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Richard Rorty wrote The Linguistic Turn, a collection of essays that discusses the philosophical methods employed by both various empiricists during the war and the philosophers of “ordinary language” in pre- and post-war Oxford. A third linguistic turn is experienced in philosophy which originated from the thoughts of philosophers such as W. V. O. Quine and Noam Chomsky. This turn had a lighter impact than the first two turns, and it is perceived as having more sophistication and tentativeness, and being more responsive to the requirements of theory construction. P. H. Nowell-Smith's notion of “contextual implication” coincided with Paul Grice's idea of a “conversational implication”, and from this emerged the Gricean aspect of this said linguistic turn. This chapter attempts to discuss how Grice came up with such an idea and how this was incorporated into a philosophical language theory.

This introductory chapter describes the three works of Paul Grice collected in this volume, selected in order to present his metaphysical defence of value. It clarifies some of the basic elements of Grice's constructivist theory and the relationship between the third Carus lecture and the ‘Reply to Richards’.

This chapter reviews the book, Studies in the Way of Words, by Paul Grice. It highlights aspects of his work which constitute a substantial and enduring contribution to philosophical and linguistic theory. Most prominent among these are two contributions which are highlighted. First, there is the attempt to give a reductive analysis of the concept of linguistic meaning in psychological terms — a project originally and brilliantly sketched in the 1957 article ‘Meaning’ (reproduced as Chapter 14 in this book), and subsequently elaborated in a series of lectures and articles (Chapters 5, 6, 7, and 18). Second, there is the development of the theory of conversational implicature, which has rightly won a secure place in linguistic theory, on both of its necessarily connected semantic and pragmatic sides (Chapters 1, 2, 3, 4, 15, and 17).

This chapter presents the final section of Paul Grice's ‘Reply to Richards’, which takes up, or takes off from, a few of the things that they have to say about important issues belonging to the chain of disciplines listed in the title of the section - metaphysics, philosophical psychology, and value.

In “Free Agency,” Gary Watson argued that an account of free agency needs to distinguish what a person wants or desires—what a person is to some extent moved to do—from what a person values. Even when one values what one desires, the motivational strength of the desire may not correspond to the extent to which one values what the desire is for. This chapter describes a model of valuing as a higher-order policy of weights in practical reasoning. It makes a proposal that ties an important kind of reflective valuing to the will of an agent whose agency is temporally extended. Intentions, plans, and policies were initially introduced on top of prior structures of considered desires. The chapter proceeds by way of a project of Paul Grice's “creature construction”: such policies about weights are a further development of planning structures, planning structures introduced earlier in the “construction” to support cross-temporal and social organization. The chapter also discusses desires, considered desires, and deliberation as well as planning agents and hierarchy.

John Lloyd Ackrill (1921–2007), a Fellow of the British Academy, had a powerful and far-reaching influence on the way ancient philosophy is done in the English-speaking world and beyond. In his first article, he interpreted Plato's claim at Sophist 259e, in the process confronting what would have been at the time the authoritative interpretation, that of W. D. Ross. Ackrill was born in Reading to Frederick William Ackrill and Jessie Anne Ackrill. He was educated at Reading School and at St John's College in the University of Oxford; his philosophy tutors at St John's were Paul Grice and John Mabbott. Ackrill's first book was Aristotle's Categories and De Interpretatione. He also published a pair of seminal articles on Plato's Sophist. Perhaps the most important aspect of Ackrill's enduring influence was his editorship of the Clarendon Aristotle Series.

This chapter endeavors to clarify the relation between common sense and ordinary language, with special attention to the use of these terms in the approaches to philosophy that are characteristic of G. E. Moore, John Austin, and Paul Grice. The topics of ordinary language and common sense are closely related in one way and quite different in another. A language, by definition, is a set of procedures for constructing intelligible units of communication. Common sense, on the other hand, is a faculty of judgment. The terms “ordinary” and “common,” however, suggest a deeper connection. It is a simple step to the inference that ordinary language is that which is spoken normally or usually within some specified linguistic community, as defined by some particular natural language or languages. An analogous step allows one to infer that common sense belongs to the majority of a designated population, and perhaps to all of its members.

This chapter presents some ideas about how to approach philosophical psychology. It begins by formulating four problems that adequate philosophical psychology must be able to test. It discusses some general aspects of the relation between psychological theory and psychological concepts, and two formal features that may be desirable to attribute to some of the laws of the theory to be used to explicate psychological concepts. The chapter then goes on to a semi-realistic procedure for introducing some psychological concepts, content-internalization, and higher-order psychological states.

