Paul Grice and the philosophy of language

552 STEPHEN NEALE
might be induced to subscribe to it or attribute it to another philosopher.
To claim that it is a consequence of Grice's theory involves, among other
things, a failure to see any connection whatsoever between the Theory of
Conversation and the Theory of Meaning. For it is Grice's express view,
as we have seen, that typically the hearer must establish what U has said
(or made as if to say) in order to establish what U meant; and it is by
taking into account the nature and purpose of rational discourse that the
hearer is able to progress (via, e.g., conversational implicature) from what
U has said (or made as if to say) to what U meant. Grice himself is explicit
on this point:
Of course, I would not want to deny that when the vehicle of meaning is a sentence (or the
utterance of a sentence), the speaker's intentions are to be recognized, in the normal case,
by virtue of a knowledge of the conventional use of the sentence (indeed, my account of
nonconventional implicature depends on this idea). (pp. 100-1).
Importantly, an analysis of sentence meaning in terms of utterer's intentions
does not conflict with this idea.
Perhaps the best way of getting clear about this is with the help of a
distinction between (i) accounts of what U said and what U meant by
uttering X and (ii) accounts of how hearers recover what U said and what
U meant by uttering X. 62 There are of course important connections here;
but they are not of such a character that utterer's meaning cannot be
used in characterizations of sentence meaning and saying. The important
connection is really the following. What U meant by uttering X is determined
solely by U's communicative intentions; but of course the formation
of genuine communicative intentions by U is constrained by U's expectations:
U cannot be said to utter X M-intending A to 6 if U thinks that
there is very little or no hope that U's production of X will result in A thing.
63 If U M-intends A actively to entertain the belief that (U thinks)
Paris is beautiful in springtime, and U and A are both English speakers,
U may well utter the English sentence 'Paris is beautiful in springtime'.
To say this is not to commit Grice to the view that sentences that are not
directly (or not so directly) connected to the proposition that Paris is
beautiful in springtime may not be employed to the same effect. On the
contrary, the Theory of Conversation is supposed to provide an explanation
of how this is possible (in the right circumstances). On the assumption
that U and A are both operating in accordance with the Cooperative
62 When discussing particular utterances of utterance-types I will use upper case X rather
than lower case x. Thus "by uttering X" can be understood as "by uttering x (a token of
type X)". This seems to me to conform to Griee's usage and, by hypothesis, his intent.
63 On this matter, see Grice (1971).