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natural meaning is an analysis of the conditions which make it true that a person means something by an utterance (where 'utterance' covers signs, gestures, marks, or spoken sounds). What is involved, accord- ing to Grice, is a complex intention, directed toward an audience, that the utterance bring about a certain response in the audience by means of the recognition of that intention. A great deal of subtle revision and qualification has ensued, mostly about the nature of the intended response (usually explained in terms of belief) and the need for further audience-directed intentions, but the basic analysis remains. Grice's pro- ject is to move from an analysis of Someonemeant something by uttering X to X meant something to X means (in a language) that p_. The idea, in short, is to ground semantics in psychological states such as intention (and belief).
The program faces considerable difficulties. How can the full complexities of linguistic meaning be explained on so slender a basis? One obvious problem concerns the role of convention. Standardly, so it would seem, the recognition of a speaker's meaning- intention is at least partly based on recognition of the conventional meaning of the sentence uttered by the speaker. But that threatens circularity in the Gricean account. However, David Lewis (1969) has presented an analysis of convention which, at least by not pre- supposing linguistic meaning, offers an important sup- plement to the intentionalist analysis. Lewisexplains convention in terms of a regularity of behavior in a group to which members of the group conform so as to bring about a coordination equilibrium, based on the common knowledge that everyone prefers to con- form on condition that the others do. Much ingenuity has been exercised (Lewis 1969; Bennett 1976; Black- burn 1984) in trying to apply this kind of convention to linguistic meaning, for example by postulating conventional correlations between utterances or utterance-types and specific beliefs and intentions. However, persistent objections center on the difficulty for this view in accounting for the compositionality of semantics and the fact that natural languages can generate an infinity of unuttered sentences. An early exponent of Grice's theory believes (Schiffer 1987) that the whole program is doomed to failure, though that can hardly be claimed as the last word on the matter. For more details, see Grice, H. P.; Convention; Meaning: Philosophical Theories.
Pursuing the enquiry into conditions of com- munication, philosophers of language came to exam- ine those aspects of meaning which go beyond semantic content encoded in sentences. This has issued in two important developments: speech act theory and the theory of implicature, both of which are com- monly located within the pragmatics of language. (For a comprehensive general survey of the scope of prag- matics, from the point of view of linguistics as well as philosophy, see Pragmatics.)
2.3 Speech Acts
Speech act theory originated with J. L. Austin's analy- sis of performative utterances—such as / promise to pay, I pronounce you man and wife—the assessment of which, he proposed, should be determined not by truth-conditions but by felicity-conditions (appro- priateness, sincerity, background context, intention, etc.). Austin (1962) came to see, though, that even statements, the paradigm truth bearers, could be assessed in terms other than just their truth: in par- ticular as actions of a certain kind. He introduced a threefold distinction among speech acts: locutionary acts (acts of saying something, with a sense and ref- erence), illocutionary acts (such as stating, promising, warning, performed in saying something), and per- locutionary acts (such as persuading, convincing, annoying, amusing, performed by saying something). Austin's early death meant that he was not able to refine the theory in detail, though he did offer a rudi- mentary taxonomy of illocutionary acts. The theory was, however, developed by, among others, Searle (1969, 1979), Strawson (1964), who attempted to assimilate speech acts into Grice's analysis of speaker's meaning, and Holdcroft (1978).
The relation between meaning and speech acts (especially illocutionary acts) has never been clear or uncontroversial. At the extreme, some (e.g., Cohen 1964) have dismissed 'illocutionary force' altogether, incorporating the idea of'force' into a wider theory of semantic content. Others, following an initial insight from Frege about assertion, have wanted a clear demarcation between theforce of an utterance and its content or thought expressed. Yet others, like Searle (1969), propose to explain meaning, and ultimately language itself, in terms of speech acts. Searle intro- duces the 'prepositional acts' of referring and predi- cating, thereby extending the theory into the heart of traditionally conceived semantics. He sees as a fun- damental task for the philosopher of language the elucidation of constitutive rules governing the full range of speech acts.
The encyclopedia contains extensive coverage of all aspects of speech act theory (in Section VIII); see Speech Act Theory: Overview; Speech Act Classi-
fication; Speech Act Hierarchy; Speech Acts and Gram- mar; Speech Acts: Literal and Non-Literal; Felicity Conditions; Indirect Speech Acts; Performative Clauses.
2.4 Implicatures
A general problem for any philosophical theory of meaning is how to account for those instances of com- munication where more than, or something different from, the information semantically encoded in a sen- tence is conveyed. Irony, figuration, and hyperbole are familiar examples and meaning shifts associated with intonational contour, stress pattern, and so forth, are well charted. But it was not until Grice's theory of
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