Grice H. P(aul) (1913–88), English philosopher whose early work concerned perception and philosophy of language, and whose most influential contribution was the concept of a conversational implicature and the associated theoretical machinery of conversational postulates. The concept of a conversational implicature was first used in his 1961 paper on the causal theory of reference. Grice distinguished between the meaning of the words used in a sentence and what is implied by the speaker’s choice of words. If someone says ‘It looks as if there is a mailbox in front of me,’ the choice of words implies that there is some doubt about the mailbox. But, Grice argued, that is a matter of word choice and the sentence itself does not imply that there is doubt. The term ‘conversational implicature’ was introduced in Grice’s William James lectures in 1968 (published in 1988) and used to defend the use of the material conditional as a logical translation of ‘if-then’. With Strawson (‘In Defence of Dogma’), Grice gave a spirited defense of the analytic–synthetic distinction against Quine’s criticisms. In subsequent systematic papers Grice attempted, among other things, to give a theoretical grounding of the distinction. Though Grice’s earlier work was part of the Oxford ordinary language tradition, in 1968 he moved to Berkeley, and his later work was more formal and theoretical. In his last decade, he concentrated more on metaphysics, especially the concept of absolute value. See also ANALYTIC – SYNTHETIC DISTINC – TION , IMPLICATURE , ORDINARY LANGUAGE PHILOSOPHY. R.E.G.