## 1. Overview



The best known of the works published during Grice's lifetime
was his joint paper with Peter Strawson, "In Defense Of A
Dogma", a widely reprinted defense of the analytic/synthetic
distinction against Quine's attack in "Two Dogmas Of
Empiricism". The best known of his ideas, that of a
conversational implicature, first appeared in a 1961 paper "The
Causal Theory Of Perception", but was a focus of the James
Lectures. In contrast to the slogan, "meaning is use",
often associated (though perhaps inaccurately) with Wittgenstein,
Grice distinguished those elements of language use which were due to
meaning from those which are due to other aspects. To illustrate, the
sentence "He has not been convicted of a crime yet" means
that the person being referred to has not yet been convicted of a
crime. But in many contexts, the speaker would be taken to imply that
the person had committed at least one crime and was likely to be
convicted in the future. In "The Causal Theory of
Perception," Grice deploys the distinction against J. L.
Austin's claim in *Sense and Sensibilia* that a sentence
like 'It looks to me as if I see something red' is only
correctly used when someone (possibly the speaker) has reason to doubt
or deny that the speaker actually sees something red. Austin's
target is sense-datum theorists who attempt to introduce sense-data by
appeal to such sentences. Grice argues convincingly that, while
*using* the sentence may typically imply the doubt-or-denial
condition, that implication is not part of the *meaning* of the
sentence since the speaker can cancel the implication by adding
'I do not mean to imply that there is any reason to doubt or
deny that I see something red.' What the speaker means on such a
occasion can be true even if the speaker is using the sentence in an
usual way, and there is no reason to doubt or deny the speaker sees
something red. 



This distinction between meaning and use has found many applications
in philosophy, linguistics and artificial intelligence. Both the
analytic/synthetic distinction, which relies on a conception of truth
by virtue of meaning, and the idea of a conversational implicature
require for their full philosophical development a theory of meaning.
Grice provided the beginning of a theory of meaning starting with his
1957 paper "Meaning" and elaborated in later papers (Grice
1968, 1969, 1982). The basic idea was to distinguish two notions of
meaning: what a sentence means in general apart from any use of it,
and what a specific speaker means by using the sentence on a
particular occasion. Grice sees the latter notion as entirely a matter
of what the speaker intends. Grice's idea was to show that the
abstract notion of sentence meaning was to be understood in terms of
what specific speakers intend on specific occasions.The following
sections will outline the Grice-Strawson arguments for an
analytic-synthetic distinction (Section 2), notions of conversational
implicature (3), and then delve into his theories about meaning (4),
reasoning (5), psychology (6), ontology (7), and value (8).


## 2. Defending a dogma



Grice and Strawson begin their article with a dissection of the
various ways one can reject a dichotomy and conclude that
Quine's rejection of the analytic/synthetic distinction is one
of the more extreme cases: "He declares, or seems to declare,
not merely that the distinction is useless or inadequately clarified,
but that it is altogether illusory, that the belief in its existence
is a philosophical mistake" (Grice & Strawson, 142).



Grice and Strawson deploy a number of arguments against Quine's
position, but the two main ones involve the distinction between an
utterance meaning something and not meaning anything, and between the
kind of revision of belief that merely recognize a previous belief as
false and the kind which involves a change of concept, and hence a
change in the meaning of a word. These can both be illustrated with
their pair of example sentences:


1. My neighbor's three year old child understands
Russell's theory of types.
2. My neighbor's three year old child is an adult.



They claim that it is not difficult to understand what someone would
mean by uttering (1), and it is fairly clear what it would take to
persuade someone that (1) is not false, as seems initially evident.
But in the case of (2), they argue, in effect, that with further
investigation one would either conclude that the speaker was using
familiar words to express new concepts, or else would conclude that
nothing at all was being said. No attempt will be made here to
adjudicate the dispute with Quine, who would reject both of these
dichotomies (new concepts/old concepts, something said/nothing said)
as well. But the reader should note that the crucial claims are that
someone who asserts (2) is either asserting it with a meaning other
than the standard conventional one, or with no meaning at all. A
further elaboration of their claims depends therefore on elucidating
the notion of the meaning of an utterance, and Section 4 will explore
Grice's account of this notion further.


## 3. Conversational implicature



Conversational implicatures are, roughly, things that a hearer can
work out from the *way* something was said rather than
*what* was said. People process conversational implicatures all
of the time and are mostly unaware of it. For example, if someone asks
"Could you close the door?" the hearer does not usually
answer "Yes", instead they perform the non-linguistic act
of closing the door. In this case, although the speaker used a form of
words that is conventionally a question, the hearer can infer that the
speaker is making a request.



Grice was the first to note this ubiquitous feature of language use
and also the first to present a philosophical analysis. He begins by
noting that conversations are usually to some degree cooperative
enterprises. He then formulates the Cooperative Principle: "Make
your conversational contribution such as is required, at the stage at
which it occurs, by the accepted purpose or direction of the talk
exchange in which you are engaged" (1989, 26).



At a more detailed level, he distinguishes four categories with more
specific maxims. The category of Quantity includes two injunctions,
one to make your contribution as informative as is required, and the
second to make it no more informative than is required. The category
of Quality is governed by a supermaxim: "Try to make your
contribution one that is true". The category of Relation has a
single maxim, "Be relevant", while the final category of
Manner has a short "super" maxim "Be
perspicuous" which has various submaxims (1989, 27).



