Herbert Paul Grice (13 March 1913 – 28 August 1988), usually publishing under the name H. P. Grice, H. Paul Grice, or Paul Grice, was a British philosopher of language who created the theory of implicature and the cooperative principle (with its namesake Gricean maxims), which became foundational concepts in the linguistic field of pragmatics. His work on meaning has also influenced the philosophical study of semantics.

Born and raised in Harborne (now a suburb of Birmingham), in the United Kingdom, he was educated at Clifton College and then at Corpus Christi College, Oxford. After a brief period teaching at Rossall School, he went back to Oxford, firstly as a graduate student at Merton College from 1936 to 1938, and then as a Lecturer, Fellow and Tutor from 1938 at St John's College. Among his pupils was P.F. Strawson, who he would later collaborate with. During the Second World War Grice served in the Royal Navy; after the war he returned to his Fellowship at St John's, which he held until 1967. In that year, he moved to the United States to take up a professorship at the University of California, Berkeley, where he taught until his death in 1988. He returned to the UK in 1979 to give the John Locke lectures on Aspects of Reason. He reprinted many of his essays and papers in his valedictory book, Studies in the Way of Words (1989).

Grice married Kathleen Watson in 1942; they had two children.

One of Grice's two most influential contributions to the study of language and communication is his theory of meaning, which he began to develop in his article "Meaning", written in 1948 but published only in 1957 at the prodding of his colleague, P. F. Strawson. Grice further developed his theory of meaning in the fifth and sixth of his William James lectures on "Logic and Conversation", delivered at Harvard in 1967. These two lectures were initially published as "Utterer's Meaning and Intentions" in 1969 and "Utterer's Meaning, Sentence Meaning, and Word Meaning" in 1968, and were later collected with the other lectures as the first section of Studies in the Way of Words in 1989.

In the 1957 article "Meaning", Grice describes "natural meaning" using the example of "Those spots mean (meant) measles."

And describes "non-natural meaning" using the example of "John means that he'll be late" or "'Schnee' means 'snow'".

Grice does not define these two senses of the verb 'to mean', and does not offer an explicit theory that separates the ideas they're used to express. Instead, he relies on five differences in ordinary language usage to show that we use the word in (at least) two different ways.

For the rest of "Meaning", and in his discussions of meaning in "Logic and Conversation", Grice deals exclusively with non-natural meaning. His overall approach to the study of non-natural meaning later came to be called "intention-based semantics" because it attempts to explain non-natural meaning based on the idea of speakers' intentions.