Paul Grice and the philosophy of language

PAUL GRICE AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF LANGUAGE 511
in the James Lectures. The section on implicature in Grice's 1981 paper
'Presupposition and Conversational Implicature' has suffered a similar
fate. This time it is valuable discussions of generalized conversational
implicature and calculability that are missing.
The purpose of the present article is to provide a critical commentary
on the development of Grice's work on language and meaning on display
in Studies. By way of carrying out this task, I shall try to assess the overall
importance of this work and the seriousness of a number of influential
objections to it. I shall also endeavor to tie up various loose ends and
suggest ways of reconstructing Grice's thoughts with a view to eradicating
a number of apparent unclarities and uncertainties. Although the 'Retrospective
Epilogue" in Studies goes some way toward supplying missing
pieces and forging important connections between various Gricean
themes, a substantial amount of detective work is still needed if one is to
present Grice's work on meaning and language in anything like its best
light. Much of the discussion will be laced with exegesis, if only for the
reason that establishing what Grice is up to can sometimes be hard work
and misunderstandings can easily arise. 4
Very roughly, the first half of the article will focus on Grice's theoretical
distinctions and the uses to which they have been put by Grice and others
with an interest in drawing a sharp distinction between semantic and
nonsemantic facts. The second half of the article concerns Grice's forbidding
philosophical analyses of the central concepts employed by philosophers
of language and theoretical linguists. Such a division might suggest
that I am aligning myself with those who see Grice as presenting two
unrelated theories, the "Theory of Conversation" and the "Theory of
Meaning" (some discussions or attempted refinements of the Theory of
Conversation either ignore or explicitly reject Grice's intention-based approach
to meaning). But it will become clear that there are important
connections between the account of meaning and the account of conversational
implicature that have not attracted the attention they deserve.
Very likely some of the connections were made by Grice only in the
course of working out this or that detail (for such is the process of
philosophizing); but there is no doubt that Grice's work on language
and meaning constitutes a more powerful and interesting contribution to
4 Nothing will be said about the details of the many important projects Grice has influenced,
such as those undertaken by (e.g.) Avramides (1990), Bach and Harnish (1979), Bennett
(1976), Gazdar (1979), Harnish (1976), Leech (1983), Levinson (1983), Loar (1981), Schiffer
(1972), Searle (1969), and Sperber and Wilson (1986). I shall, however, draw upon some of
the discussions, criticisms, and refinements of Grice's proposals made in these and other
works.