Perhaps the first thing to note is that conversational maxims often
come into conflict. One party to the conversation may be caught
between saying something less informative than is desired (violating
Quantity) and saying something for which there is insufficient
evidence (violating Quality). One example of the application of these
principles given by Grice is the following exchange:


1. I'm low on gas.
2. There is a station around the corner on Main St.



In this situation the sentence B uttered does not logically imply that
the station is open. However, the remark is irrelevant unless the
station is open, so A can infer from the combination of Manner and
Quality that B believes he has good evidence that the station is open.
Thus B's utterance conversationally implicates that the station
is open. One characteristic of conversational implicatures is that
they can be cancelled. Thus if B adds to his remark above, "but
I don't know whether it is open" then there is no
conversational implicature that the station is open. This contrasts
with logical or semantic implications which cannot be cancelled
without contradiction.



The most famous application of Grice's ideas is to the debate
about whether the truth conditions of declarative conditional
statements, such as "If George is driving, he will be
late" are accurately captured by the material conditional.
Representing the sample sentences as 'George is driving
\(\rightarrow\) he will be late' would make the sentence true if
it is false that George is driving or true that he will be late (or
both). Many writers argued that it would be inappropriate for someone
to make the assertion if they knew that George was not driving.
Grice's response is that to argue that in most circumstances it
is conversationally inappropriate to make that assertion, not
because it is false, but because it violates conversational
principles.



Symbolically, \(A \rightarrow B\) should not be asserted in
circumstances where the speaker knows that \(A\) is false because the
statement not-\(A\) is true and simpler; similarly, if the speakers
knows \(B\) is true, \(B\) is a shorter simpler statement; and if the
speaker knows both of those facts, then not-\(A\) and \(B\), is more
informative. Thus the only circumstances in which the conditional is
appropriate is where the speaker is ignorant of the truth values of
\(A\) and \(B\), but has some good reason to think that if \(A\) does
prove to be true, \(B\) will as well. On this account, the truth
conditions of the conditional are those of the material implication,
but the appropriate assertibility of a conditional tracks the
conditional probability of \(B\) given \(A\).


 It should be noted that while this explanation of the
circumstances in which a conditional is asserted seems very plausible,
the account does not readily extend to apparent discrepancies between
ordinary language conditionals and the material conditional when the
conditional is embedded in a larger context, e.g., "Mary
believes that if George is driving, he will be
late". Mary's believing that George will be late allows
Mary to immediately form the material conditional belief *George is
driving* \(\rightarrow\)
*George will be late*. But this is clearly not enough for a
speaker reporting on Mary's beliefs to assert that Mary
therefore believes that if George is driving then George will be
late. Grice's explanation cannot say why.



In the last two decades, there has been a burgeoning number of
researchers investigating conversational implicature and Grice's
principles. Criticisms have come from two opposing directions. Some
critics argue that Grice's maxims are not sufficiently worked
out to explain many of the phenomena related to implicature. For
example, in the sentence, "Joan believes that some of her
students will fail," there seems to be an implicature that not
all of her students will fail, even though the contained sentence is
not asserted. In another direction, Wilson and Sperber, and separately
Bardzokas, argue that Grice's principles can be derived from
more general principles and should be understood in the context of
some version of relevance theory.



Another continuing topic generated by Grice's ideas is the
relation between semantics and pragmatics
 (see the entry on pragmatics).
 The nature of the distinction is controversial, as argued by Bach
1997 and Horn 2006. Korta & Perry 2011 (Ch. 11) points out that there are
various theoretical meanings to "proposition" and that the
extent to which pragmatic principles are needed to determine the
proposition expressed by an utterance depends on which understanding
of proposition is in play. Two examples of the ongoing debate are
LePore and Stone 2015 which argues that most, or perhaps all, of what Grice
thought as pragmatic is in fact governed by linguistic rules, and
Recanati 2010 which argues the contrary, that pragmatics plays a
larger role than is generally recognized.


## 4. Meaning



Grice contends sentence and word meaning can be analyzed in terms of
what speakers (utterers, for Grice) mean. Utterers' meaning, in
turn, can be analyzed without semantic remainder in terms of utterers
having certain intentions. To see the idea as initially outlined in
Grice's 1957 article, "Meaning," imagine you are
stopped at night at an intersection, when the driver in an oncoming
car flashes her lights. You reason as follows: "Why is she doing
that? Oh, she must intend me to believe that my lights are not on. If
she has that intention, it must be that my lights are not on. So, they
are not." To summarize:



> 
> The driver flashes her lights intending
> 
> 1. that you believe that your lights are not on;
> 2. that you recognize her intention (1);
> 3. that this recognition be part of your reason for believing that
> your lights are not on.
> 
> 
> 



Call such an intention an M-intention. Grice's idea is that an
utterer \(U\) means that \(p\) by uttering \(x\) if and only if \(U\)
M-intends that \(p\) by uttering \(x\). We will use
'M-intends' in this way in what follows. Utterances may
include, not just sounds and marks but also gesture, grunts, and
groans--anything that can signal an M-intention. The example
illustrates an indicative M-intention; such intentions may also be
imperative. In such a case, the utterer intends to get the audience to
perform an action.



