LECTURE 2, H06: H.P. GRICE, ‘MEANING’
Carsten Hansen
I. INTRODUCTORY REMARKS AND BACKGROUND MATERIAL
The first paper on the syllabus is Grice’s 1957 paper on meaning. So, what
recommends the topic, and the paper, as a starting point for a course devoted to
contemporary philosophy of language?
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Among issues connected with language, the topic of meaning is of central
importance for philosophers. Grice’s short paper articulates an important
approach to this topic, and raises issues that need to be dealt with
irrespective of whether one agrees with the theory put forward.
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Grice’s work provides us with many theoretically important contrasts with
the other main figures whose work we shall be studying.
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Finally, the paper provides a vivid, and concrete, illustration of what is
involved in tackling a philosophical problem. When you read the paper,
you see a philosopher at work.
Why the topic of meaning?
The concept of meaning plays a pivotal role in the philosophy of language. Indeed,
philosophers have arguably spent more time thinking about meaning than any other
topic connected with language. The reason for this has to do with why language
matters to philosophy in the first place. Last time, we looked at two reasons for this
both of which also serve to explain why the topic of meaning has loomed so large in
the minds of philosophers:
A. A large part of philosophy, traditionally conceived, consists of what is sometimes
called ‘philosophical anthropology’ – that is to say, the project of trying to understand
ourselves and our place in nature. And issues about the relation(s) between
language and thought, on the one hand, and the relation(s) between language and
reality on the other are intimately bound up with this overarching problematic. So
consider, once again, questions like:
(1) What is the relation between language-mastery (the ability to speak) and
the ability to think?
(2) What is linguistic communication, and how is it possible?
(3) How do linguistic expressions come to stand for, or refer to, things in the
world?
Ad (1) Thought does appear to be possible without language. (Think of animals and
infants.) Nevertheless, it seems highly plausible that there are a range of thoughts
that one cannot grasp, or entertain, except insofar as one masters a language in
which those thoughts can be expressed. In these cases, language serves as a
vehicle of thought – which is one of its principal functions. Furthermore, it would
seem that the ability of a language to serve as a vehicle of thought essentially
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depends on the fact that its expressions have meaning. (Which thoughts a
language can express depends ultimately on the meanings possessed by its
expressions.)
Ad (2) Language is traditionally supposed to have another principal function –
namely that of an instrument of communication. (Indeed, many philosophers have
supposed that this is the principal function of language.) Here again, it would seem
that when language serves as an instrument of communication, its doing so
depends essentially on the fact that its expressions are meaningful.
Ad (3) Finally, it would appear that when linguistic expressions can stand for, or refer
to things in the world it is, once again, in virtue of the fact that they are meaningful.
On some views, Russell’s for example, the meaning of a word simply is the object to
which it refers. (At least, that is what he sometimes claims.) On other views, Frege’s
for example, meaning (‘sense’) plays something like a mediating role between
expressions and the things they are about.
In sum, most philosophers take the concept of meaning to be a fundamental and
indispensable notion, because it plays a pivotal role in explaining how language can
fulfil its key functions. In turn, that presumably explains the amount of attention that
has been given to it.
B. I gave you Russell as an example of a philosopher who cared about language for
an additional reason: he saw philosophy of language as the key to solving
philosophical issues more generally. Russell claimed that modern logic and
philosophy of language, for the first time, made it possible to see what kinds of
(philosophical) problems are capable of solution, and what kinds are not, and,
furthermore, provides a method for obtaining results that must command the assent of
anyone competent to form an opinion about the matter.
One of the principal obstacles to progress in philosophy, on Russell’s view, is the fact
that philosophers have had to rely on natural languages to express their thoughts and
arguments. Like Frege, Russell had a sceptical attitude towards natural language, and,
in particular concerning its ability to serve as a vehicle of thought: As a result of the
messiness of the language in which we think – or so Russell maintained - we often
end up with a highly imperfect understanding of our own thoughts and assertions.
What logic and philosophy of language provides us with, according to Russell, are
formal languages ideally suited for the expression of (scientific) thought, as well as an
arguably correct general conception of what meaning is. On this view, then, the
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thoughts that we express with sentences in ordinary language, can be made clear to us
by considering how they should be analysed and subsequently expressed in the
language of predicate logic.
Once again, understanding the nature of meaning as well as the correct analysis of
particular meanings (concepts) comes to be seen as one of the central concerns of
philosophy.
