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Grice's Meaning Project teorema Vol. XXVI/2, 2007, pp. 41-58 ISSN: 0210-1602 Grice’s Meaning Project Wayne A. Davis RESUMEN El proyecto que Grice concibió sobre el significado consistía en explicar qué es el significado “no-natural” en términos del significado del hablante y el significado del hablante en términos de intenciones. Examino aquí el intento de Grice de llevar a cabo este proyecto examinando las definiciones particulares que propuso. Estas defi- niciones tienen numerosos problemas muy difíciles de tratar, que han llevado a los es- tudiosos de Grice a concluir que todo el proyecto era impracticable. Muestro que la teoría del significado de la expresión que he desarrollado resuelve los problemas ofre- ciendo definiciones alternativas del significado del hablante y del significado de la expresión. Los recursos teóricos adicionales más importantes que se necesitan son la convención, el pensamiento ocurrente como estado mental distinto de la creencia y la estructura del pensamiento. El proyecto de Grice es todavía el enfoque más promete- dor para explicar en qué consiste el significado lingüístico. ABSTRACT Grice’s meaning project was to explain what ‘non-natural’ meaning is by defin- ing expression meaning in terms of speaker meaning and speaker meaning in terms of intention. I review Grice’s attempt to carry out this project by examining the particu- lar definitions he proposed. These have numerous intractable problems, which led scholars to conclude that the basic project was flawed. I briefly show how the expres- sion theory of meaning I have developed solves the problems by offering alternative definitions of speaker and expression meaning. The most important additional theo- retical resources needed are convention, occurrent thought as a mental state distinct from belief, and thought structure. Grice’s project is still the most promising approach to explaining what linguistic meaning is. What is meaning? That is the central question of H.P. Grice’s seminal “Meaning”, whose silver anniversary we are celebrating. He sketched out an original way of answering the question that is still the most promising general approach to defining meaning. Grice’s answers to many subsidiary questions proved to be dead-ends, and he never completed a foundational theory of meaning. But Grice’s basic project remains compelling, and there are ways of carrying it to completion. 41 42 Wayne A. Davis I. REFINING THE QUESTION Grice’s first move was to show that the question needs to be refined. For there are many different senses of meaning. He called the senses illus- trated in (1) ‘natural’. (1) a. Tiger Woods means to win. (Intention) b. Dark clouds mean rain. (Indication) c. Those spots mean that he has measles. (Showing) In sentence (1)(a), ‘means’ is a synonym of ‘intends’. (1)(a) tells us that Woods intends to win. He wants and expects to win. In sentence (1)(b), ‘mean’ is roughly synonymous with ‘indicate’. (1)(b) tells us that the pres- ence of dark clouds is evidence that it will rain. Dark clouds gives us a reason to believe that it will rain, and in the absence of counter-evidence we can in- fer that it will with at least some probability. The connection between dark clouds and rain that enables us to make such an inference is a purely natural relationship. The fact that dark clouds mean rain is in no way a consequence of human activity. Grice himself focused on (1)(c), in which ‘mean’ is roughly synonymous with ‘shows’. This too entails that the spots indicate that the patient has measles, but tells us more than that. For (1)(c) entails that the patient has measles. We can infer from the spots that the patient has measles with certainty, not just probability. Showing is conclusive indicating.1 Again, the connection between the spots and the measles that enables us to make such an inference is purely natural. (Grice classified intention as natural ‘for convenience’). There are other senses that Grice called ‘non-natural’, illustrated by (2): (2) a. By ‘Palmer beat Nicklaus’, Tiger means that Palmer defeated Nicklaus. (Speaker Meaning) b. ‘Palmer beat Nicklaus’ means that Palmer defeated Nicklaus. (Expression meaning) While the meaning of ‘means’ in (2) seems related in some way to its mean- ings in (1), we cannot replace ‘means’ with ‘intends’, ‘indicates’, or ‘shows’ in (2) without completely changing the truth conditions of the sentences. Grice observed that in (1)(a) and (b), we cannot infer that anyone meant any- Grice’s Meaning Project 43 thing by those spots or dark clouds. He also observed that whereas we can re- formulate (2) using quotation marks, we cannot do that in (1). Thus (2)(b) is equivalent to ‘Palmer beat Nicklaus’ means “Palmer defeated Nicklaus”, but (1)(c) is not equivalent to Those spots mean “He has measles”. Human activ- ity is clearly entailed by both sentences in (2). Grice went on to say that “the distinction between natural and non- natural meaning is, I think, what people are getting at when they display an interest in a distinction between ‘natural’ and ‘conventional’ signs”[Grice (1957), p. 379]. Hobbes [(1655), §2.3] noticed that while we can say both that dense clouds signify rain, and that stone markers signify the boundaries of fields, one sign is completely natural, the other conventional. Whereas dense clouds would indicate rain even if humans had never existed, a pile of stones indicates the boundary of a field only because humans use stones for the purpose of marking boundaries. Tiger’s saying ‘Palmer beat Nicklaus’ is a conventional rather than natural sign that he is thinking the thought that Palmer defeated Nicklaus. Note, though, that Hobbes is using ‘signify’ as a synonym of ‘indicate’ or ‘show’ in both cases. What Tiger said is a causal consequence of what he thought, so the latter can be inferred from the former. Hobbes’s distinction between natural and conventional signs is a distinction be- tween things with what Grice calls natural meaning.2 Note also that while natu- ral meaning does not entail human action, it does not exclude it either. Grice was concerned to analyze non-natural meaning. He was primarily interested in what it is for words, phrases, and sentences to mean something, and in what it is for a speaker to mean something by uttering linguistic ex- pressions. Grice’s fundamental thesis was that expression meaning can be de- fined in terms of speaker meaning, and speaker meaning in terms of intention; hence non-natural meaning can be defined in terms of natural meaning. Grice’s project was then to produce those definitions. A satisfactory definition must be noncircular. Grice’s analyses will meet this requirement if non- natural meaning can be defined in terms of natural meaning as expected. Grice offered an analysis of intention elsewhere, doing so exclusively in terms of nonlinguistic notions like belief and desire. The elements added by other leading analyses are similarly non-linguistic.3 If successful, Grice’s pro- ject would reduce semantics to psychology. It might be thought that Grice’s project is doomed from the start. For what I call the ‘naive theory’ of speaker meaning is very plausible. It is natu- ral to think that S meant ȝ by e iff (i) S uttered e and (ii) e means ȝ. This na- ive theory maintains that (2)(a) is true because (2)(b) is true. It reduces speaker meaning to expression meaning, the opposite of what Grice’s thesis maintains. The naive theory is plausible to the extent that people do typically mean ȝ by uttering words that mean ȝ. But it takes only a few moments of re- flection to realize that this simple theory is indeed naive. What a speaker means may depart from what the sentence she utters means in many cases, 44 Wayne A. Davis including slips of the tongue, ellipses, figures of speech, and nonce meanings or codes. (2)(a) and (2)(b) are logically independent: neither entails the other. II. SPEAKER MEANING Grice’s basic insight that speaker meaning depends on intention seems obviously right. When Tiger said ‘Palmer beat Nicklaus’, whether he meant that Palmer defeated Nicklaus, or that Palmer struck Nicklaus, or (ironically) that Palmer lost to Nicklaus, or (though a slip of the tongue) that Nicklaus de- feated Palmer, or something else altogether, depends entirely on what Tiger intended. Which intention determines what a speaker means? That is far from obvious. Grice’s ‘first shot’ was to suggest that S meant that p by e iff S in- tended to produce in some audience the belief that p. In the typical case of telling Grice evidently had in mind [see e.g. (1957), p. 382], it is plausible that what Tiger meant is determined by whether he intended to produce the belief that Palmer defeated Nicklaus or the belief that Palmer struck Nicklaus or some other belief. But as a definition of speaker meaning in general, Grice’s first shot was wide of the fairway by a mile. (2)(a) would be true even though Tiger had no intention of producing the corresponding belief in his audience in many cases: he thought his audience already had the belief; he thought his audience would not believe him; he thought his audience would not understand him; he thought he had no audience; and so on. (2)(a) may have been true if Tiger wrote ‘Palmer beat Nicklaus’ in his private diary, confident that no one would ever read what he wrote (including himself). Ti- ger would not thereby be telling or informing anyone that Palmer defeated Nicklaus, and he would not be communicating with anyone.
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