In the case of sentence meaning, Grice's idea is to explicate it
in terms of M-intentions. He suggests that the claim that a sentence
\(x\) means that \(p\) "might as a first shot be equated with
some statement or disjunction of statements about what
'people' (vague) intend (with qualifications about
'recognition') to effect by \(x\)" (1957, 66). The
underlying idea is the same as in the flashing lights example. When
you utter, "She brandished her clarinet like a tomahawk,"
I--as a Gricean audience--reason as follows. "The
standard use of that sentence is to utter it intending (1) that the
audience believe she brandished her clarinet like a tomahawk; (2) that
the audience recognize the intention (1); and (3) that this
recognition be part of the audience's reason for believing that
she brandished her clarinet like a tomahawk. This is a standard,
non-deceptive use; hence I should believe that she brandished her
clarinet like a tomahawk."



Grice's post-1957 work on meaning divides along two lines.
First, he refines the analyses of utterer's meaning and sentence
meaning, primarily in the 1968 article, "Utterer's
Meaning, Sentence Meaning, and Word Meaning," and the 1969
article, "Utterer's Meaning and Intentions." Second,
he addresses the fact that utterers and audiences rarely, if ever,
reason in the way suggested. As you read these words, for example, you
are not reasoning in that way. You read and you understand
straightaway without any intervening reasoning. So how can
Grice's suggested explanation be anything but illusory? These
points will be considered in turn.



In "Utterer's Meaning, Sentence Meaning, and Word
Meaning," Grice offers a revised version of his 1957 account of
utterers meaning. Grice remarks that in



> 
> the earlier (1957) account I took the view that the M-intended effect
> is, in the case of indicatives-type utterance, that the hearer should
> *believe* something, and, in the case of imperative-type
> utterances, that the hearer should *do* something. I wish for
> present purposes to make two changes here.
> 
> 1. I wish to represent the M-intended effect of imperative-type
> utterances as being that the hearer should *intend* to do
> something (with, of course, the ulterior intention on the part of the
> utter that the hearer go on to do the act in question).
> 2. I wish to regard the M-intended effect common to indicative-type
> utterances as being, not that the hearer should believe something
> (though there will frequently be an ulterior intention to that
> effect), but the hearer should *think that the utterer
> believes* something.
> 
> 
> 
> (1968, 230).
> 
> 
> 



By way of illustration, suppose \(U\), who wants the audience \(A\) to
close the door, utters 'Close the door.' \(U\) M-intends
that \(A\) should intend to close the door, and note: we specify what
\(U\) means using the subjunctive mood. \(U\) means that \(A\)
*should* close the door. For the indicative case, suppose \(U\)
utters 'The door is closed,' M-intending that \(A\)
believe \(U\) believes the door is closed. We specify what \(U\) means
using the indicative mood--thus: \(U\) means that the door is
closed.



Grice captures the role of moods in specifying meaning by introducing
a special notation. He represents the indicative case this way: \(U\)
means that \(\vdash\)(the door is closed); the imperative: \(U\) means
that !(the door is closed). Here 'the door is closed'
represents a moodless, underlying syntactical element Grice calls a
sentence radical; it designates the moodless proposition that the door
is closed. Grice calls '\(\vdash\)' and '!'
*mood operators*, and he explains them contextually as
follows:


1. \(U\) means that \(\vdash(p)\) by uttering \(x\) if and only if,
for some \(A\), \(U\) utters \(x\) M-intending \(A\) to think \(U\)
*thinks* that \(p\);
2. \(U\) means that \(!(p)\) by uttering x if and only, for some
\(A\), if \(U\) utters \(x\) M-intending (a) \(A\) to think \(U\)
*intends* (to bring it about) that \(p\); and (b) \(A\) to
*intend* that \(p\)--having, as part of his reason
\(U\)'s intention (a).



More than two operators are required to handle the full range of
things utterers mean, but a complete list is not necessary to
formulate the revised account of meaning. The account can be stated as
follows. Given a function from psychological states onto mood
operators, if \(\psi\) is a psychological state and \(\*\_{\psi}\) the
associated mood operator,



> 
> 
> \(U\) means that \(\*\_{\psi}(p)\) by uttering \(x\) if and only if, for
> some \(A\), \(U\) utters \(x\) M-intending
> 
> 
> 1. that \(A\) should think \(U\) to \(\psi\) that \(p\); and (in some
> cases only), depending on \(\*\_{\psi}\),
> 2. that \(A\) should via fulfillment of (i), himself \(\psi\) that
> \(p\).
> 
> 
> 



Grice uses his revised treatment of utterer's meaning to refine
the very rough and preliminary account of sentence meaning (structured
utterance type meaning, in his terminology) he gave in
"Meaning." His account thereof uses the notion of
*having a procedure in one's repertoire*. He says,



> 
> This idea seems to me to be intuitively fairly intelligible and to
> have application outside the realm of linguistic, or otherwise
> communicative, performances, though it could hardly be denied that it
> requires further explication. A faintly eccentric lecturer might have
> in his repertoire the following procedure: if he sees an attractive
> girl in his audience to pause for half a minute and then take a
> sedative. His having in his repertoire this procedure would not be
> incompatible with his also having two further procedures: (a) if he
> sees an attractive girl, to put on a pair of dark spectacles (instead
> of pausing to take a sedative); (b) to pause to take a sedative when
> he sees in his audience not an attractive girl, but a particularly
> distinguished colleague (1969, 233).
> 



Turning to sentence meaning, the idea is that users of a natural
language like English have standard procedures for using sentences,
and that--very roughly--a sentence means \(p\) among a group
of utterers when and only when that group has the procedure of using
it to M-intend that \(p\).