Some key features of Grice’s over-all approach:
Grice explicitly sees himself as an advocate of ‘ordinary language philosophy’ – a
school of philosophy, based at Oxford, which was at its heyday in the 1950’s and
60’s. Other prominent members were: John Austin, Gilbert Ryle, and Peter
Strawson. This was not a highly unified school of philosophy, and it’s members had
quite diverse views. So it’s best just to indicate what Grice wanted to emphasize by
claiming membership of this group:
(a) From the name, we can gather that language is important for Grice qua ordinary,
or natural language. Thus, he stands in marked contrast with Frege and Russell
who thought that that natural languages are so flawed, considered as instruments
for the expression of thought, that they should really be replaced by formal
languages, at least in scientific contexts. Grice is also in disagreement with other,
more recent philosophers - like Davidson, for example - who have advocated a
somewhat different idea, namely, that formal languages can be used as highly
fruitful tools or models for understanding the structure of natural language. (No talk
of replacement, just tools for elucidation and explanation.)
(b) In addition, Grice sees ‘ordinary language’ as a source or ‘repository’ of a kind
knowledge and insight that is of paramount importance for philosophy. The idea is
not that philosophers need to pay special attention to the unreflective, common
sense views of individuals. It is, rather, that our ordinary linguistic practice embodies
– implicitly – a set of basic concepts in terms of which we think about the world and
ourselves. This is where insight is to be gained, and what philosophers need to
attend to. Here, Grice is in opposition to what is known as scientism – the view that
science is the only real source of knowledge about the world and ourselves. (A view
that can reasonably be attributed to Quine, for example.)
(c) One of the basic concepts embodied in our ordinary linguistic practice is the
notion of meaning itself. This, together with the points mentioned above, explains
why Grice takes the job of a theory of meaning to be that of arriving at an explicit
understanding of our pre-theoretical conception of meaning. A conception that is
implicit in our various uses of the expression ‘mean’ and other cognate expressions.
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(cf. his early reference to ‘our uses of “mean”).
(d) Of the two principal functions of language that I have mentioned, Grice – in
contrast with Frege and Russell – primarily focuses on language as an instrument of
communication: In his paper on meaning, you will see that the idea of language as an
instrument of communication plays an important role in that it provides a crucial
constraint on what counts as an adequate analysis of meaning: no account of meaning
can be correct, which does not do justice to the role of language in linguistic
communication. In the paper ‘Logic and Conversation’, on the other hand, the nature
of linguistic communication in general, as well as one of its most important sub-species
(communication by ‘implicature’) becomes the focus of attention.
II. H.P. Grice, ‘Meaning’
1. THE DISTINCTION
BETWEEN
NATURAL
AND NON-NATURAL
MEANING.
Grice’s overarching goal – that of arriving at an explicit understanding of our pre-
theoretical conception of meaning – can readily be seen as involving several stages:
first, it would be reasonable to begin by getting an overview of the most important kinds
of uses of ’mean’. Next, it would be reasonable to consider how these various uses or
senses of ‘mean’ are related, whether they stand in need of further elucidation, and, if
so, how to go about doing so. And this, in fact, is pretty much how Grice proceeds.
On the basis of a consideration of various ways in which the expression ‘mean’ is
used, he begins by drawing a distinction between what he calls natural and non-natural
meaning. This distinction is offered (albeit implicitly) as the most fundamental
distinction between different kinds of meaning (or senses of ‘mean’)
He doesn’t give us an explicit definition of this distinction. Instead, he gives a number
of examples of sentences in which the expression ‘means’ is used in one or the other
of these two senses. Furthermore, he points to five differences between these two
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ways of using the expression: Differences that can be employed to test or determine
whether a particular use of ’means’ belongs to one or the other category.
The five differences are not independent. In later work, he takes this into account, and
makes do with just two criteria or tests for determining whether a use of ‘means’
belongs to one or the other category. These tests correspond to observations number
(1) and (4) at the beginning of the paper.
The ‘factivity’-test1:
For it to be true that something means that p, does it have to be the case that
p?
The ‘quotation’-test:
Would it be appropriate to enclose the specification of what is meant in quotation
marks?
If a particular occurrence of the verb ‘mean’ is factive, and quotation marks
would be inappropriate, it is a case of natural meaning; otherwise the meaning
involved is non-natural.
Having drawn the distinction between natural and non-natural meaning, Grice goes on
to ask what else can be said of these two fundamental kinds or senses of ’meaning’.
But it is clear that he is primarily interested in the question whether is is possible to
give an account, or as it turns out, a conceptual analysis of non-natural meaning.2
1
Sammenlign her forskellen mellem det at vide noget og det at formode noget
(knowledge and belief). Jeg kan ikke vide noget som er falsk, men jeg kan godt tro noget
som ikke er tilfældet. Hvis jeg ved at p, så følger det at p, p følger ikke af at jeg tror p.
2
I forbindelse med sprog og kommunikation er det først og fremmest ikke-naturlig
mening som er relevant. Af de to typer mening/to meningsbegreber, er det samtidigt ikkenaturlig mening som trænger mest til afklaring.
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2. HOW CAN
WE MAKE PROGRESS IN UNDERSTANDING NON-NATURAL MEANING?
