Page 539 - Encyclopedia of Philosophy of Language

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1
Herbert Paul Grice (1913-1988) was a central figure in post-war Oxford philosophy, working alongside J. L. Austin and P. F. Strawson. In 1967 he moved from Oxford to the University of California, Berkeley, where he remained until his death in 1988. Despite a relatively small published output (his published work is collected in a single volume of essays, Grice 1989), his influence on the development of analytic phil- osophy of language has been incalculable. This influ- ence resides in two distinct, though ultimately related, contributions: an analysis of 'nonnatural meaning' and a theory of 'conversational implicature.'
The analysis of nonnatural meaning first appeared in a famous paper of 1957 (Grice 1957) where Grice tentatively outlined an account of what became known as 'speaker's meaning.' First, he distinguished 'natural' from 'nonnatural' meaning, the former exemplified by 'Those spots mean measles,' the latter by 'Those three rings on the bell mean that the bus is full'; it was the latter kind he sought to analyze. His ambition was then to explain all cases of nonnatural meaning—including ('timeless') word and sentence meaning—on the basis of an analysis of what an utterer means on an occasion (an 'utterance' need not be linguistic but could encompass gestures, signals, movements, sounds, etc.). The hallmark of the analy- sis is a distinctive—now called 'Gricean'—reflexive intention. Thus the proposal in its original, most strik- ing and simple, formulation, was this:
"A meantNN [i.e. nonnaturally] something by x [i.e. some utterance on an occasion]" is (roughly) equivalent to "A intended the utterance of x to produce some effect in an audience by means of the recognition of this intention"
(Grice 1989: 220)
On that base the derivative notions of 'x meant something' and 'x meansNN (timeless) that so-and-so' could be defined. The ramifications of the program were far-reaching: meaning was to be explained in terms of human interaction (and communication) but not on a purely causal foundation; semantics was to be reduced ultimately to psychology; linguistic meaning
was to be seen as only a more complex development of a wider species of rational behavior.
However, although the initial insight (the structure of 'Gricean intentions') was broadly welcomed by philosophers of language, a satisfactory working out of the details has proved elusive, both in the analysis of speaker's meaning and its relation to semantic meaning. Several deep-rooted problems had to be addressed, for example, how any but the simplest intentions could be recognized by a hearer without presupposing linguistic conventions (thereby threat- ening the account with circularity); David Lewis's work on conventions (Lewis 1969) went some way to alleviate this difficulty. There was also a problem in how to characterize the requisite 'effect' or 'response' involved in meaning. A series of putative counter- examples to the sufficiency of the 1957 analysis (Straw- son 1964, Searle 1965, Schiffer 1972) led to increas- ingly recondite qualifications, culminating (in Grice's work) in a version which is worth quoting in full not only to illustrate the immense sophistication of Grice's thinking but also the distance traveled from the orig- inal simple intuition.
"{/meant by uttering x that *^/?" is true iff
I. U uttered x intending x to be such that anyone who has 4>would think that
(1) xhas/
(2)/is correlatedinwaycwithi/'-ingthatp
(3) (3</>'): U intends x to be such that anyone who has 4>' would think, via thinking (1) and (2), that U\l/'s that p
(4) in view of (3), Lty's thatp; and
II. (operativeonlyforcertainsubstituendsfor"*/')
U uttered x intending that, should there actually be anyone who has </>, he would via thinking (4), himself \l/ that p;
and
III. It is not the case that, for some inference-element E,
U intends x to be such that anyone who has 4>will both
(!') rely on E in coming to \l/+ that p
Grice, H. P. P. V. Lamarque
Grice, H. P.
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