This is a promising start. It is undeniable that English speakers have
the procedure of using 'The door is closed' to mean that
the door is closed. That is (one of the many) things we do with that
sentence. So, assuming we accept the explication of utterer's
meaning in terms of M-intentions, it undeniable that English speakers
have the procedure of using that sentence to M-intend with regard to
the proposition that the door is closed. This yields the explanatory
payoff described earlier. We can see communication as a rational
activity in which an utterer intends to produce certain results and
audiences reason their way to those results via their recognition of
the utterer's intention to produce that very result.



This preliminary account must be complicated, however, as it is
unacceptable on three grounds. First, there are infinitely many
sentences. How does an utterer associate a procedure with each
sentence of his language? If they must be acquired one by one, it will
take an infinite amount of time. Second, sentences are structured
utterance-types, where meaning of the whole is consequent (in ways
determined by syntactic structure) on the meaning of the parts. The
account does not capture this aspect of sentence meaning at all.
Third, the account fails to represent the complexity introduced into
the account of utterer's meaning; there is no mention of
moods.



These considerations lead Grice to posit that the procedures
associated with sentences are resultant procedures arising recursively
out of basic procedures associated with words. Grice explains that



> 
> As a first approximation, one might say that a procedure for an
> utterance-type \(X\) will be a resultant procedure if it is determined
> by (its existence is inferable from) a knowledge of procedures (a) for
> particular utterance-types which are elements in \(X\), and (b) for
> any sequence of utterance-types which exemplifies a particular
> ordering of syntactic categories (a particular syntactic form) (SWW,
> p. 136-7).
> 



Grice introduces a canonical form for specifying resultant procedures.
He does so by generalizing the special notation he has already used in
specifying meaning. Recall that he represented the indicative case by:
\(U\) means that \(\vdash\)(the door is closed);the imperative: \(U\)
means that !(the door is closed). The indicative sentence
'\(\vdash\)(the door is closed)' is associated with the
psychological state of belief: speakers can and do utter that sentence
with the intention that audiences respond by believing the door is
closed. The imperative '! (the door is closed)' is
similarly associated with an audience response of action: speakers can
and do utter that sentence with intention that that audiences respond
by closing the door. '\(\vdash\)' and '!' are
examples of a type of syntactic item Grice calls a mood operator. He
assumes that the syntactic structure of sentences divides into a mood
operator and the rest of the structure. Grice uses
'\(\*+\mathrm{R}\)' to represent this division. Now let
\(\mathrm{P}\_{\*+R}\) be the set of propositions associated with
\(\*+\mathrm{R}\), and \(\psi\) the psychological state or action
associated with \(\*\). Then a resultant procedure for \(\*+\mathrm{R}\)
takes one of two forms. \(U\) has the resultant procedure of:


1. uttering \(\*+\mathrm{R}\) if, for some \(A\), \(U\) wants \(A\) to
\(\psi\) that \(p\); or
2. uttering \(\*+\mathrm{R}\) if, for some \(A\), \(U\) wants \(A\) to
think \(U\) to \(\psi\) that \(p\).



Call these type 1 and type 2 resultant procedures. As a definition of
sentence meaning we can say that, where \(p \in
\mathrm{P}\_{\*+\mathrm{R}}\), \(\*+\mathrm{R}\) means \(p\) in a group
\(G\) if and only if members of \(G\) have, with respect to
\(\*+\mathrm{R}\), a type 1 or type 2 resultant procedure, the type
being determined by the type of the mood operator \(\*\_{\psi}\).
(Qualifications will, of course, be necessary to handle
'audienceless' cases.)



So far, perhaps, so good. There are pleasant quibbles over details,
but in broad outline, the account is a very plausible description of
meaning. In fact, at least three authors, Bennett, Loar and Schiffer,
have developed their own more detailed accounts along Gricean lines.
However, when we turn from description to explanation, plausibility
appears to decline. The explanatory idea is to see communication as a
rational activity where audiences reason their way to beliefs or
intentions via their recognition of the utterer's intention to
produce such results. What about the problem that utterers and
audiences rarely if ever engage in such reasoning? Grice's work
on reasoning contains the answer.



Does this approach define sentence meaning in terms of speaker's
intentions without any semantic remainder? That depends on how one
interprets



> 
> A procedure for an utterance-type \(X\) will be a resultant procedure
> if it is determined by (its existence is inferable from) a knowledge
> of the procedures (a) for particular utterance-types which are
> elements in \(X\), and (b) for any sequence of utterance-types which
> exemplifies a particular ordering of syntactic categories (a
> particular syntactic form). (1968, 235)
> 



One possibility is to explain at least some basic procedures in terms
of the concept of reference, where reference is analyzed in terms of
speakers' intentions. The basic procedure for
'tiger' for example would be to utter 'tiger'
to refer to tigers. But there is another possibility: the knowledge in
(a) and (b) includes the knowledge of the semantic properties of
words, and the semantic properties of combinations of word, where
those properties cannot be fully analyzed in terms of speakers'
intentions. Noting that the notion of a procedure is quite unclear,
Grice observes that 



> 
> We can, if we are lucky, identify "linguistic rules," so
> called, which are such that our linguistic practice is as if we
> accepted these rules and consciously followed them. But we want to say
> that this is not just an interesting fact about our linguistic
> practice but also an explanation of it; and this leads us on to
> suppose that "in some sense," "implicitly," we
> do accept these rules.Now the proper interpretation of the idea that
> we do accept these rules becomes something of a mystery, if the
> "acceptance" of the rules is to be distinguished from the
> existence of the related practices]but it seems like a mystery which,
> for the time being at least, we have to swallow, while recognizing
> that it involves us in an as yet unsolved problem.
> 



The appeal to implicitly followed linguistic rules casts a revealing
light on Grice as a champion of the view that communication is an
exercise in rational coordination through acts of speaker meaning.
Since Grice, a central question has been "[h]ow much of this
coordination derives from interlocutors' specific knowledge of
one another as people? How much exploits their knowledge of language
itself?" (Lepore and Stone 2015, 1). With the appeal to
implicitly followed rules, Grice has one foot squarely on
"knowledge of language itself" side of that divide.


