5. Grice on Speaker’s Meaning and Sentence-Meaning

[Note: The discussion is based mainly on A. Muller (2007), pp. 249-54.]

Evidently our linguistic production is typically goal-directed, planned behavior. I ask “Can you pass the salt?” because I am trying to get the salt passed. I yell “Watch out, there’s a bear approaching you!” because I am trying to alert you to the presence of the bear. Indeed, Paul Grice (1957) has seen the goal-directed nature of our utterances as the key to understanding meaning. This section seeks to spell out briefly the essentials of Grice’s main ideas about meaning.

In his short but crucially important article “Meaning,” Grice (1989) begins by distinguishing between two senses in which the expressions ‘means’, ‘means something’, ‘means that’, may be taken. The first of these is the natural sense, exemplified by:

(3) Those spots mean measles.
(4) Those spots didn’t mean anything to me, but to the doctor they meant measles.
(5) The recent budget means that we shall have a hard year.

This type of meaning is sometimes referred to as indicator-meaning, since the idea is that spots indicate the presence of measles and so on. Grice points out that one feature of natural meaning is that if x means that p (where x is an object or objects, p a proposition) in the sense of natural meaning, it follows that p. Where natural meaning is concerned, it makes no sense to say, for example, “Those spots meant measles, but he hadn’t got measles” or “The recent budget means that we shall have a hard year, but we shan’t have.”

This sense of meaning contrasts with nonnatural meaning, exemplified by (6) and (7) below:

(6) Those three rings of the bell (of the bus) mean that the bus is full.
(7) That remark, ‘Smith couldn’t get on without his trouble and strife’, meant that Smith found his wife indispensable.

Unlike the natural sense of meaning, there is no entailment from x means that p to p: it makes perfect sense to say that “Those three rings of the bell mean that the bus is full, but the conductor is mistaken and it isn’t actually full” or “That remark... meant that Smith found his wife indispensable, but in fact he deserted her seven years ago.”

Grice is concerned purely with the nonnatural sense of meaning, and he uses the abbreviation “means” to distinguish this sense. Grice proceeds in two steps. First, he aims to explain speaker’s-meaning in terms of the intentions of the utterer. Second, he aims to explain sentencemeaning in terms of speaher’s-meaning, so that ultimately we have an account of sentence-meaning in terms of utterers’ intentions. So, in the first stage he is concerned with locutions such as in (8).

(8) Speaker A meant something by sentence x (on a particular occasion of use).

Given an account of this sense of “means” in terms of A’s intentions, Grice goes on to attempt to explain sentence-meaning, by explaining “means” as it appears in locutions such as in (9).

(9) Sentence x means (timeless) something (that so-end-so).

Let’s work towards Grice’s account of (8) and speaker’s-meaning. Concentrate on the case where the sentence x is a declarative, or ‘informative’, sentence, such as “Jones is an efficient administrator’ (as opposed to ‘non-informative’ sentences or imperatives, such as “Close the window”). We are looking for a set of necessary and sufficient conditions for the truth of (10) below:

(10) Miller meant that Jones is an efficient administrator by his utterance of “Jones is an efficient administrator.”

Suppose that Miller directs this utterance to his colleague Divers, so that Divers constitutes the ‘audience’ for this remark. A first stab at a sufficient condition for (10) might be:

(i) Miller intends his utterance of the sentence to induce the belief that Jones is an efficient administrator in Divers.

But as Grice points out, the intention to induce a belief in the audience is not on its own sufficient for a case of meaning:

I might leave B’s handkerchief near the scene of a murder in order to induce the detective to believe that B was the murderer; but we should not want to say that the handkerchief (or my leaving it there) meant anything or that I had meant by leaving it that B was the murderer. (Grice 1989: 217)

The problem here, as Miller’s humorousness, is that “I do not intend the detective to recognize the intention behind my leaving the handkerchief near the scene of the murder (this would be self-defeating in this case).” So we can add, to the condition (i) that “Miller intends his utterance of the sentence to induce the belief that Jones is an efficient administrator in Divers,” the condition, thus:

(ii) Miller also intends Divers to recognise the intention behind his utterance.

Do we now have a sufficient condition for the truth of (10)? Grice thinks not, and that we need to add a further condition. He brings this out by considering the following two cases:

(11) I show Mr. X a photograph of Mr. Y displaying undue familiarity to Mrs. X.
(12) I draw a picture of Mr. Y behaving in this manner and show it to Mr. X.

Grice suggests that whereas we would want to say that by drawing the picture in the case of (12) I mean that Mr. Y had been unduly familiar with Mrs. X, we would not want to say this in the case of my producing the photograph. Why not? Because my intention that Mr. X form the belief that Mr. Y had been unduly familiar with Mrs. X, and my intention that Mr. X recognise this intention of mine, do not play any part in the explanation of why Mr. X forms this belief: even if I had not had these intentions -if Mr. X had stumbled on the photograph by accident, for example -Mr. X would still have formed this belief. This is not so in the example of the drawing. So, in addition to my intention that Mr. X form this belief, and my intention that Mr. X recognise this intention of mine, I must also intend that Mr. X’s recognition of this intention of mine plays a part in the explanation of why Mr. X forms the belief.

