What is Grice’s account of speaking meaning?

Can it be defended against the

various counterexamples that have been proposed against it?

The philosophy of language like its empirical cousin the psychology of language is a somewhat
overlooked field, but I doubt for very much longer due to its massive potential to revel critically
important insights into, human evolution, and the mind’s structural and functional aspects. In
this essay I will first briefly discuss Grice’s account of speaking meaning, what he hoped to
achieve by it and its success at describing meaning. Then I shall look at counterexamples to
Grice’s theory and Grice’s reply to those examples and attempt to fix problems raised by them.
Finally I shall look at the success of his ultimate goal of reducing sentence meaning to speaker
meaning.

The pursuit of linguistic meaning falls into two main types of theory, semantic theories and
foundational theories. These theories attempt to provide an explanation of meaning and to
form a system of analysis for meaning. The two theories further breakdown into two varieties,
propositional semantic theories, and non-propositional semantic theories. Mentalist and non-
mentalist theories are the varieties of foundational theory (SEP 2010). Grice developed a
mentalist approach in response to the question of sentence meaning, such as, where does
sentence meaning come from? How do sentences come to have the meaning they do? And so
on. Grice’s (1989) account of speaking meaning puts cognitive processes central to a
description and understanding of sentence meaning. Rather than producing sentence and word
meaning inherently, it is the speaker’s intentions to convey certain meaning that produces a
given meaning. The theory presents speaker meaning as proceeding sentence meaning, which
is particularly important for testing the theory. If it can be shown that it is only necessary for
the analysis to have speaker meaning, without the need to look at what particular expressions
mean, conventionally, then the theory can be considered convincing at explaining the questions
of meaning in terms of speaker meaning.

Lycan called Grice’s project “no less than the reduction of linguistic meaning to psychology.”
(Lycan 2000:102). However, as Lycan notes in his book philosophy of language, Grice’s project
starts out with “a slightly different notion of meaning that is not entirely that of sentence
meaning.” It is not completely clear if Grice’s intention was for a complete analysis of sentence
meaning or simply one aspect of it. His main concern for his first formulation in the 1959 article
“meaning”(reprinted in the 1989 collection see references) are cases of conventional, or in his
terms, non-natural meaning; these in particular are cases were other accounts meaning fail to
explain correctly how meaning is being communicated. An example that I think nicely illustrates
what Grice was first digging at is a sarcastic comment such as “he’s a really good cook” meaning
he is a terrible cook. It is the fact that words can come to have the exact opposition meaning of
their usual meaning that the theory is first designed to understand. In the work titled
“meaning,” he developed the term non-natural to be applied to any words or sentences were
meaning is not fixed. Grice’s example is “those three rings on the bell (of the bus) mean that
the bus is full.” (meaning could be other than it is.) This is in contrast to natural meaning where
meaning is definitely given by the sentence. Grice’s example “Those spots mean (meant)
measles.”(meaning could not be other than it is.) (Grice 1989:213-223)

Grice’s solution, to deriving meaning, is to have cognitive psychological processes assigned to

speaker meaning rather than as a competing theory (causal theory) would suggest as
behaviourally conditioned responses. He wants to show that meaning is derived from unique
intentions to communicate meaning and for an audience to actively recognise this intention.
The example he suggests is a case of someone who could blush at will, who then consented to
blush whenever he hears Grice grunt. (Grice 1989:221) So whenever he recognised Grice’s
grunt, and the intention meant by it, he blushed. The point of this example for Grice is to show
“for x to have meaningNN the intended effect must be something which in some sense is within
the control of the audience.” (Grice1989:221) Therefore meaning is to be analysed by what
intentions a speakers has to convey to an audience, meaning intentions or M-intends, “utterer
U means that p by uttering x if and only if U M-intends that p by uttering x.”( SEP 2005) This
may also include minimal and non-linguistic responses such as, tuts, hums or gestures. Basically
Grice arrives at three clauses that he thinks will allow the analysis of speaking meaning to be
completed in terms of intentions. The first is to consider the speaker intention to induce in the
audience the belief (p). The second, that the audience recognised the intention of the speaker
and the third that the audience form the belief (p) from the recognition of the intention. This is
Grice’s basic formulation of meaning which is to be analysed by what intentions a speaker has
to convey to an audience. (Grice 1989)