To do so, it turns out that we need to make further distinctions:
(A) Note that we attribute non-natural meaning to utterances as well as the people
whose utterances they are:
x meansnn something/that so-and-so
A meansnn something/that so-and-so by x
(where x is an utterance)
(where A is a person)
(Grice operates with a wide understanding of the notion of an utterance. It is not
restricted to the utterance of a linguistic expression. More about this later.)
(B) Furthermore, we need to distinguish between ‘standard’ (or ‘timeless’) meaning,
and things meant on a particular occasion:
x meansnn something (on a particular occasion)
x meansnn (timeless) something
A meansnn something by x (on a particular occasion)
A meansnn (timeless) something by x
(C) W HAT IS MEANT BY ‘TIMELESS’ MEANING?
‘Timeless’ meaning can be explained by appealing to the type/token distinction. The
type/token distinction, in turn, is best explained with the help of an example.
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elephant, giraffe, gorilla, giraffe
How many words are listed?
The question is ambiguous. There are three word-types, and four word-tokens.
Word-types, and types generally, are abstract entities, without spatio-temporal
location. (Hence Grice’s expression ‘timeless’ meaning.)
Standard or timeless meaning can then be explained as the kind of meaning that, in
the first instance, belongs to word-, sentence-types. If a token has timeless
meaning, it is in virtue of the fact that it instantiates or exemplifies a given type with a
timeless meaning.
Similarly, we can characterize timeless meaning, as ascribed to persons:
‘A meantNN (timeless) something by x’:
A associates a timeless/standard meaningNN with expressions of type x, and
in virtue of that associates a timeless/standard meaningNN to a given instance
of the utterance type x.
(D) THIS
GIVES US THE FOLLOWING CLASSIFICATION:
Nonnatural meaning
x meansnn something
on a particular
timeless
A meansnn something by x
on a particular
timeless
8
occasion
occasion
In order to understand and explain non-natural meaning, we need to taken this into
account, and to understand how the different phenomena are related to each other.
So the question becomes: where do we begin, and how shall we procede?
In the context of his criticism of Stevenson’s ‘causal’ account of non-natural meaning,
it becomes clear that Grice has a view of what is the most fundamental concept of
non-natural meaning, namely the notion of what users of a sign mean by it on a
particular occasion.
A meansnn something/that so-and-so by x (on a particular occasion).
Grice doesn’t give us much in the way of an explicit argument for this view, but it
seems to be the result of a line of reasoning along the following lines:
(1) What utterances mean is a matter of what people mean by uttering them.
(2) A person kan mean something by an utterance on a particular occassion,
even though he or she doesn’t associate any standard, or timeless meaning,
with that utterance.
(3) Timeless meaning on the other hand, is not similarly independent of the fact
that people mean something on particular occassions. Rather, timeless meaning
is dependent on people repeatedly meaning the same by an utterance on
particular occasions.3
3
En Griceansk redegørelse for tidløs/standard mening kan gives på basis af analysen af
tidsbestemt mening ved at gøre brug af begrebet om en konvention. Denne redegørelse
forekommer dog ikke i vores artikel ‘Meaning’.
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Note: (2) is connected with, and confirmed by, the fact that non-natural meaning is
not exhaustively a linguistic phenomenon. (It is in order to take this into account that
Grice operates with a very wide notion of an ‘utterance’: one can make an utterance,
on this conception, by waving a flag, nodding one’s head, or whistling, as well as by
uttering a sentence of a language.
Grice’s analysis of meaning something on a particular occasion:
Grice suggests that the notion of someone’s meaning something on a particular
occasion is the fundamental notion, and, furthermore, that if we can elucidate the
meaning of sentences involving this kind of meaning, we can ’reasonably be expected’
to go on to understand the phenomenon of timeless meaning.
Grice begins by asking how sentences of the following kind should be analysed (looking
intially at ’descriptive or informative’ utterances):
x meansnn something (on a particular occasion)
A meansnn something by x (on a particular occasion)
This central part of Grice’s paper has the following general character. He begins by
offering a suggestion about how to analyse the sentences in question. Next, he tests –
and rejects – the analysis by formulating counterexamples. In light of these counterexamples, he presents a further suggestion which gets rejected in the same way. This
happens three times. Why this complicated procedure?
(1) We are provided with a stepwise introduction and precisification of the
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central ideas underlying the analysis on offer.
(2) Grice is attempting, as clearly as possible, to satisfy the general conditions
on an adequate analysis. He is attempting to analyse the notion of non-natural
meaning by articulating a set of conditions that are individually necessary and
jointly sufficient for the application of the concept of non-natural meaning. A
further condition that he explicitly seeks to satisfy is that none of the conditions
must be circular: they musn’t employ the concept being analysed. (Cf. his
criticism of Stevenson.)
