Paul Grice and the philosophy of language

PAUL GRICE AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF LANGUAGE 515
in terms of what its users do with it, i.e., in terms of what its users
(could/would/should) mean by it on particular occasions of use. Two
important ideas came out of Grice's sensitivity to use. The first is that the
most "basic" notion of meaning is that of an utterer U meaning something
by doing something on a particular occasion. All other notions of meaning
are to be treated as "derivative" and "explicated" in terms of the more
basic notion. As Grice puts it in 'Retrospective Epilogue',
•.. it is necessary to distinguish between a notion of meaning which is relativized to the
users of words or expressions and one that is not so relativized;.., of the two notions the
unrelativized notion is posterior to, and has to be understood in terms of, the relativized
notion; what words mean is a matter of what people mean by them. (p. 340)
The second idea is that the locution qgy uttering x, U meant that p7 can
be analysed in terms of complex audience-directed intentions on the part
of U. 8 And what is, for all intents and purposes, almost a consequence of
these two ideas, sentence meaning (more broadly, utterance-type meaning)
can be analysed (roughly) in terms of regularities over the intentions with
which utterers produce those sentences on given occasions. What U means
by producing x on a given occasion is a function of what U intends, in a
complex way, to get across to his audience. The basic idea put forward in
"Meaning" (and subsequently refined in his William James Lectures) is,
very roughly, that for an "indicative-type" utterance, the locution ~by
uttering x, U meant that p7 expresses a truth if and only if U uttered x
intending to produce in some audience A the belief that p by means of
A's recognition of this intention.
The details of this proposal and its r61e in the analysis of (e.g.) sentence
meaning will be addressed in Sections 4 and 5. I want now to examine
Grice's earliest published responses to two particular applications of the
methods of ordinary language philosophy, bearing in mind that, on Grice's
own account, utterer's meaning and ultimately sentence meaning are to
be cashed out in terms of utterers' intentions.
In his 1961 address to the Aristotelian Society ('The Causal Theory of
Perception', Essay 15 of Studies), Grice seeks to "rehabilitate" a version
of the view that
the elucidation of the notion of perceiving a material object will include some reference to
the r61e of the material object perceived in the causal ancestry of the perception or of the
sense-impression or sense-datum involved in the perception. (pp. 224-225)
s Throughout, I shall follow Grice in using the terms "utter" (together with "uttering" and
"utterance") in such a way as to be applicable to "any case of doing x or producing x by
the performance of which U meant that so-and-so" (p. 118). The act or performance in
question does not have to be linguistic, conventional, or established in any way.