## 5. Reasoning



In *Aspects of Reason*, Grice begins by considering the
suggestion that reasoning consists in "the entertainment (and
often acceptance) in thought or in speech of a set of initial ideas
(propositions), together with a sequence of ideas each of which is
derivable by an acceptable principle of inference from its
predecessors in the set" (2001, 5). He shows that it is scarcely
plausible to suppose that reasoning always involves the entertainment
or acceptance of a sequence of ideas--the steps in the
reasoning--each of which is derivable (or taken by the reasoner
to be derivable) from its predecessors.



He points out that reasoning is often, indeed typically, enthymematic
in the following way. Jill reasons: "Jack broke his crown, but
he is an Englishman; therefore, he will be brave." She does not
employ any suppressed premise. She *merely* thinks: 'but
he is an Englishman; therefore, he will be brave'. The thought
occurs to her in a way that carries conviction with it, and she thinks
it *intending* the inference signaled by
'therefore' to be valid. Grice suggests that it is a
necessary condition of reasoning from \(A\) to \(B\) that one
*intend* that there be a formally valid (and non-trivial)
argument from \(A\) to \(B\). Grice devotes a good deal of attention
to the question of what to add to this necessary condition in order to
obtain a sufficient condition. He emphasizes that we typically reason
with the intention of producing reasons relevant to some end, and he
sees this intentional activity as involving the exercise of the
ability to make reason-preserving transitions between sets of thoughts
or beliefs (or intentions or whatever). A transition is
reason-preserving if and only if necessarily, if one has reasons for
the initial set, then one also does for the subsequent set. Like any
ability, the ability to make reason-preserving transitions may be
impaired. Good reasoning consists in an unimpaired exercise of the
ability to make reason-preserving transitions; reasoning--good or
bad--is an exercise that is not too impaired. As Grice says,
"[T]o explain what reasoning is (and maybe what the term
'reasoning' means), it is necessary in the first instance
to specify what good reasoning is, and then to stipulate that
'reasoning' applies to good reasoning and also to
sequences which approximate, to a given degree, to good reasoning; the
idea of good reasoning is, in a certain sense, prior to the idea of
reasoning." 



There is an important corollary: when we articulate our reasoning
explicitly, we are typically not making previously suppressed premises
explicit; rather, we are constructing the steps as we supply them.
Suppose, for example, we were to ask Jill, "Why do you think
that follows?" She could answer by saying she thinks that all
the English are brave; or that the English are brave when they break
their crowns; or that people of Jack's age and description are
brave provided that they are also English; and so on. In proposing one
of these alternatives, Jill is not *reporting* her suppressed
premise; she is advancing a premise she is willing to put forward now
as what she would--or, perhaps, should--have thought or said
then if the question of formal validity had been raised.



Returning to meaning, why not view utterers and their audiences as
similar to Jill? You say "Jack brandished his clarinet like a
tomahawk," and in response I straightaway believe that he did
brandish his clarinet in that way. Like Jill, I do not
entertain--even in a suppressed way--any intervening
premises. My comprehension is immediate and automatic--unmediated
by any reasoning at all. But this does not mean that we cannot see me
as intending there to be a formally valid inference from your words to
my belief. Moreover, like Jill, I could construct the missing steps.
Thus: "The utterer has the resultant procedure of uttering
"He brandished his clarinet like a tomahawk" intending (1)
that the audience believe that the utter believes he brandished his
clarinet like a tomahawk; (2) that the audience recognize that
intention (1); and (3) that this recognition be part of the
audience's reason for believing that the utterer believes that
he brandished his clarinet like a tomahawk. The utterer is following
that procedure in a non-deceptive way; hence I should believe, not
only that the utterer believes that he brandished his clarinet like a
tomahawk; but also, to the extent that I have confidence in the
utterer, I should believe that myself."



Similar remarks hold for you as the utterer of "Jack brandished
his clarinet like a tomahawk." You reason: "I recognize
him as an English speaker; hence he knows I have the procedure of
uttering "Jack brandished his clarinet like a tomahawk"
intending: (1) that my audience believe he brandished his clarinet
like a tomahawk; (2) that the audience recognize that intention (1);
and (3) that this recognition be part of the audience's reason
for believing that I believe that he brandished his clarinet like a
tomahawk. He will believe that I am following that procedure here in a
non-deceptive way; hence he will believe that I believe that he
brandished his clarinet like a tomahawk; and, to the extent that he
has confidence in me, he will believe that too."



