1. My account of saying is not immune as it stands to the Strawson/Schiffer-style
counterexamples to Grice's analysis of speaker-meaning. But I believe that this can be
remedied by the sorts of suggestions Schiffer offers to help Grice's account of speaker-meaning. See Strawson (1964) and Schiffer (1972). I do not expect the analysis of
saying that I am presenting here is immune to other sorts of problems as well. I am
putting forward this notion of saying as "more suitable" than the Gricean notion of
speaker-meaning for the purposes of the theory of expression-meaning. I don't expect that
this is the final word here.
2. Grice (1967), p. 36.v
3. Still, the point of my glossing saying is not centrally to provide an analysis of the
ordinary notion expressed by the English "saying", but to come up with a notion that can
be used in a theory of expression meaning.a
4. Grice (1967), p. 25.v
5. I have in mind, of course, Loar in Loar (1976) and Loar (1981), and Lewis in Lewis
(1991) where he essentially repeats Loar's ideas. See above chapter 5.
6. Loar (1976), p. 158. See also Loar (1981), p. 256.
7. Chomsky (1957), p. 23.x
8. Chomsky (1986), pp. 36-37.|
9. Ziff (1974), p. 530. Ziff also cites Zellig Harris as a source of the argument that
natural languages are in fact infinitely large.
10. Note that when I speak of conventional meaning here, I am not presupposing anything
about the use of the notion of convention in a theory of conventional meaning. I take it
that it is understood well enough what sort of cases count as cases of conventional
meaning. As I discussed in chapter 5, it seems doubtful that the notion of convention
should be used in glossing a notion of conventional meaning. But it is still customary to
call the cases that I want to talk about here cases of conventional meaning and so I do
so. Perhaps other terminology would be clearer here, but I prefer to stick with the
customary locution right now.
11. See Whitney (1904) and Saussure (1916). Davidson makes the following remark
about arbitrariness: "What is obvious enough to be a platitude is that the use of a
particular sound to refer to, or mean, what it does is arbitrary. But while what is
conventional is in some sense arbitrary, what is arbitrary is not necessarily conventional"
(Davidson (1981), p. 265).;