Identifying the Strands -- Vebalising them

-- by JLS
---- for the GC

JONES ("Strand 5", THIS BLOG) makes an excellent exegetical point when it comes to Grice's hard task of 'identifying' strands, and verbalising them in his usually circumlocutory and eccentricist ways:

Jones:

"At the very beginning, then, when Grice identifies the
strands but before he comes to discuss them, we have already
two distinctions each articulated in ways which we might
better connect with the terms which I have touched upon
above. The distinctions are here presented as kinds of meaning:
aonventional/non-conventional meaning and
assertive/non-assertive meaning."

Good. Let's check the circumlocutory syntax:

Grice wrote (or rather Harvard University Press, via S. Waters, in 1989, published):

(of course Grice wrote it!)

The fifth strand is the contention
that in considering the notion of
meaning

--- or the locution 'mean', I should say. Kemmerling for one tried to translate 'mean' to 'mein[en]' and failed, but he got his PhD alright in the attempt. You read Kemmerling and you get a headache as to why Grice thought that he was discussing meaning when all he did was discuss 'mean'. All the cases that Grice sees as NOT falling within meaning, Kemmerling notes, are best understood as not falling under the scope of 'mean' -- etc.

Grice goes on:

we should pay attention to two
related distinctions. First, a distinction
between those elements of meaning
which are present by virtue of convention

Jones is right in having a caveat here. Grice HATED convention, and as he goes on p.298 of WoW:

"I do NOT think that meaning
is ESSENTIALLY connected with
convention".

So, as Alfred Newman would say, why bloomingly bother?