Grice: Searching for Invisible Meanings

The analytical overview of the natural language pragmatic dimension researches initiated by Grice has been undertaken. Intentional semantics and inferential pragmatic are considered correspondingly in the first and second part of the paper. The mentioned research programs constitute one of the most influential strategies in the contemporary analytic philosophy of language and stimulate, on the one hand, lively debates with formal-research oriented investigators, and on the other hand, research reorientation from predominantly linguistic dimension to mental and social dimensions. Grice’s treatment of the “speaker’s meaning”-phenomenon, the variety of semantic and pragmatic implications, mechanisms of pragmatic inferences (implicatures) are considered in the work. The third part is devoted to a number of contemporary post-Gricean investigations, which are linked with different strengthenings of Gricean tactics (implicitures, imlicatures of politeness, particularized and generalized implicatures), or with radical alternative to Gricean views (relevance theory).