Product Description

This volume, Grice's first hook, 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.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #446331 in Books
• Published on: 1991-04-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 406 pages

From Library Journal
This book comprises a revised version of the late author's 1967 William James Lectures, published for the first time; reprints of 12 papers, some slightly revised; and a 1987 retrospective commentary on three aspects of the papers. The lectures are a detailed examination of assertion, implication, and meaning; and the papers discuss ordinary language philosophy, meaning, conversational implicature, the philosophy of perception, and metaphysics. In the lectures, Grice emphasizes that language serves many important functions besides scientific inquiry, distinguishes different sorts of meaning, and theorizes about the kinds of implication that our utterances exemplify in ordinary conversation. The papers analyze numerous topics, including different kinds of meaning. Grice's writing is pellucidly clear, his analyses subtle, and his arguments detailed and rigorous. For all major philosophy collections.
- Robert Hoffman, York Coll., CUNY
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Review
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 (Synthése )

Customer Reviews

Grice as father of a field of linguistic philosophy
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.

Mystery Man
Grice was regarded by colleagues in philosophy as one of the brightest mean who never wrote. He, like John Wisdom, was an exceptionally brillant and nuanced man who (psychologist neede) would not publish.

What a shame. Maybe this in some small way fills a large gap.