Deutero-Esperanto

I think perhaps Grice was getting a bit tired of attempts by people like Loar, Peacocke, etc., to provide an 'actual language relation' and seeing them fail one after the other.

In "Meaning Revisited", last section ("A mystery package"), Grice introduces

Deutero-Esperanto.

"Unlike Esperanto," which some people speak, "nobody speaks Deutero-Esperanto", except Grice. It's a language he developed to point that when it comes to Deutero-Esperanto, HE is the master. What an expression means in Deutero-Esperanto is what Grice (and his population, or 'ilk') mean by it.

M. K. Davies was perhaps unimpressed. This from his online "Philosophy of language", repr. in the Blackwell guide to philosophy.

Davies, who studied at Oxford, if not under Grice, writes:

"Given the notion of a possible language, the question whether a
semantic theory is correct for the language of a given group of speakers can be
reformulated as the question whether the possible language for which the semantic theory is stipulated to be correct is the actual language of a given group (Lewis, 1975; Peacocke, 1976; Schiffer, 1993)."

Davies -- and Dale relies on Davies's excellent book on meaning, necessity and quantification: -- adds:

"What is sometimes called the actual language relation is thus a relation between languages (in the abstract) and groups of language users."

"Under the reformulation that we are envisaging, conditions of adequacy on semantic theories become constraints on the actual language relation."

"Any philosophical elucidation of the key semantic concept used in semantic theories,
such as meaning or truth, can be transposed into a condition of adequacy on those
theories (or, equivalently, into a constraint on the actual language relation)."

"Thus, suppose for example that an elucidation of the concept of meaning says that any sentence

S has meaning m in the language of a group G if and only if some condition C(S, m, G)
holds.

This can be transposed into a condition of adequacy as follows:

"If a semantic theory for the language of a group G delivers a theorem saying that the meaning of sentence S is m then it should be the case that C(S, m, G)."

"Similarly, it can be transposed into a constraint on the actual language relation:
A possible language in which S has the meaning m is the actual language of a group G only if
C(S, m, G)."

And so on.