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Grice was a miniaturist who changed the way other people paint big canvases. The question of correct scale is ultimately one of intellectual judgment, and in this his magisterial, fastidious prose rebukes those of us who want to move faster. [His] work culminated in the William James lectures delivered at Harvard in 1967, and philosophers will he grateful for having them finally available in one volume, Studies in the Way of Words, together with many other of Grice's papers, and a retrospective epilogue, written within two years of his death. -- Simon Blackburn Times Literary Supplement Some philosophers are important because they have produced an important article or an important theory; others are important because, in addition to producing articles and theories, they have minds that "scintillate" in a certain way. Grice is a philosopher of this second and greater type... Grice's intellect, power, and charm are all vehicles for conveying a vision of philosophy, a vision that has much to say to analytic philosophers today. -- Hilary Putnam, Harvard University In interest and power this book far exceeds most publications of our time. -- P. F. Strawson Synthese
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This volume, Grice's first book, includes the long-delayed publication of his enormously influential 1967 William James Lectures. But there is much, much more in this work. Paul Grice himself has carefully arranged and framed the sequence of essays to emphasize not a certain set of ideas but a habit of mind, a style of philosophizing.
Grice has, to be sure, provided philosophy with crucial ideas. His account of speaker-meaning is the standard that others use to define their own minor divergences or future elaborations. His discussion of conversational implicatures has given philosophers an important tool for the investigation of all sorts of problems; it has also laid the foundation for a great deal of work by other philosophers and linguists about presupposition. His metaphysical defense of absolute values is starting to be considered the beginning of a new phase in philosophy. This is a vital book for all who are interested in Anglo-American philosophy.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
15 of 15 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
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.
Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
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4 reviews
30 of 33 people found the following review helpful
Grice as father of a field of linguistic philosophy
8 May 2001
Format:Paperback
Studies in the Way of Words, by Paul Grice, is a collection of papers by the late British philosopher of linguistics. His concepts such as the Maxims of Conversation and the basic ideas behind presupposition and implicature are vital to a robust understanding of communication through language.
As a philosophical text, Grice's work is a bit difficult to plow through. His prose is quite full of flourishes and there's enough amusing references in there to keep an interested reader going, however the reader must indeed be interested for this book to be of much use. Anyone expecting to fully digest any of the papers in this book would do well to plan on reading it 3 or 4 times. However, if done successfully, the concepts you'll take from it will indeed do much to expand your view of how linguistic communication works.
Rated 5 stars for its philosophical importance and 2 for readability, the 4-star rating given here is a sort of weighted average.
4 of 5 people found the following review helpful
A Fundamental Work
7 April 2011
Format:Paperback
This collection of papers have provided a spine for much work in pragmatics and the philosophy of language ever since they were published. Logic & Conversation, in particular, has helped to shape an entire field. Speaking against ordinary language philosophers such as Wittgenstein, Grice provided a wealth of vital distinctions, most of which have remained unshaken. In addition, and unlike many similar collocations of papers, there is a sense of cohesion to the volume, put in order as it was by Grice himself.
A classic, and requisite reading for anyone interested in the philosophy of language.
A classic, and requisite reading for anyone interested in the philosophy of language.
0 of 1 people found the following review helpful
Foundations of pragmatics
23 Aug 2011
Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase
There are in linguistics field called pragmatics largerly known laws or statements. They are refered to the studies Paul Grice did in those fieds. Here I found them on the authors terms. I learned about Grice's laws earlyer but it was good to read about them hearing from the voice of Paul Grice himself.
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