Grice on Propositions

By Roger Bishop Jones for The Grice Club

I'm interested to know more about what Grice has said on "propositions" (in connection with "the eternal city").

I think of propositions as the meanings of sentences, and Grice certainly was interested in meanings, and in something he called "central meaning", by way of distinguishing what is "said" from what is "implicated".

He seems to have been reluctant to call these central meanings propositions, and I wonder why that was, and whether there are other parts of Grice's writings which cast light on his attitude towards use of the word "proposition", or indeed on his views about propositions.

In relation to "central meanings" if I may take that for a moment to be a Griceian surrogate for propositions, is it safe to say that was seeking to elucidate a single distinction, rather than to explore what might possible be multiple related distinctions?

There do seem to be multiple ways in which one might approach the analysis of what sentences mean.  The one I have seen in Grice might be said to approach "central meaning" by way of implicature.  If we can identify the implicatures and put them aside (for this purpose), then what we are left with is "central meaning".

Two other approaches are:

1. by consideration of when reported speech is accurate or misleading.
(for reported speech does not replicate how something is said or what it implicates, but must convey what is said and hence depends upon the claim as reported have the same content, conveying the same proposition, as the original)

2. by considering the content of explicit discussions about meanings.

We have there three (and there will probably be more) approaches to pinning down the notion of proposition which are not too far removed from Grice's method of philosophising, (though not so close to how Carnap might think about this), and its not obvious that these three approaches will yield the same answers.  A pluralistic Carnap* might embrace this situation readily, and might start by saying that propositions as a part of the semantics of a language, are a technical device the details of which might vary from one language to another.

Is there anything in Grice to suggest that either his notion of "central meaning" or his notion of proposition (if he had one), might not be absolute, and might be best analysed as more than once related concept?

RBJ