Grice's speaking meaning has been reformulated as objections and counter-examples have
shown that his formulation lets in cases it showed keep out or keeps out case that it should
include. There have been a lot of counter-examples that have sought to show Grice’s account to
be inadequate. I will look at a few examples where he himself noticed that it was too vague or
too strict and discuss his solutions to the particular problems. J. O . Urmson (cited in Grice
1989:93) offers a situation of a prisoner of war, who is thought to have important information.
His captors resort to torture in order to obtain this information. So by Grice’s analysans it
should be correct to say, they put thumbscrews on him with the intention of producing a
response. Specifically the torturers intended something by applying thumb screws to the
prisoner (that he should tell them what they wished to know) they intended him to recognises
this and that the recognition should be at least in part for his response.
Grice thinks that what has gone wrong with the analysis of meaning here is that there was no
intention for recognition meant. It is intended as an inducement to respond, “they only meant
him to tell.”(Grice1989:93) To correct this Grice’s suggests an amendment, so the redefinition
reads as:

“U meant something by uttering x” is true iff:

1) U intended by uttering x, to induce a certain response in A
2) U intended A to recognise, at least in part from the utterance of x, that U intended to
produce that response.
3) U intended the fulfilment of the intention in (2) to be at least in part A’s reason for fulfilling
the intention in (1)” (Grice1989:94)

I am not sure that this reformulation completely avoids the problems highlighted by the
prisoner example, although it does if the reason for the response; because of recognition of a
demand for one, has nothing to do with the prisoner giving a response. Nevertheless the
example passes the first line, there was an intention to induce a response and as far as I can
make out passes the second line, the prisoner is intended to recognise that the torturer
intended the prisoner to make that response. Although three does seem to prevent the
example because the prisoner’s recognition does not seem to be likely to be what the torturer
intended to be the prisoner reason for his response. I think this example does perhaps highlight
some difficulties with Grice’s program, particularly in attempting to distinguish whether
inducement to respond has anything to do with the audience recognition and reason for the
induced response.

It may be the case that Grice’s analysans is in fact too strict. Lycan offers an example of
“soliloquising” (2000:104) about personal and private matters in his bat cave. He has no
intended audience but would be shocked and horrified if it turned out that someone had been
listening in on his words. Grice’s solution is to suppose a virtual audience, which a speaker
would have intended to communicate meaning to. But this really seems to violate his
requirement for audiences to be participatory, as mentioned earlier, in the communication of
meaning. One may be able to imagine an audience without difficulity, but their active
engagement in cognitively processing the information is missing and according to Grice’s theory
this is essential. A possible defence maybe that the speaker is also the intended audience, but
this seems to still have problems with cognitive engagement of the audience, one must not only
intend to cause the audience to form a belief, but also intend that they do so on the basis of
their recognition of the speaker's intention. The purpose cannot be to communicate intention
and have that recognised by the audience since the audience and the speaker are the same
person and already knows the meaning of what they intend. Grice presents an extended
reformulation with sub-clauses appropriate for three types of audience less cases in studies in
the way of words (Grice 1989:114) that he considers to avoid the problems that the theory
gains in audience less cases.

However with an audience it is possible to intend by an action that someone form a belief and
yet not mean that belief by the action. An example from the Stanford Encyclopaedia of
Philosophy, (SEP 2010) by saying “You're standing on my foot.” There is an intention that the
words are recognised and believed, but the meaning is not the statement, “You're standing on
my foot,” but to draw one’s attention to it and hopefully that they should get off. John Searle
suggests, in the chapter on meaning, that the “intended effect of meaning is understanding.”
(Searle 1969:47) He thinks that Grice’s account is defining meaning as intending to perform a
perlocutionary act, but sometimes it can be an illocutionary speech act that is performed. To
illustrate his point he presents the captured American solider example who utters the only
phrase of German he knows to fool his captors into believe he is a German solider. Searle wants
his example to stress the point, “Meaning is more than a matter of intention, it is also at least
sometimes a matter of convention.” (Searle 1969:45) However Grice does not think that it
causes his formulation any significant problems. The captors are intended to recognise and to
think they are intended to recognise the soldiers meaning that he is German and for this he
postulates a “mode of correlation” (Grice 1989:103) between the speech act and intended
belief.