There is no denying that we can describe utterers and audiences in
this way. But should we really embrace this description as an
explanation of meaning? To see the worry, imagine we are demigods. For
our amusement, we create a race of creatures. We program language use
into their brains. We ensure, for example, that, when an utterer
produces the sounds "She brandished her clarinet like a
tomahawk," audiences believe that she did. To handle deceptive
contexts, figurative language use, language instruction situations,
telling jokes, and so on, we also build in heuristics that more or
less reliably produce a different appropriate belief in such
situations. When a creature utters a sentence and the audience forms
the appropriate belief, the explanation is our programming,
programming that operates entirely at a physiological level that is
entirely inaccessible to consciousness. So, even if an audience
reasons to a belief based on a recognition of relevant utterer's
intentions, surely that reasoning is an epiphenomenon of limited
explanatory interest. The worry is that we may be like the creatures
we have imagined. There is extensive physiological and psychological
evidence that our use of natural language is to be explained along the
lines similar to the explanation in the case of our creatures.



Grice's 'Meaning Revisited' contains an answer to
this worry. The key idea is that the account of utterers meaning
specifies an *optimal* state that actual utterers rarely if
ever realize. We explain this idea then return to our worry. Grice
says that,



> 
> The general idea that I want to explore, and which seems to me to have
> some plausibility, is that something has been left out, by me and
> perhaps by others too, in the analyses, definitions, expansions and so
> on, of semantic notions, and particularly various notions of meaning.
> What has been left out ... [is] the notion of value.
> 
> 
> Though I think that in general we want to keep value notions out of
> our philosophical and scientific enquiries--and some would say
> out of everything else--we might consider what would happen if we
> relaxed this prohibition to some extent. If we did, there is a whole
> range of different kinds of value predicates or expressions which
> might be admitted in different types of case. To avoid having to
> choose between them, I am just going to use as a predicate the word
> 'optimal' the meaning of which could of course be more
> precisely characterized later (1982, 237).
> 
> 
> 



The analysis of utterers' meaning illustrates what Grice has in
mind. He suggests that, "[a]s a first approximation, what we
mean by saying that a speaker, by something he says, on a particular
occasion, means that \(p\), is that he is in the optimal state with
respect to communicating, or if you like, to communicating that
\(p\)" (1982, 242). The optimal state is what the analysis of
utterers' meaning specifies.



The point is that there is no need to insist that real utterers
typically have all the intentions the analysis requires. We
nonetheless, for purposes of psychological explanation, often regard
them to have the requisite intentions. For Grice, audiences do so when
they need to *justify* the actions and beliefs that result from
utterances in their presence. For example, as a result of reading the
last sentence, you believe that we believe that audiences regard
utterers as having the intentions specified in the account of
utterers' meaning when audiences are called upon to justify the
beliefs and actions they form in response to utterances. Why are you
justified in believing this? Because you recognized that we uttered
the sentence intending, by means of recognition of that very
intention, to produce that belief. Similar remarks hold for us as
utterers. Why are we justified in thinking that you will form a
*justified* belief in response to our utterance? Because we
know that you can supply the justification in terms of your knowledge
of our intentions.



This pattern of justifications also yields an explanation. The
justifications explain by showing that meaning and response are
instances of people's capacity to act rationally. Such instances
include actions one engaged in without prior reasoning, and which one
would have also engaged in if one had reasoned about whether to do so
prior to acting. The appeal to such counterfactuals is explanatory to
the extent that speakers and audiences meet this condition: for a wide
range of cases of speaker meaning, speakers reliably make utterances
and audiences reliably respond without reasoning in (more or less)
ways they would have if they had reasoned with sufficient time,
insight, and attention. Thus, the Gricean theory of meaning does
explain meaning as a rational activity. Grice's treatment of
conversational implicature also illustrates the breadth and power of
this approach. Our demi-god example ignored this connection between
explanation and justification.



A further objection to Grice's account of meaning is that young
children understand the meaning of utterances but are not capable of
processing the complexities apparently required by Gricean theory.
Thompson (2007, 2008) provides one approach to defend a (neo)Gricean
account against these arguments.



Grice's treatment of conversational implicature illustrates the
breadth and power of this approach. Indeed, one of the motivations
Grice had in giving an account of meaning was to distinguish between
what is *meant*--M-intended--and what is not
M-intended but *implied*. Grice's conversational maxims
are principles of rational communication that audiences use to
construct an inferential bridge from what is meant to what is
implied.



The continuing lively debates (e.g., Petrus 2010) about conversational
implicatures and meaning, which are present in linguistics and
artificial intelligence as well as philosophy, are testimony to the
continuing importance of Grice's seminal ideas.


## 6. Everyday Psychological Explanation



Grice's views on everyday psychological explanation are
intertwined with his views on rationality. Grice contends that the
right picture of rationality is the picture, given us by Plato and
Aristotle and others, as something which essentially functions to
regulate, direct, and control pre-rational impulses, inclinations, and
dispositions. Both everyday psychological explanation and assessments
of rationality employ commonsense psychological principles. By such
principles we mean a relatively stable body of generally-accepted
principles, of which the following are examples:


* If a person desires \(p\), and believes if \(p\) then \(q\),
then--other things being equal--the person will desire
\(q\).
* If a person desires \(p\) and desires \(q\), then--other
things being equal--the person will act on the stronger of the
two desires if the person acts on either.
* If a person stares at a colored surface and subsequently stares at
a white surface, then--other things being equal--the person
will have an after-image.



These examples express relations among complexes consisting of
psychological states and behavior, and, as such they serve a
descriptive and explanatory function. Other principles play a more
evaluative role. Consider for example:


* If a person believes \(p\) and that \(p\) entails \(q\), and the
person believes not-\(q\), then, other things being equal, the person
should stop believing \(p\) or stop believing \(q\).



