Paul Grice is one of those remarkable twentieth-century philosophers’ philosophers who have greatly influenced styles of philosophical thinking (and writing) without ever, or so it seems, gaining even the slightest form of notoriety outside the academic fraternity. In this capacity, he is in the company of equally ‘unmemorable’, more or less contemporaneous, thinkers like J. L. Austin, A. J. Ayer, G. E. Moore, or Gilbert Ryle, all of them based, at one time or another, in Oxford, and most of whom were actively — though in some cases only indirectly or even adversely — involved in the development of something like a world center of ‘ordinary language’ philosophy. One of the more serious drawbacks of this disposition, however, is the relative unfamiliarity, in the orthodox reception of Grice, with the global (integrated) picture that is being presented, notably in much of his contribution to the philosophy of language. This has largely resulted in the proposal of a whole series of counterexamples to the original ‘Meaning’ (Grice 1957) hypotheses and in some fiddling around with Grice’s conversational maxims (and sometimes with the Cooperative Principle itself), as well as in very technical discussions concerning the status of different types of meaning (semantic, pragmatic). More recently, and in particular following the first (1986) edition of Sperber & Wilson’s Relevance, linguistic debates have focused upon the precise nature of the interface that is postulated to exist between the domains (or rather, the methodologies) of semantics and pragmatics. This interface, then, defines a number of conditions that are hoped to replace various extra (perhaps superfluous) theoretical concepts that were, in the past, prompted by the ‘explosion’ of meaning (Turner 1999a), i.e., its fragmentation into numerous more or less improvised distinctions of meaning types that proved more often than not to be dependent on fairly contingent contextual parameters. In general, therefore, linguists working in the line of Grice have tended to focus almost exclusively on the theme of ‘pragmatic intrusion’, or the idea that the old Gricean dichotomy between what is ‘said’ and what is ‘implicated’ can be refined by distinguishing between minimal propositions, their ‘expanded’ forms, and genuine inferential (argumentative) work on the part of the hearer, as guided by the conversational hypothesis. As such, Grice is one of the prime instigators of a ‘radically pragmatic’ take on meaning that suggests the viability of maintaining a rigorous theoretical distinction between semantics and pragmatics, while ensuring a paradigmatic continuity in the formal study of syntax, semantics, and pragmatics. It should not be forgotten, though, that radical pragmatics is largely based on the ultimately unjustified (cf. Grice 1978: 119) assumption “that it is more generally feasible to strengthen one’s meaning by achieving a superimposed implicature, than to make a relaxed use of an expression”. Not only does this pre-theoretical orientation hinge crucially on the acceptance of (propositional) logic as a kind of universal (and sufficient) semantics, which is somehow acknowledged in much of pragmatic work. But many of these and similar assumptions made by Grice himself (and actually presented as suppositions at work in language users’ own understandings of utterances) are also directly related to the generally presumptive or ‘projective’ nature of communication and interpretation, which cannot be explained without reference to the rational properties that should be ascribed to speech participants. Most existing overviews of Grice’s work, especially those targeted at a linguistic and/or cognitive audience, choose to ignore issues of this rational grounding of Grice’s philosophical project. In what follows, this paper will try to fill out this gap (but not fill it in), indicating links to Grice’s views on (philosophical) psychology, ethics, and metaphysics. It will be suggested, though hardly argued, that it is these nonlinguistic considerations solely that can provide the necessary and ultimate rationale for Grice’s rational account of meaning. The structure of this exposition will explicitly follow some of the lines set out in Grandy & Warner’s (1986a) introduction to Grice’s thinking. Insofar as possible, it will refer to Grice’s original publications, in order to convey a feeling of the historical progression of his thinking. It should be pointed out, though, that most of his papers directly relevant to the development of linguistic pragmatics can be found in Grice (1989), which also contains an important ‘Retrospective epilogue’.