Thus, the following three conditions are jointly sufficient (and individually necessary) for the truth of (10):

(i) Miller intends his utterance of “Jones is an efficient administrator” to induce the belief that Jones is an efficient administrator in Divers.

(ii) Miller intends Divers to recognise the intention behind his utterance of “Jones is an efficient administrator.”

(iii) Divers’ recognition of Miller’s intention (in (ii)) plays a part in the explanation of why Divers forms the belief that Jones is an efficient administrator.

This account can be generalised to deal with ‘non-informative’ cases. Suppose we are at a department meeting, and we are trying to decide who has sufficient administrative acumen to be a good examinations officer. Miller wants his colleagues to choose Jones. Then the meaning of his utterance of “Jones is an efficient administrator” is Jones’s being picked as examinations officer if: Miller intends to induce my colleagues to pick Jones as examinations officer by means of his utterance, and Miller intends to induce them to pick Jones via their recognition of this intention.

Grice sums up his account of speaker’s-meaning as follows:

“A meant something by x” 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”; and we may add that to ask what A meant is to ask for a specification of the intended effect. (Grice 1989:220)

Having accounted for speaker’s-meaning, Grice goes on to consider sentence-meaning. We are looking for a necessary and sufficient condition for the truth of

(13) The sentence “Jones is an efficient administrator” means (timeless) that Jones is an efficient administrator.

Grice suggests that (13) is true if and only if tokens of “Jones is an efficient administrator” are regularly or conventionally associated with the speaker’s meaning that Jones is an efficient administrator. The conventional way for a speaker A to mean that Jones is an efficient administrator is to utter a token of the type “Jones is an efficient administrator.” Of course, there are other uses of this token: a speaker can use it to mean that Jones is picked as examinations officer, or to mean that Jones is an uninteresting philosopher. But these uses are non-conventional, the exception rather than the rule, as it were.

Thus, the notion of sentence-meaning is explained in terms of the notion of speaker’s-meaning and the notion of convention, where the notion of speaker’s-meaning is explained in terms of utterers’ intentions. This is why Grice’s account is sometimes known as a ‘convention plus intention’ account of sentence-meaning. Note that Grice’s analysis of sentence -or linguistic meaning is intended to be a reductive analysis: the notion of speaker’s-meaning is defined in terms of utterers’ intentions, in a way that requires no use of the notion of sentence-meaning; and the notion of sentence-meaning is defined in terms of speaker’s-meaning and convention, in a way which requires no use of the notion of sentence-meaning. The meaning of language is non-circularly analysed in terms of mental content.

So far, we have considered the large units of language and meaning, specially the linguistic theories and philosophical theories of meaning which help us to grasp the expressions; that is, their linguistic competence, and the system of meanings. Philosophers’ opinion shows that knowing the meaning of a sentence is not the same as knowing an object. They, thus, have adopted numerous approaches that we have seen above. For cognitive semanticists, they treat meaning construction as a process that is fundamentally conceptual in nature. From this perspective, sentences work as ‘partial instructions’ for the construction of complex but temporary conceptual domains, assembled as a result of ongoing discourse. These domains, which we called mental spaces, are link to one another in various ways, allowing speakers to ‘link back’ to mental spaces constructed earlier in the ongoing linguistic exchange. From this perspective, meaning is not a property of individual sentences, nor simply a matter of their interpretation relative to the external world. Instead, meaning arises from a dynamic process of meaning construction, which we call conceptualization. According to Mental Spaces Theory,^[1] language guides meaning construction directly in context. This approach holds that sentences cannot be analyscd in isolation from ongoing discourse. In other words, semantics (traditionally, the context-independent meaning of a sentence) cannot be meaningfully separated from pragmatics (traditionally, the context-dependent meaning of sentences). This is because meaning construction is guided by context and is therefore subject to situation-specific information. Moreover, because meaning construction is viewed as a fundamentally conceptual process, this approach also takes account of general cognitive processes and principles that contribute to meaning construction. In particular, meaning construction relies on some of the mechanisms of conceptual projection that we have already explored, such as metaphor and metonymy. Based on the theoretical background dealt with and discussed in the previous chapter, and particularly in the previous sections of the present one, the next sections will focus on presenting, discussing, and critically analysing in detail the Five Nikāyas, specially the Majjhima Nikaya which chronicles best the Buddhist discourses and teaching in its larger perspective.

Footnotes and references:

[1]:

Developed by Gilles Fauconnier ([1985] 1994), 1997), for more details see (i) Gilles Fauconnier. [1985] 1994. Mental Space. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; (ii) Gilles Fauconnier. 1997. Mappings in Thought and Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.