This chapter discusses some lessons learned from philosophy in the 20th century. One of these is that the fundamental bearers of the properties of truth or falsity, the fundamental subjects of the predicates ‘true’ or ‘false’, are not linguistic items, neither sentences nor utterances of sentences. It is not, when we speak or write, the words we then use, but what we then use them to say, that is in question. It is whatever may be believed, doubted, hypothesized, suspected, supposed, affirmed, denied, declared, alleged, and so forth, that is, or may be, true. The views of Paul Grice are also considered: his emphasis on the value of consulting our great dead predecessors; the doctrine of the unity of philosophy across apparent departmental divisions; and his opposition to ‘Minimalism’ in philosophy, a heading under which he ranged a number of other ‘isms’, including ‘physicalism’ and ‘extensionalism’.

Fritz Senn, one of the most incisive readers ever to tackle Ulysses, calls “Calypso” “probably the easiest chapter in the novel.” This is certainly true for veteran readers of the novel, who can bring the knowledge of the whole work to bear on figuring out nearly everything that goes on in this episode. But how would “Calypso” strike a first-time or virgin reader, as we might call such a hypothetical figure? This chapter advocates a return to first principles in its endeavor to track the heuristic dilemmas faced by a “virgin” reader of “Calypso.” Adopting Paul Grice's notion of implicature, the role of the unspoken and the implied in discourse, this chapter charts the path the reader must steer through the false leads, explanatory gaps, perplexing conjunctions, semiotic lapses, and insinuated points of view of this episode. It shows that all interpretations of Ulysses must necessarily be incomplete and imperfect and that, moreover, James Joyce forces us to collude in the guilty secrets at which the text playfully gestures only often to reveal as figments.

This chapter reviews approaches taken by political philosophers concerned with the nature of law, with language seen as one of the key elements in the formation of political collectivities ruled by law. However language as law's medium has also been seen as a potential source of instability and uncertainty, and legal theorists and political philosophers have differed widely in their assessment of the importance and role of language in law. If law is a kind of market of exchange or reflects a social contract between citizens and the sovereign, and language is the medium for the recording of law and for its explication, then the terms of that contract, and language in general, become the primary medium through which social order is created and maintained. Questions about definition, rules, and coherence are central to anxieties about legal language. This chapter reviews the positions of legal theorists and philosophers, notably Bentham, Wittgenstein, Austin, and Grice, showing how that the linguistic turn in philosophy used law as a way of understanding everyday language.

This chapter presents a goal-oriented approach to communication, in which both the speaker and the hearer engage in problem solving to arrive at pragmatic meaning. Especially in explaining indirectness and negative politeness, it returns to the foundations of modern Anglo-American pragmatics in the thinking of (in particular) Paul Grice and John Searle, bringing these two philosophical accounts together in a “Searlo-Gricean” account of the pragmatics of politeness. It further draws on more recent neo-Gricean thinking, especially in emphasizing the role of default interpretation as an essential component of pragmatic inference. Also explained is the role of pragmaticization (or “routinization”) as a process leading to conventional implicature. The pragmatic background of this chapter is further explained, especially for newcomers to the field, in the Appendix at the end of the book.

In this chapter, the authors seek to show that legal speech is best seen not as a radically distinct verbal phenomenon but rather as one variety of verbal interaction, albeit with various distinctive properties that follow from the institutional nature and goals of the legal domain. The authors first sketch a general picture of verbal communication as essentially inferential, drawing on recent work in linguistic pragmatics that takes its inspiration from the work of Paul Grice. The authors then focus on the complex activity of adjudication. The authors analyse adjudication in speech act terms as a “verdictive”, explaining how this act encompasses a number of sub-activities. In doing so, the authors pay particular attention to Endicott’s (2012) claims about the “interpretative” and “non-interpretative” aspects of judging. Significantly, the authors reject some specific claims of his regarding the “non-interpretative” nature of certain components of adjudication. The authors argue (i) that the general picture of verbal communication implies that understanding the speech act content of the law is an interpretative, inferential activity; and (ii) that a court creatively determining extensions of vague terms is also performing interpretation, if it is attempting to respect certain intentions of the legislature in doing so.

On the model of Grice’s account of the creation of a new kind of value at the same time as the introduction of practical agents, this chapter continues the argument that Aristotle attempted to ‘bootstrap’ a commitment to normativity from the existence of practical reason. Reinterpreting Socrates’ paradoxical claim that everyone aims at the good, Aristotle turned a tautological analysis of action—that it necessarily aims at some good—into the normative thesis that we are, as rational agents, implicitly committed to seeking the true good. Central to his vision is the belief that we can antecedently identify some agents as more practically wise than others, averting the possibility of radical collective error.

This chapter defends the view that sentences get their meanings from the contents of the beliefs they express, not the other way round. It shows first how the contents of contingent beliefs are given by the success conditions of the actions they make desires cause, i.e. the conditions in which the actions fulfil those desires. It then meets objections to this thesis and uses it to derive the meanings of sentences. It does this by showing how uttering a sentence to tell others what we believe is an action that will succeed if our beliefs about how it does so are true. The chapter ends by showing how this theory simplifies Paul Grice’s theory of meaning.