Meaning (philosophy)
Paul Grice

The philosopher Paul Grice, working within the ordinary language tradition, understood "meaning" — in his 1957 article — to have two kinds: natural and non-natural. Natural meaning had to do with cause and effect, for example with the expression "these spots mean measles". Non-natural meaning, on the other hand, had to do with the intentions of the speaker in communicating something to the listener.

In his essay, Logic and Conversation, Grice went on to explain and defend an explanation of how conversations work. His guiding maxim was called the cooperative principle, which claimed that the speaker and the listener will have mutual expectations of the kind of information that will be shared. The principle is broken down into four maxims: Quality (which demands truthfulness and honesty), Quantity (demand for just enough information as is required), Relation (relevance of things brought up), and Manner (lucidity). This principle, if and when followed, lets the speaker and listener figure out the meaning of certain implications by way of inference.

The works of Grice led to an avalanche of research and interest in the field, both supportive and critical. One spinoff was called Relevance theory, developed by Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson during the mid-1980s, whose goal was to make the notion of relevance more clear. Similarly, in his work, " Universal pragmatics ", Jürgen Habermas began a program that sought to improve upon the work of the ordinary language tradition. In it, he laid out the goal of a valid conversation as a pursuit of mutual understanding.
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