Paul Grice and the philosophy of language

544 STEPHEN NEALE
To some philosophers and linguists, Grice's program seems to constitute
something of a snub to serious compositional semantics. The idea that
sentence meaning is to be analysed in terms of utterer's meaning has been
felt to conflict with (i) the fact that knowing the meaning of a sentence is
typically a necessary step in working out what U meant by uttering that
sentence, i.e., for recovering U's communicative intentions, and (ii) the
fact that the meaning of a sentence is determined, at least in part, by the
meanings of its parts (i.e., words and phrases) and the way the parts are
put together (syntax). In my view, both of these charges are based on
misunderstandings of Grice's project, and I shall attempt to bring together
various parts of Studies in an attempt to show why. First, I need to say
something about the main strengths and weaknesses of the sort of analysis
of utterer's meaning that Grice explores (in Essays 5, 6, and 14) and tie
up a number of loose ends.
5. UTTERER'S MEANING
In 'Meaning', Grice suggests that "U meant something by uttering x" is
(roughly) equivalent to "U intended the utterance of x to produce some
response in an audience by means of the recognition of this intention" (p.
220). 47 By the time of the James Lectures, any suggestion of a selfreferential
intention in this formulation has disappeared, as Following a
suggestion due to Strawson (1964), in 'Utterer's Meaning and Intentions',
Grice unpacks (or perhaps modifies) his original idea as follows:
(I)
rBy uttering x, U meant something" is true iff for some audience
A, U uttered x intending:
(1) A to produce some particular response r,
(2) A to recognize that U intends (1), and
(3) A's recognition that U intends (1) to function, in part, as
a reason for (1).
47 In 'Meaning' Grice writes the analysandum as "U meant something by x". In the James
Lectures he writes it as"U meant something by uttering x". As (e.g.) Ziff (1967) and Schiffer
(1972) point out, it is not obvious that these notions coincide in all cases. Once the distinction
is made clear, the later analysandum emerges as the relevant one as far as Grice's project
is concerned, and to that extent I propose to view the earlier statement of the analysandum
as an abbreviation of the later statement.
48 On this matter, see Harman (1974) and Avramides (1989).