Conformity to this principle is a criterion of rationality. The
descriptive-explanatory and evaluative principles collectively give us
is a specification of how "pre-rational, impulses, inclinations,
and dispositions" operate as well as a basis for evaluating that
operation.



The essential point for our purposes is that everyday psychology has
special status for Grice. He argues:



> 
> The psychological theory which I envisage would be deficient as a
> theory to explain behaviour if it did not contain provision for
> interests in the ascription of psychological states otherwise than as
> tools for explaining and predicting behaviour, interests (for example)
> on the part of one creature to be able to ascribe these rather than
> those psychological states to another creature because of a concern
> for the other creature. Within such a theory it should be possible to
> derive strong motivations on the part of the creatures subject to the
> theory against the abandonment of the central concepts of the theory
> (and so of the theory itself), motivations which the creatures would
> (or should) regard as justified. Indeed, only from within the
> framework of such a theory, I think, can matters of evaluation, and
> so, of the evaluation of modes of explanation, be raised at all. If I
> conjecture aright, then, the entrenched system contains the materials
> needed to justify its own entrenchment; whereas no rival system
> contains a basis for the justification of anything at all (1975b, 52).
> 



Thus, while everyday psychology (or some preferred part of it) may not
entirely accurately specify how in fact we think and act, it does
specify how we *ought* to think and act.



Assume everyday psychology is uniquely self-justifying in the way
Grice suggests; then we must reject the suggestion that everyday
psychology is just a rough and ready theory that we will (or could)
eventually abandon without loss in favor of a more accurate and
complete scientific theory of behavior. Grice objects on this ground
to theories that regard only scientific knowledge as truly descriptive
and explanatory and that relegate commonsense psychological
explanation to a second-class role as a theory, useful in daily life,
but not a theory we should endorse as a description or explanation of
reality. Grice remarks:



> 
> We must be ever watchful against the Devil of scientism, who would
> lead us into myopic overconcentration on the nature and importance of
> knowledge, and of scientific knowledge in particular; the Devil who is
> even so audacious as to tempt us to call in question the very system
> of ideas require to make intelligible the idea of calling in question
> anything at all; and who would even prompt us, in effect, to suggest
> that since we do not really think but only think that we think, we had
> better change our minds without undue delay (1975b, 53).
> 



Thus, to return briefly to the theory of meaning, the picture that
theory offers of ourselves as rational communicators producing
justified psychological attitudes in each other is no mere accident,
no explanatory way station to be abandoned as science progresses. It
is an ineliminable feature of the way in which we understand ourselves
and others. In addition to this result, Grice's view of
psychological explanation also yield consequences both for ontology
and for ethics.


## 7. Ontology



Grice's ontological views are liberal. As Grice says when
commenting on the mind--body problem in 'Method in
Philosophical Psychology',



> 
> I am not greatly enamoured of some of the motivations which prompt the
> advocacy of psychophysical identifications; I have in mind a concern
> to exclude such 'queer' or 'mysterious'
> entities as souls, purely mental events, purely mental properties and
> so forth. My taste is for keeping open house for all sorts of
> conditions of entities, just so long as when they come in they help
> with the housework. Provided that I can see them work, and provided
> that they are not detected in illicit logical behaviour (within which
> I do not include a certain degree of indeterminacy, not even of
> numerical indeterminacy), I do not find them queer or mysterious at
> all.... To fangle a new ontological Marxism, *they work
> therefore they exist,* even though only some, perhaps those who
> come on the recommendation of some form of transcendental argument,
> may qualify for the specially favoured status of *entia
> realissima*. To exclude honest working entities seems to me like
> metaphysical snobbery, a reluctance to be seen in the company of any
> but the best objects (1975, 30-31).
> 



Our discussion of psychological explanation shows what Grice had in
mind in his reference to entities that "come on the
recommendation of some form of transcendental argument, [and hence]
may qualify for the specially favoured status of *entia
realissima*." Suppose--as Grice thinks--certain
way of thinking, certain *categories*, are part of what is
entrenched. Then there are certain concepts or categories that we
*cannot avoid* applying to reality.



This theme will not be pursued further here; rather, we turn to the
more "Marxist" side of Grice's ontology: the claim
that if entities work, they exist. We illustrate this point with the
concept of a proposition. The critical role of that notion in
Grice's theory of meaning motivates our focus on it. Quinean
criticisms of the notion have placed under it under a cloud of
suspicion, a cloud many see as hanging ominously over Grice's
theory.



One of Quine's arguments is that synonymy is not a well-defined
equivalence relation, the identity conditions for propositions are
unclear and there is 'no entity without identity'. On this
issue, Grice is not committed to an equivalence relation of synonymy
(thus his remark above about indeterminacy), and he parts company with
Quine over whether clear identity conditions are required. Grice, as
noted earlier, argues for such conditions. But the acceptability of
his theory of meaning does not depend on the success of that defense.
Within the theory of meaning, propositions are theoretical entities to
be understood by the role in the theory, and that role, according to
Grice, does not demand a strict criterion of identity. Rather: if they
work they exist. It is worth noting in this regard that there are many
respectable entities for which we do not have criteria or identity.
Suppose my favorite restaurant moves. Is it a new restaurant with the
same name? Or suppose it changes owners and names but nothing else? Or
that it changes menu entirely? Or that it changes chefs? It would be
foolish to look for a single criterion to answer these
questions--the answers go different ways in different contexts.
But surely the concept of a restaurant is a useful one and restaurants
do exists. Quine and Grice differ on the theoretical usefulness of
propositions. The main reason for disagreement is due to Quine's
attitude that concepts such as belief and desire are of, at most,
secondary importance in the unified canonical science that is his
standard for ontology. Grice, as we have already noted, thinks that
everyday psychological theory is of first importance.


