Paul Grice and the philosophy of language

514 STEPHEN NEALE
proposition that is either true or false. 7 So the view, perhaps borrowed
from classical logic, that every use of an indicative sentence involves the
expression of a truth or a falsehood must be abandoned.
In his closing paragraph, Strawson suggests that the very idea of a theory
of meaning for a natural language based on classical logic is misguided:
Neither Aristotelian nor Russellian rules give the exact logic of any expression of ordinary
language; for ordinary language has no exact logic. (p. 344)
Two years later, Strawson backed up this claim with his influential text
Introduction to Logical Theory, in which, among other things, he launched
an attack on the view that the logic of the formal devices '&', 'v', 'D',
'(Vx)', '(3x)', and '(tx)' captures the meanings of the natural language
expressions 'and', 'or', 'if', 'every', 'a', and 'the'. A single example, modified
somewhat, will suffice. If an utterer U asserts a sentence of the form
rp or q~, U will standardly be taken to imply that he has non truthfunctional
grounds for the assertion, i.e., U will standardly be taken to
imply that he does not know which of p and q is true. The ordinary
language philosopher impressed by this observation might then conclude
that an utterance of rp or q7 in which this condition is not satisfied involves
a misuse of language. It is, in some sense, part of the meaning of r p or
qT, that such a locution is used correctly only if the speaker does not know
that p is true and does not know that q is true. If this condition is not
satisfied, the utterance cannot be taken to express a truth. And so, the
ordinary language philosopher might conclude, it would be a serious mistake
to suppose that the meaning of the English word 'or' is given by the
semantics of the logical particle 'v'; the semantics of 'v' is stipulated by
the logician to be truth-functional, but the semantics of 'or' is determined
by actual linguistic practice (use), which does not square with the logician's
truth-functional analysis.
Grice himself was an exceptional practitioner of ordinary language
philosophy and broadly sympathetic to many of its aims and methods.
Indeed, his own philosophy of language involves both an original refinement
and an original critique of the idea of meaning as use. In his first
publication on meaning, his 1957 article 'Meaning' (Essay 14 of Studies),
Grice expresses allegiance to the position that a theory of meaning must,
in some sense, be sensitive to use. In this paper, Grice presents his first
attempts to say exactly what meaning is. It ought to be possible, he
suggests, to explicate the meaning of an expression (or any other sign)
7 My wording here is supposed to be neutral between (a) a proposition is expressed but it
is neither true nor false, and (b) no proposition is expressed at all. Strawson is not consistent
on this matter. For discussion, see Neale (1990) chap. 2.