Paul Grice

Paul Grice

Paul Grice was a philosopher of language. He is credited with systematising the rules of cooperative conversation, now called the Gricean maxims, and with the term implicature for what a speaker implies without saying. Here he matters because Miller and Kahn drew on his theory of conversational implicature to explain why shoppers respond to unusual colour names.

Who they are

This site knows Grice through secondary sources. The vault's note on The Organized Mind records that the book credits him with systematising the rules of cooperative conversation and with the term implicature. The vault dates the framework to 1975. This page does not carry a biography, because none has been read for it, and it does not guess at dates or posts.

His ideas travel well beyond philosophy. In the vault they connect to indirect speech acts and to the work of John Searle, and to marketing through Miller and Kahn's 2005 paper on colour and flavour names.

Key papers

The framework is usually cited to Grice's 1975 paper "Logic and Conversation". The vault records the year and treats the work as the origin of the Gricean maxims; this site has not read the paper and cites it only as the origin the vault names.

Key ideas

The cooperative principle and the four maxims. Speakers are taken to be cooperative, and cooperation is spelled out as quantity, quality, manner and relation. See Gricean maxims.

Implicature. When a speaker seems to break a maxim, the listener infers a meaning that was not stated. Miller and Kahn argued that an unusual colour name works this way: shoppers assume the name was chosen for a reason and go looking for it. See ambiguous colour names.

This page does not claim that Grice wrote about marketing or colour. The application is Miller and Kahn's.

Sources

  1. Levitin, D. J. The Organized Mind. As recorded in the vault's note on the book; secondary.
  2. Miller, E. G., & Kahn, B. E. (2005). Shades of meaning: The effect of color and flavor names on consumer choice. Journal of Consumer Research, 32(1), 86-92. doi:10.1086/429602.