1. I am pretending all Finns speak Finnish, but there are Finns who speak only Swedish
and perhaps there are other non-Finnish-speaking Finns as well.
2. When I speak of propositional-attitude notions I will mean notions like
belief, desire, intention, etc. and not speech-act notions
like speaker meaning, telling, saying, etc. even
though these latter can be called propositional-attitude notions as well. I
will sometimes refer to the latter notions as propositional-speech-act notions.
3. See Grice (1957), Grice (1968), Grice (1969), and Grice (1982).
4. See Schiffer (1972), Schiffer (1982), and Schiffer (1988).
5. See Lewis (1969) and Lewis (1975).
6. See Strawson (1969), Fodor (1975), Fodor (1989), Loar (1976), Loar (1981), Bennett
(1973), and Bennett (1976). See also Landesman (1972) and Avramides (1989), although
Avramides argues that the Gricean program has been largely misunderstood in important
respects by many philosophers, including at least some of the above, who have taken
themselves to be working within it.
7. I am simplifying somewhat: Grice conceived of the notion of meaning as applying to
more than just what are ordinarily understood to be "linguistic expressions". Things will
get appropriately complicated in due course, but I will stick with the slightly loose talk
here.
8. Of course, I will always mean public-language semantic notions in this and the
following sections. Private-language semantic notions, i.e., semantic notions pertaining
to a language of thought will not be discussed until the last section of chapter 2.
9. Stevenson (1944).
10. Grice (1957), p. 217. Page number references for Grice (1957) are to Grice (1989).
11. Grice (1957), p. 217. The "x"'s in the predicates of this quotation are intended to
range over expressions; the "A"'s, over persons. "MeansNN" and its cognates
are intended by Grice to express the relation of what Grice calls "nonnatural meaning".
This special notion and what Grice intended to convey with it are unimportant to the present
discussion except insofar as "meansNN" and its cognates can be read simply as "means"
or a grammatically appropriate cognate.
12. Grice (1957), p. 220.
13. In Grice (1982): "It seems plausible to suppose that to say that a sentence (word,
expression) means something (to say that 'John is a bachelor' means that John is an
unmarried male, or whatever it is) is to be somehow understood in terms of what
particular users of that sentence (word, expression) mean on particular occasions." (See
Grice (1989), p. 298.)"
14. See Avramides (1989), pp. 33-38.
15. Avramides (1989), p. 21.
16. Ibid.
17. Avramides (1989), p. 25.
18. Avramides (1989), p. 33.
19. Avramides (1989), p. 174, n. 112. I will quote the passage from Grice below.
20. Ibid.
21. Ibid.
22. Grice (1957), p. 219. The details of Grice's analysis of speaker-meaning are not the
concern of this section, but of the next, so I don't complete the quote here.
23. Grice (1957), p. 220. Again, all that is important right now are the connectives, so
I leave out the details of the various proposals here.
24. Grice and Strawson (1956), p. 202.
25. Since I talk in the present essay about the analysis of notions, I will retain that
talk in the current section in spite of the fact that Grice and Strawson talk in terms of the
analysis of expressions. I don't see that this should engender serious confusion for the
careful reader.
26. Ibid.
27. Grice and Strawson (1956), p. 203.
28. Grice (1986), p. 67.
29. Grice (1987), p. 351.
30. Grice (1957), p. 216.
31. See the table of contents of Grice (1989), p. vii, where "Meaning" is dated "1948,
1957". Stephen Schiffer, Richard Grandy, and Richard Warner have all told me in
personal correspondence that Grice originally wrote the paper for a seminar that he and
Strawson were to give in 1948, but was reluctant to publish it. Strawson had the article
typed out and submitted it for publication without Grice's knowledge. Strawson only told
Grice after the article was accepted for publication. Stephen Schiffer has told me that
Grice himself told him this story and Richard Warner has written to me that he also heard
this story from Grice. The only person I have been able to find who has noted the 1948
date is Fogelin in his review of Studies in the Way of Words: "'Meaning'...was first
published in 1957, and apparently given as a lecture almost ten years earlier in 1948"
(Fogelin (1991)). But that "Meaning" was given as a lecture does not seem to be noted
anywhere in Studies in the Way of Words and Fogelin doesn't mention a source for the
information he provides.
32. I am not going to discuss at all the way Grice deals with imperatives or other moods.
33. Again, I am ignoring non-indicative speech acts for simplicity here.
34. Of course, there are all sorts of background beliefs that I need to have here, and in
unusual cases these may have to be beliefs that you are not trying to deceive me with a
trick photograph of some sort. But I ignore such unusual cases.
35. See Strawson (1964), Grice (1969), and Schiffer (1972) for discussion of the most
important counterexamples to Grice's original analysis and suggestions on what to do
about them.
36. See Schiffer (1982), pp. 120ff., and Yu (1979), p. 281. See Vlach (1981) for someone
who proceeds on the assumption that there is a pretheoretically clear notion of speaker-meaning. See also Shwayder (1972).S
37. Grice (1957), p. 218.
38. Grice (1969), p. 87.
39. Grice (1968), p. 118.
40. This is not how Lewis presents his views, but this is how I take his discussion in
Lewis (1969), pp. 152-159. See Schiffer (1993) for an argument that one thing that may
be wrong with Lewis-style theories of meaning is that they do not use any
propositional-speech-act notions. I will discuss this criticism in chapter 5 below.
