Studies in the Way of Words

This book contains many of Grice’s most important essays on language. The series of essays collected together as Part I -- "Logic and Conversation" -- where Grice introduces the notion of Conversational Implicature, are worth the cover price alone. Other essays include "Meaning" where Grice draws a distinction between what he called ‘natural meaning’ and non-natural meaning. Natural meaning is the kind of thing we are speaking of when we say something like, "Those spots mean measles" and non-natural meaning is the what we speak of when we say "That remark, ‘Smith couldn’t get on without his trouble and strife,’ meant that Smith found his wife indispensable." In essays like this and in "Utterer's Meaning, Sentence Meaning, and Word-Meaning," and "Meaning Revisited" Grice develops the notion of Intention-Based Semantics, where language is seen as facilitating correspondences in psychological states. This volume also includes Grice’s essay (with P.F. Strawson) "In Defense of A Dogma," on Quine’s "Two Dogmas of Empiricism" as well as "Presupposition and Conversational Implicature," an important contribution to the debate on Russell’s theory of descriptions. The essays themselves are not always easy on first reading, but they show above all that Grice had the kind of wide ranging intellectual curiosity and originality that distinguishes a philosopher of the first-rank.