Nevertheless Searle’s argument on the type of speech acts still seems to point up an important
aspect that words have a conventional meaning in themselves, referring us back to the question
of reducing sentence meaning to speaker meaning. One is constrained to some extent by
normal usage of words that at least limits how they can be used to mean something; which
seems to be a problem for this part of Grice’s project, because he is attempting to reduce one
to the other. In an effort to explain unusual, infrequent, or even possibly the formal
development of language, Grice is generally recognised to have a strong case, but as Simon
Blackburn makes clear Grice’s formula is no-longer applicable “once we have habits of taking
utterances one way or another.”(Blackburn 2004:113) One suggestion is that once established
the conventional conditions supplant Grice’s system. Blackburn notes the second interpretation
of linguistic nominalism is that a way of inducing belief becomes fixed in a community and a
matter of habit, so now it would not be necessary to consider complex intentions needed for
the communication of meaning. “The total psychology of this situation is supposed to be fixed
when there is a convention or regular habit.” (Blackburn 2004:114) However that the habit
supplants the need for beliefs and intention seems to be the more likely.

This is not satisfactory to Grice, who still wants to say that it is a “task of specifying the
conditions in which what U conventionally meant by an utterance is also part of what U said.”
(Grice 1989:121) Lycan’s interpretation of Grice’s explanation of sentence meaning begins with
individual meaning and is broken into unstructured-utterances (non-verbal communication) the
procedures of which are widespread and reliant on the community of users for their
maintenance. In order to go to structured-utterances (verbal communication) Grice introduces
the idea of “resultant procedure.”(cited in Lycan 2000:111) A sentence’s meaning is not exactly
a function of speaker meaning, but “a function of the individuals utterance meanings of its
ultimate parts.” (Lycan 2000:112) Lycan thinks that if one takes resultant procedures to be
compositionality achieved by syntax by defining a concept of speaker extension and compile it
with Grice’s unstructured utterances into a composite then the theory would achieve more.

In summary this has only been a brief examination of the major issues in Grice’s theory of
speaking meaning. Grice presents a theory which puts psychological states at the heart of
understanding meaning. Grice’s program is ultimately to reduce meaning to speakers
intentions. There are a variety of objections to this project that Grice has attempted to resolve.
It is generally seen by philosophers of language to have made a very important contribution to
understanding in the subject, although many argue over its scope and applicability in given
situations.
 References.

Blackburn, S. (2004) “Conventions, Intentions, Thoughts,” in: Spreading the Word. Oxford
University Press. 110-140

Grice, P. (1989) “Utterer’s meaning and intentions”, in: Studies In The Way Of Words, Harvard
University Press, 86-116

Grice, P. (1989) “Utterer’s meaning, Sentence-meaning and Word-meaning”, in: Studies In The
Way Of Words, Harvard University Press, 117-137

Grice, P. (1989) “Meaning”, in: Studies In The Way Of Words, Harvard University Press, 213-223

Lycan, W, G. (2000) “Psychological theories: Grice’s program.” , in: P, K, Moser (ed) Philosophy
of Language. Routledge. 102-112

Lycan, W, G. (2000) “Truth-Condition theories: Davidson’s program.” , in: P, K, Moser (ed)

Philosophy of Language. Routledge. 145-146

Searle, J, R. (1969) “Expression, Meaning and Speech acts”, in: Speech Acts. Cambridge
University Press. 22-53

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. (2005). Retrieved on 5th December 2012 from the World
Wide Web: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/grice/#ConImp

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. (2010). Retrieved on 1st December 2012 from the World
Wide Web: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/meaning/#FouTheMea
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. (2010). Retrieved on 3rd December 2012 from the World
Wide Web: http://plato.s