41. Or if I am wrong in my reading of Lewis here.
42. Grice (1957), p. 213.
43. Grice (1957), p. 214.
44. Grice (1957), pp. 213-214.
45. Grice (1957), p. 215.
46. Grice (1957), p. 215.
47. For some of the history of the sort of speculation about the origins of language that
I will discuss here, see Kretzmann (1967) and Aarsleff (1976). Aarsleff's discussion ends
at the beginning of the 19th century with the rise of the idea that language study should
be more rigidly scientific and less speculative than it had been in the past. There is no
discussion of the resurrection of speculation about language origins in "respectable"
circles that was due chiefly to the advent of evolution theory. See also Ullman (1975)
and Wright (1976).
48. Russell seems to have suggested that the organism-world relations that could
constitute propositional attitudes could be understood in terms of a notion of natural
meaning. In one place he says of words and ideas that they "both have meaning" but that
"in the case of words, the relation to what is meant is in the nature of a social convention,
and is learned by hearing speech, whereas in the case of ideas the relation is 'natural'; i.e.
it does not depend upon the behavior of other people, but upon intrinsic similarity and
(one might suppose) upon physiological processes existing in all human beings, and to
a lesser extent in the higher animals" (Russell (1948), p. 96). Landesman quotes this
passage too and notes the dubiousness of the specific take on natural meaning as some
sort of intrinsic similarity (Landesman (1972), p. 3). But if you read for "ideas",
"language of thought expressions" and for "intrinsic similarity", "some sort of causal
relation" you just about have an idea that survives today in, hopefully, a somewhat more
acceptable form in the work of Fodor and a number of others. See, for example, Fodor
(1987) and Fodor (1990). Also, Russell's view evolved over time from 1919, when he
essentially first began working on the theory of meaning (see Russell (1919), Russell
(1921), Lecture X, Russell (1926), and my discussion of the history of the theory of
meaning below, chapter 2). In one place, for example, he interestingly claims with
respect to words and "images": "...the relationship which constitutes meaning is much the
same in both cases. A word, like an image, has the same associations as its meaning has"
(Russell (1921), p. 210). Thus, the causal relations a word or "image" has is what matters
for the determination of its meaning: if the relevant associations caused by a word or
"image" are like the associations caused by some thing, then the word or "image" means
that thing. This is not an unproblematic view, but it is somewhat more attractive than the
resemblance-style view mentioned above. I can't investigate the matter any further here
however.
49. That this is the sort of thing that Grice had in mind is born out by his discussion in
"Meaning Revisited" (Grice (1982)). At one point he characterizes what he wants to do
as follows: "So what I want to do now is look to see if one would represent the cases
of nonnatural meaning as being descendants from, in a sense of 'descendant' which would
suggest that they were derivative from and analogous to, cases of natural meaning. I shall
also look a little at what kind of principles or assumptions one would have to make if one
were trying to set up this position that natural meaning is in some specifiable way the
ancestor of nonnatural meaning" (Grice (1982), p. 292).
50. Catherine Joos first helped me understand cases like the following.
51. I believe that Davidson is suggesting such a criticism of the Gricean picture in
Davidson (1973), Davidson (1974), and Davidson (1975).
52. Strawson mentions the criticism I am discussing here and offers a sketch of the sort
of story I have been indicating as a response to it: "...it is clear that we can, and do,
communicate very complicated things by the use of language; and if we are to think of
language as, fundamentally, a system of rules for facilitating the achievement of our
communication-intentions, and if the analysis is not to be circular, must we not credit
ourselves with extremely complicated communication-intentions (or at least desires)
independently of having at our disposal the linguistic means of fulfilling those desires?
And is that not absurd? I think this is absurd. But the programme of analysis
[essentially, the Gricean program] does not require it. All that the analysis requires is that
we can explain the notion of conventions of communication at a rather basic level. Given
that we can do this, then there is more than one way in which we can start pulling
ourselves up by our own linguistic boot-straps" (Strawson (1969), p. 174). Strawson then
goes on to talk about how language could evolve from expression of very basic thoughts
to more complex thoughts and in turn, their expression.
53. "More-or-less" because of details like subsentential-expression-meaning and
non-literal meaning. Such details will be discussed briefly in chapter 3.
54. If you are worried about the variable "y" and the quantifier that binds it,
wait till section 3.3 of chapter 3 where I talk about propositions.
55. Loar sets in contrast Grice's way of theorizing about meaning and that due to Ramsey
in Ramsey (1927) in which, in Loar's words, "[t]he idea is that you give the meaning of
a sentence of z's by saying what z would be believing if z
accepted that sentence" (Loar (1981), p. 210). I have no complaints about Loar's making
the contrast, but from the perspective I am suggesting now, we could talk about Ramsey
as suggesting a moderate Gricean theory.