(3) This can seem quite complicated, as it indeed is. But that is not an
objection to the strategy, unless you think that there is an easier way of
accounting for the phenomenon in question. (In other words, Grice would claim
that the analysis is complicated because it is tracking the structure of a complex
concept.)
Back to the question how sentences of the following form should be analysed:
x meansnn something (on a particular occasion)
A meansnn something by x (on a particular occasion)
I. GRICE’S FIRST PROPOSAL:
(Ia) ‘x meantNN something’ would be true if x was intended by its utterer to induce a
belief in some “audience”.....[furthermore] to say what the belief was would be to say
what x meantNN.
(Ib) ‘A meantNN something by uttering x’ would be true [if and only if] A uttered x
intending to induce a belief in some audience...(And to say what the belief was
would be to say what A meantNN.)
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The analysis captures a necessary condition for non-natural meaning: the notion of
non-natural meaning has to be understood by reference to the notion of a speaker’s
(or utterers) intentions.
Grice then shows that it is nevertheless not a sufficient condition for non-natural
meaning by means of a counter-example:
A leaves B’s handkerchief by the scene of the crime in order to induce the
detective to believe that B was the murderer.
The described situation satisfies the condition expressed by Grice’s initial proposal.
Nevertheless, we would not say that the handkerchief meant something (NN), or that
A meant something (NN) by so leaving the handkerchief.
Grice then continues:
‘Clearly we must at least add that, for x to have meantNN anything, not merely
must it have been “uttered” with the intention of inducing a certain belief but
also the utterer must have intended an “audience” to recognize the intention
behind the utterance.’
Why? What makes this a more or less obvious requirement for Grice? This is
because he take the notion of (non-natural) meaning to be inextricably linked to that
of communication.
The phenomenon of non-natural meaning, Grice claims, is to be understood by
uncovering what is involved in communicating something to someone. (Grice’s idea,
then, is that we have an analysis of what it is to mean something by an utterance,
when we can specify the conditions under which it is correct to say that someone is
‘telling’ someone something.)
II. GRICE’S SECOND SUGGESTION:
A meantNN something by uttering x if and only if A uttered x intending
(a) that A’s utterance of x produce a certain response (belief) in an audience,
H, and (b) that H recognize A’s intention
Think of this addition as Grice’s first attempt at capturing the connection between the
notions of meaning and communication.
That it doesn’t succeed, Grice makes clear with the help of another counterexample:
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Herod presents Salome with the head of St. John the Baptist on a charger.
Here we seem to have a case that satisfies both condtions in the analysis above:
“Herod intended to make Salome believe that John the Baptist was dead, and
no doubt also intended Salome to recognize that he intended her to believe
that John the Baptist was dead.”
Nevertheless, we don’t have a case of non-natural meaning. Why not?
Grice: “the recognition is intended by A to play its part in inducing the belief,
and if it does not do so something will have gone wrong with the fulfilment of
A’s intentions”.
Salome’s reaction – that she comes to believe that John the Baptist is dead, does
not depend on the fact that she recognizes Herod’s intention. Seeing John’s
severed head would have induced the relevant belief, whether she had recognized
Herod’s intentions or not.
Here’s one way of summarizing what has gone on so far:
The first analysis captures what is involved in ‘getting someone to think’
something.
This second analysis captures what is involved in ‘deliberately and openly
letting someone know’ something.
Telling someone something is a case of ‘deliberately and openly’ letting someone
know something. However, there are many ways in which one can ‘deliberately and
openly’ let someone know something.
What the last counter-example shows, is that Grice has not yet explained when a
case of ‘deliberately and openly’ letting someone know something counts as a case
of ‘telling’ someone something.
This is what Grice aims to capture with his third analysis.
III. GRICE’ S THIRD SUGGESTION:
‘A meantNN 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”.
More precisely:
A meantNN something by uttering x if and only if A uttered x intending
13
(a) that A’s utterance of x produce a certain response (e.g., belief) in an
audience H
(b) that H recognize A’s intention (a), and
(c) that H’s recognition of A’s intention (a) shall function as at least part of H’s
reason for responding (e.g., acquiring the belief in question).
A thumbnail sketch of Grice’s over-all view about meaning:
Remember that the above analysis is only an analysis of what it is for a person to
mean something by an utterance on a particular occasion. How, then, does
‘linguistic meaning’ (timeless meaning, as possessed by the expressions of a
language) fit into the picture, according to Grice?
Grice claims that (1) linguistic meaning is to be understood in terms of (2) what a
person means by an utterance. (He analyzes linguistic meaning in terms of a
special sort of (communicative) intention.)
This latter sort of meaning (2) is to be understood in terms of the person’s intending
the utterance to produce some effect in an audience by means of the recognition of
this intention.
The linguistic meaning of an utterance is – very roughly – the content of the
(communicative) intention