Paul Grice in the context of Philosopher of language

In linguistics and the philosophy of language, pragmatics is the study of how context contributes to meaning. The field of study evaluates how human language is utilized in social interactions, as well as the relationship between the interpreter and the interpreted. Linguists who specialize in pragmatics are called pragmaticians. The field has been represented since 1986 by the International Pragmatics Association (IPrA).

Pragmatics encompasses phenomena including implicature, speech acts, relevance and conversation, as well as nonverbal communication. Theories of pragmatics go hand-in-hand with theories of semantics, which studies aspects of meaning, and syntax, which examines sentence structures, principles, and relationships. Pragmatics, together with semantics and syntactics, is a part of semiotics. The ability to understand another speaker's intended meaning is called pragmatic competence. In 1938, Charles Morris first distinguished pragmatics as an independent subfield within semiotics, alongside syntax and semantics. Pragmatics emerged as its own subfield in the 1950s after the pioneering work of J. L. Austin and Paul Grice.

In pragmatics, a subdiscipline of linguistics, an implicature is something the speaker suggests or implies with an utterance, even though it is not literally expressed. Implicatures can aid in communicating more efficiently than by explicitly saying everything we want to communicate. The philosopher H. P. Grice coined the term in 1975. Grice distinguished conversational implicatures, which arise because speakers are expected to respect general rules of conversation, and conventional ones, which are tied to certain words such as but or therefore. Take for example the following exchange:

Here, B does not say, but conversationally implicates, that the gas station is open, because otherwise his utterance would not be relevant in the context. Conversational implicatures are classically seen as contrasting with entailments: they are not necessary or logical consequences of what is said, but are defeasible (cancellable). So, B could continue without contradiction:

Relevance theory is a framework for understanding the interpretation of utterances. It was first proposed by Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson, and is used within cognitive linguistics and pragmatics. The theory was originally inspired by the work of Paul Grice and developed out of his ideas, but has since become a pragmatic framework in its own right. The seminal book, Relevance, was first published in 1986 and revised in 1995.

The theory takes its name from the principle that "every utterance conveys the information that it is relevant enough for it to be worth the addressee's effort to process it", that is, if I say something to you, you can safely assume that I believe that the conveyed information is worth your effort to listen to and comprehend it; and also that it is "the most relevant one compatible with the communicator's abilities and preferences", that is, I tried to make the utterance as easy to understand as possible, given its information content and my communicative skills.

Ordinary language philosophy (OLP, sometimes called linguistic philosophy) is a methodological approach within analytic philosophy which treats many traditional philosophical problems as the result of misunderstandings of how words are ordinarily used. Rather than proposing ideal or artificial languages, ordinary language philosophers investigate the actual use of expressions in everyday contexts, and often argue that once such uses are described carefully, many philosophical "problems" dissolve or change their shape.

In the twentieth century OLP was primarily associated with the later work of Ludwig Wittgenstein, early to mid-century philosophers at the University of Cambridge such as G. E. Moore and John Wisdom, and mid-century philosophers at the University of Oxford, including Gilbert Ryle, J. L. Austin, P. F. Strawson, H. L. A. Hart, and Paul Grice. Because a number of its most prominent practitioners taught at Oxford, OLP is sometimes informally referred to as "Oxford philosophy".

In linguistics, discourse analysis, and related fields, an interlocutor is a person involved in a conversation or dialogue. Two or more people speaking to one another are each other's interlocutors. The terms conversation partner, hearer, or addressee are often used interchangeably with interlocutor.

According to Paul Grice, the behavior of interlocutors in ordinary conversation is governed by the cooperative principle.

Pragma-dialectics (also known as the pragma-dialectical theory) is a program in argumentation theory developed since the late 1970s by Dutch scholars Frans H. van Eemeren and Rob Grootendorst at the University of Amsterdam. It conceives argumentation as a form of goal-directed communicative activity aimed at the reasonable resolution of differences of opinion by means of a critical discussion. Combining a pragmatic interest in how argumentative discourse is actually used with a dialectical interest in how it ought to proceed, pragma-dialectics studies argumentation as a complex speech act that occurs in natural language use and serves specific communicative purposes.

The theory is both descriptive and normative. It offers tools for reconstructing ordinary argumentative exchanges in terms of an ideal model of a critical discussion and uses that model to evaluate whether a discourse contributes to resolving a disagreement in a reasonable way. Central to pragma-dialectics is a four-stage model of critical discussion (confrontation, opening, argumentation and concluding) and a set of ten discussion rules that parties should observe; systematic violations of these rules are treated as fallacies. The approach integrates insights from critical rationalism, formal dialectics, speech act theory, Gricean language philosophy and discourse analysis, operationalized through meta-theoretical principles such as functionalization, socialization, externalization and dialectification.

Deirdre Susan Moir Wilson, FBA (born 1941) is a British linguist and cognitive scientist. She is emeritus professor of Linguistics at University College London and research professor at the Centre for the Study of Mind in Nature at the University of Oslo. Her most influential work has been in linguistic pragmatics—specifically in the development of Relevance Theory with French anthropologist Dan Sperber. This work has been especially influential in the Philosophy of Language. Important influences on Wilson are Noam Chomsky, Jerry Fodor, and Paul Grice. Linguists and philosophers of language who have been students of Wilson include Stephen Neale (CUNY Graduate Center), Robyn Carston (University College London) and Tim Wharton (University of Brighton).

In social science generally and linguistics specifically, the cooperative principle describes how people achieve effective conversational communication in common social situations—that is, how listeners and speakers act cooperatively and mutually accept one another to be understood in a particular way.

The philosopher of language Paul Grice introduced the concept in his pragmatic theory:

In philosophy, a razor is a principle or rule of thumb that allows one to eliminate (shave off) unlikely explanations for a phenomenon, or avoid unnecessary actions. Common examples include:

• Alder's razor (also known as Newton's flaming laser sword): If something cannot be settled by experiment or observation, then it is not worthy of debate.
• Grice's razor (also known as Guillaume's razor): As a principle of parsimony, conversational implicatures are to be preferred over semantic context for linguistic explanations.
• Hanlon's razor: Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.
• Hitchens' razor: That which can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.
• Hume's guillotine: What ought to be cannot be deduced from what is; prescriptive claims cannot be derived solely from descriptive claims, and must depend on other prescriptions. "If the cause, assigned for any effect, be not sufficient to produce it, we must either reject that cause, or add to it such qualities as will give it a just proportion to the effect."
• Occam's razor: Explanations that require fewer unjustified assumptions are more likely to be correct; avoid unnecessary or improbable assumptions.
• Popper's falsification criterion of demarcation: For a theory to be considered scientific, it must be falsifiable.
• Sagan standard: Positive claims require positive evidence, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.