Herbert Paul Grice was born and educated in England. He taught at St. John's College Oxford until 1968, when he moved to the University of California–Berkeley. He taught there until his death. He published little until near the end of his life, but had a great influence through students and the wide circulation of unpublished manuscripts. His earliest work dealt with perception, but he subsequently moved to problems in language, ethics, and metaphysics. A concern with reason and rationality is a subtle thread which unites these investigations. His historical idols were Aristotle and Kant.

One early topic was a defense of the causal theory of perception. This defense required separating the scientific or specialist's part of the task of analyzing perception from that of the philosopher. This distinction relies on an underlying notion of analysis closely related to the analytic–synthetic distinction...