## 8. Ordinary Language Philosophy



Grice was constantly concerned with philosophical methodology, and the
discussion so far omits one important methodological focus: ordinary
language philosophy. Although it was by no means Grice's sole
philosophical commitment, it was a central one. 



Grice is a well-known *critic* of ordinary language philosophy,
and one of his main targets was J. L. Austin and a style of reasoning
he popularized. Austin thought there was a relatively clear notion of
what it is inappropriate to say, and that we could delineate
truth-conditions by identifying instances of inappropriateness
(Warner, 2012). For example, he inferred from (1) "Typically,
when one acts, it would be inappropriate to say either that one acted
voluntarily or that one acted involuntarily" to (2)
"Typically, when one acts, one acts neither voluntarily nor
involuntarily." As Grice convincingly argues, the inference
fails because being untrue is not the only form of inappropriateness.
Something may be true but inappropriate to say for other reasons
(Grice 1960, 1975, 1981, 1989). 



Grice was, however, also a life-long practitioner of ordinary language
philosophy. He begins the "Prolegomena" to *Studies in
the Way of Words* by noting that "some may regard [ordinary
language philosophy] as an outdated style of philosophy," but he
urges us "not to be too quick to write off such a style."
Instead, he urges us to build "a theory which will enable one to
distinguish between the case in which an utterance is false or fails
to be true, or more generally fails to correspond to the world in some
favored way, and the case in which it is inappropriate for reasons of
a different kind" (Grice 1989, 4). Much of *Studies in the
Way of Words* addresses this task. 



Why bother to build such a theory? There are many possible answers,
and Grice would no doubt have given more than one, but we focus on
just one answer, which is implicit in this work. Recall that, on his
view, commonsense psychology consists, at least in part, of a body of
self-justifying descriptive, explanatory, and evaluative principles.
The principles are 'self-justifying' in the sense
explained earlier in section 6. An illuminating description of these
principles would be an illuminating description of how we think, and
such a description would certainly be of interest. How do we get one?
By carefully examining what we say. Two tenets of ordinary language
philosophy were that a clear view of what we *mean* in the
language we use is a clear view of what we *think*, and that a
necessary step in getting clear view of what we mean is *close*
attention to the *details* of what we say. But the detailed
examination will only reveal what we mean if we can reliably
distinguish between "the case in which an utterance is false or
fails to be true, or more generally fails to correspond to the world
in some favored way, and the case in which it is inappropriate for
reasons of a different kind." 


## 9. Ethics



Grice uses this general account of reasoning to investigate moral
reasoning and moral reasons. He emphasizes the connections between
reasons, actions, and freedom. It is convenient to divide
Grice's approach into two stages (although he himself does not
do so). The first stage argues that one must regard the exercise of
rationality in the free adoption and pursuit of ends as an
unrelativized good at which all persons should aim. The second stage
examines the concepts of happiness and freedom to discover principles
which persons--conceived of as rationally adopting and pursuing
ends--must adopt insofar as they are to qualify as rational.



*The first stage*. Why think that one must regard the exercise
of rationality in the free adoption and pursuit of ends as an
unrelativized good at which all persons should aim? To begin with,
what does Grice mean by an "unrelativized good"? Grice
grants that the concept of unrelativized value requires defense; after
all, things have value only relative to ends and beneficiaries. So how
is unrelativized value to be understood? Grice defines unrelativized
value "in Aristotelian style [as] whatever would seem to possess
such value in the eyes of a duly accredited judge; and a duly
accredited judge might be identifiable as a good person operating in
conditions of freedom." (Of course, this is still to talk about
what is of value for and to persons; the point is to avoid
relativization to this or that *kind* of person or
*kind* of end.) So, why would a duly accredited judge see value
in the free rational adoption and pursuit of ends, where such value is
*not* ascribed because of the contribution that activity makes
to some *other* end?



Grice's views on commonsense psychology provide the answer. As
noted earlier, Grice thinks that commonsense psychology exhibits two
features: parts of it are self-justifying; and, it contains principles
for evaluating thought and action, where some of those principles are
self-justifying. When he turns to ethics, Grice adds that commonsense
psychology represents us as exercising rationality in freely adopting
and pursuing ends; moreover, this view of ourselves is self-justifying
in the sense that we cannot coherently conceive of ourselves in any
other way. Grice's--very plausible--claim is that a
"duly accredited judge" operating from within the theory
of commonsense psychology would take the rational, free adoption and
pursuit of ends as having unrelativized value. Hence, it does have
such value.



*The second stage*: What principles must a free adopter and
pursuer of ends embrace in order to qualify as rational? Grice
addresses this question most fully in *Aspects of Reason* and
*The Conception of Value*. The idea is that the combined
requirements of rationality (outside ethics), freedom, and happiness
impose substantive constraints on all persons. Grice develops this
theme with great insight and subtlety; however, he did not complete
the project, and the intricacies of his views are best left to the
detail of his own works.


## 10. Conclusion



The sophistication and inventiveness of Grice's work is
well-known. What is less well-known is its ambitious and systematic
nature. Emphasizing this latter aspect has been one goal of this brief
presentation of Grice's work, work which weaves meaning,
reasoning, psychology, ontology, and value into a complex, unified
whole.