Paul Grice and the philosophy of language

520 STEPHEN NEALE
to avail itself of a distinction along these lines if it is to be taken seriously.
But Grice was not content with an intuitive division between semantic
and pragmatic implication; he wanted a full-fledged theoretical account of
the division (and perhaps further subdivisions) that was compatible with
his own account of meaning. And this was the task he set himself in his
William James Lectures. The main task was broken down into three
subtasks. The first was to present an account of the possibility of pragmatic
implication that meshed with his own fledgling philosophical psychology.
The second subtask was to improve upon the analysis of utterer's meaning
given in 'Meaning'. The third subtask was to use the revised analysis to
provide accounts of sentence meaning and the statement made (in that
order). It seems to have been Grice's view that he would then be in a
position to specify the conditions under which an implication was genuinely
semantic. He could then appeal much more confidently to the distinction
between semantic and pragmatic implication in pursuit of other philosophical
goals.
2. THE THEORY OF CONVERSATION
In his William James Lectures, Grice proposes to make a distinction within
the "total signification" of a linguistic utterance between "what [U] has
said (in a certain favored, and maybe in some degree artificial, sense of
"said"), and what [U] has implicated (e.g., implied, indicated, suggested)"
(p. 118).
(1) Although there is no explicit textual evidence on this matter, it is
at least arguable that a specification of the "total signification" of an
utterance x made by U is for Grice the same thing as a specification of
what U meant by uttering x.
(2) What U said is "... to be closely related to the conventional meaning
of the words (the sentence) he has uttered" (p. 25).12 It seems to be
Grice's view that, in some sense, the conventional meaning of the sentence
uttered both falls short and goes beyond what is said. For a "full identification"
of what U said on a particular occasion, one needs to establish,
in addition to the conventional meaning of the sentence uttered, at least
the references of any referring expressions (e.g., proper names, demonstratives,
and indexicals) and the time and place of utterance. Although
Grice is not as explicit as he might have been, it is clear upon reflection
~2 Grice's use of the word 'conventional' in 'conventional meaning' should not be taken too
literally, for it is Grice's view that linguistic meaning is not to be explicated in terms of what
other philosophers might think of as convention. On this matter, see Section 6.