Paul Grice

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Herbert Paul Grice (1913 - 1988), often writing under the name Paul Grice, was a philosopher remembered mainly for his substantial contribution to the study of meaning within language, particularly his cooperative principle, the maxims of conversation derived from the cooperative principle, and his theory of implicatures. Grice's work is one of the foundations of the modern study of pragmatics. He proposed an intention-based theory of meaning, in which 'A meant something by x' is roughly equivalent to 'A uttered x with the intention of inducing a belief by means of the recognition of this intention'. Many of his essays/papers were published in the book Studies in the Way of Words (1989). Born and raised in Great Britain, Grice was educated at Oxford University and later taught there until 1967, when he moved to the United States, returning in 1979 to give the John Locke lectures on Aspects of Reason. He took a professorship at the University of California, Berkeley, teaching and residing in America until his death.

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Meaning

Grice understood "meaning" to have two kinds: natural and non-natural. Natural meaning had to do with cause and effect, for example with the expression "these spots mean measles". Non-natural meaning, on the other hand, had to do with the intentions of the speaker in communicating something to the listener.

It is non-natural meaning that Grice was most interested in explaining. In his studies, he made many important and powerful distinctions to help form that explanation.

First, he distinguished between four kinds of content: encoded / non-encoded content and truth-conditional / non-truth-conditional content.

Encoded content is the actual meaning attached to certain expressions, arrived at through investigation of definitions and making of literal interpretations.
Non-encoded content are those meanings that are understood beyond an analysis of the words themselves, i.e., by looking at the context of speaking, tone of voice, and so on.
Truth-conditional content are whatever conditions make an expression true or false.
Non-truth-conditional content are whatever conditions that do not affect the truth or falsity of an expression.

Sometimes, expressions do not have a literal interpretation, or they do not have any truth-conditional content, and sometimes expressions can have both truth-conditional content and encoded content.

For Grice, these distinctions can explain at least three different possible varieties of expression:

Conventional Implicature - when an expression has encoded content, but doesn't necessarily have any truth-conditions;
Conversational Implicature - when an expression does not have encoded content, but does have truth-conditions (for example, in use of irony);
Utterances - when an expression has both encoded content and truth-conditions.

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