PERSON

Paul Grice

The Oxford philosopher who discovered that we mean vastly more than we say and gave that surplus a name—implicature—providing the deepest modern theory of how meaning works, and therefore the sharpest available vocabulary for asking whether a machine can mean anything at all.

Paul Grice is the thinker whose ideas you use a hundred times a day without knowing his name. Born in Birmingham in 1913 and educated at Oxford, where he taught from 1938 until 1967 before moving to the University of California, Berkeley, Grice was a central figure in ordinary language philosophy—the school that held many philosophical problems could be dissolved by attending carefully to how words are actually used. His most consequential ideas came from a set of lectures delivered at Harvard in 1967 and published in 1975 as “Logic and Conversation.” Their subject was implicature: the meaning that goes beyond the literal content of words, the vast surplus we communicate and recover constantly without noticing we are doing it. Every time you read between the lines, every time you take “it's getting late” to mean “let's go” rather than as a remark about the clock, every time a single word does the

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