Paul Grice and the philosophy of language

542 STEPHEN NEALE
appeals to these notions time and again; but in Essays 5, 6, 14, and 18 he
attempts to analyse or explicate them in terms of (for him) more basic
notions such as intention, belief, desire, and recognition.
The analysis of locutions of the forms rX did Y intentionally ", rX caused
Y', ~X is true ", ~X entails Y', rX is red 7, and so on, has been regarded
by many philosophers as a central task of philosophy. There are a number
of different views about the exact aims and proper methods of analysis;
Grice's conception appears to have a reductive and explicative flavor in
that it appears to be his view that locutions of the forms %y uttering X,
U meant that p", 'X means "p"~, and rby uttering X, U said that p7 can
be wholly explicated without appealing to semantical concepts. 43
In his 1957 paper 'Meaning', Grice seeks to explain what it is for
someone or something to mean something (but not in a sense of 'mean'
("natural meaning") found in sentences such as 'those spots mean measles',
'that buzz means someone is at the door', or 'that groan means Bill
is in pain'.44). He starts out with what people mean rather than with what
this or that expression, sign, or action means. The plan, executed in more
detail in the James Lectures, is to analyse utterer's meaning in terms of
complex audience-directed intentions on the part of the utterer, and to
analyse utterance-type meaning (e.g., sentence meaning and word meaning)
in terms of utterer's meaning.
It is important for a proper understanding of this project to keep in
mind the following: although Grice aims to neutralize many ordinary
language maneuvers with his saying/implicating distinction, one of the
driving forces behind his work is still the idea that the meaning of an
expression is a function of what its users do with it. The following passage
from 'Meaning Revisited' will help to frame the discussion of the next
three sections:
[T]o say what a word means in a language is to say what it is in general optimal for speakers
of that language to do with that word, or what use they are to make of it; what particular
43 It could be argued that one of the lessons of twentieth-century philosophy is that watertight
reductive analysis is, for the most part, impossible. To argue this would not be to commit
oneself to the denial of the existence of a viable analytic-synthetic distinction. For some of
Grice's thoughts on this matter, see the 1956 paper 'In Defence of a Dogma', written with
Peter Strawson (Essay 13 of Studies) and Grice (1986).
44 Although he separates "natural""and "nonnatural" meaning, the possibility of viewing
nonnatural meaning as a "descendant" of natural meaning appeals to Grice. In the final
paragraph of 'Utterer's Meaning and Intentions' he suggests that a simplified treatment of
utterer's meaning might emerge from investigating the relation between natural and nonnatural
meaning (p. 116). An attempt to spell out the relation is contained in 'Meaning Revisited'
(Essay 18) and important auxiliary notions are discussed in 'Method in Philosophical Psychology'.