Customer Reviews

Studies in the Way of Words

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

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.

This collection of papers have provided a spine for much work in pragmatics and the philosophy of language ever since they were published. Logic & Conversation, in particular, has helped to shape an entire field. Speaking against ordinary language philosophers such as Wittgenstein, Grice provided a wealth of vital distinctions, most of which have remained unshaken. In addition, and unlike many similar collocations of papers, there is a sense of cohesion to the volume, put in order as it was by Grice himself.

A classic, and requisite reading for anyone interested in the philosophy of language.

There are in linguistics field called pragmatics largerly known laws or statements. They are refered to the studies Paul Grice did in those fieds. Here I found them on the authors terms. I learned about Grice's laws earlyer but it was good to read about them hearing from the voice of Paul Grice himself.

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.