March 6, 2026
In my philosophy course this week the professor mentioned Grice and pragmatics — the idea that meaning isn't just what's said but what's implied, and that listeners do enormous interpretive work to recover what a speaker actually intends. We infer relevance, cooperative intent, quantity. It stopped me cold.
Twenty years of building communication products, and I never had a formal framework for why some of them worked. I was operating on instinct. The instinct was usually right, but I didn't know why. Grice is the why.