Grandy/Warner (Stanford) on Grice on mood or mode

Grandy/Warner write:

"In “Utterer's Meaning, Sentence Meaning, and Word Meaning,” Grice offers a revised version of his 1957 account of utterers meaning. Grice remarks that in."

GRICE WRITES:

"the earlier (1957) account I took the view that the M-intended effect is, in the case of

INDICATIVE-TYPE utterances,

that the hearer should believe something, and, in the case of

IMPERATIVE-TYPE utterances,

that the hearer should do something."

"I wish for present purposes to make two changes here."

"I wish to represent the M-intended effect of

IMPERATIVE-TYPE utterances

as being that the hearer should intend to do something (with, of course, the ulterior intention on the part of the utter that the hearer go on to do the act in question)."

"I wish to regard the M-intended effect

COMMON TO INDICATIVE-Type utterances

as being, not that the hearer should believe something (though there will frequently be an ulterior intention to that effect), but the hearer should think that the utterer believes something. (1968, 230)."

Grandy/Warner continue:

"By way of illustration, suppose U, who wants the audience A to close the door, utters

Close the door!

"U M-intends that A should intend to close the door, and note: we specify what U means using the subjunctive mood."

"U means that A should close the door."


----

"For the indicative case, suppose U utters

The door is closed.

M-intending that A believe U believes the door is closed. We specify what U means using the indicative mood — thus:

U means that the door is closed.

"Grice captures the role of moods in specifying meaning by introducing a special notation."

"Grice represents the indicative case this way:

U means that ⊢(the door is closed).

The imperative:

U means that !(the door is closed).

"Here ‘the door is closed’ represents a moodless, underlying syntactical element Grice calls a sentence radical."

"It designates the moodless proposition that the door is closed."

"Grice calls ‘⊢’ and ‘!’ mood operators, and he explains them contextually as follows."

"U means that ⊢(p) by uttering x iff, for some A, U utters x M-intending A to think U thinks that p;

U means that !(p) by uttering x if and only, for some A, if U utters x M-intending (a) A to think U intends (to bring it about) that p; and (b) A to intend that p — having, as part of his reason U's intention (a).

"More than two operators are required to handle the full range of things utterers mean, but a complete list is not necessary to formulate the revised account of meaning."

"The account can be stated as follows."

"Given a FUNCTION

from

PSYCHOLOGICAL STATES onto mood operators, if

ψ

is a psychological state and

*_ψ

the associated mood operator,

U means that *_ψ(p) by uttering x iff, for some A, U utters x M-intending

that A should think U to ψ that p; and (in some cases only), depending on *,
that A should via fulfillment of (i), himself ψ that p.

"We have departed slightly from Grice's notation."

"Grice uses ‘*’ for the function that maps psychological states into mood operators."

"Grice uses his revised treatment of utterer's meaning to refine the very rough and preliminary account of sentence meaning (structured utterance type meaning, in his terminology) he gave in “Meaning.”"

"His account thereof uses the notion of having a procedure in one's repertoire."

"He says, "This idea seems to me to be intuitively fairly intelligible and to have application outside the realm of linguistic, or otherwise communicative, performances, though it could hardly be denied that it requires further explication. A faintly eccentric lecturer might have in his repertoire the following procedure: if he sees an attractive girl in his audience to pause for half a minute and then take a sedative. His having in his repertoire this procedure would not be incompatible with his also having two further procedures: (a) if he sees an attractive girl, to put on a pair of dark spectacles (instead of pausing to take a sedative); (b) to pause to take a sedative when he sees in his audience not an attractive girl, but a particularly distinguished colleague (1969, 233).
Turning to sentence meaning, the idea is that users of a natural language like English have standard procedures for using sentences, and that — very roughly — a sentence means p among a group of utterers when and only when that group has the procedure of using it to M-intend that p."

Grandy/Warner:

"This is a promising start. It is undeniable that English speakers have the procedure of using

The door is closed.

to mean that the door is closed. That is (one of the many) things we do with that sentence. So, assuming we accept the explication of utterer's meaning in terms of M-intentions, it undeniable that English speakers have the procedure of using that sentence to M-intend that the door is closed. This yields the explanatory payoff described earlier. We can see communication as a rational activity in which an utterer intends to produce certain results and audiences reason their way to those results via their recognition of the utterer's intention to produce that very result."

"This preliminary account must be complicated, however, as it is unacceptable on three grounds. First, there are infinitely many sentences. How does an utterer associate a procedure with each sentence of his language? If they must be acquired one by one, it will take an infinite amount of time. Second, sentences are structured utterance-types, where meaning of the whole is consequent (in ways determined by syntactic structure) on the meaning of the parts. The account does not capture this aspect of sentence meaning at all. Third, the account fails to represent the complexity introduced into the account of utterer's meaning."

"There is no mention of moods."

"These considerations lead Grice to posit that the procedures associated with sentences are resultant procedures arising recursively out of basic procedures associated with words. Grice explains that "The notion of a ‘resultant procedure’: as a first approximation, one might say that a procedure for an utterance-type X will be a resultant procedure if it is determined by (its existence is inferable from) a knowledge of procedures (a) for particular utterance-types which are elements in X, and (b) for any sequence of utterance-types which exemplifies a particular ordering of syntactic categories (a particular syntactic form) (1968, 235).""

"How can we give an account of such procedures that is free of undefined semantic notions?"

"We can do so via the concept of reference, where reference, like meaning, is analyzed in terms of intentions. The basic procedure for ‘tiger,’ for example, would roughly be to utter ‘tiger’ to refer to members of the kind tiger.

"Grice introduces a canonical form for specifying resultant procedures."

"He does so by generalizing the special notation he has already used in specifying meaning."

"Recall that he represented the indicative case by:

U means that ⊢(the door is closed);

the imperative:

U means that !(the door is closed), where

The door is closed.

represents a moodless, underlying syntactical element Grice calls a sentence radical.

"The sentence radical designates the moodless proposition that the door is closed."

"Grice generalizes this approach by using

‘*+R’

to represent any sentence whose underlying syntactic form divides into the mood operator * and the sentence radical R."

"Thus:

where * is mood operator, and R a sentence radical, let

∏(*+R)

be the set of all propositions associated with any sentence with the structure

(*+R)

Where

p ε ∏(*+R)

and

ψ

the psychological state associated with *, a

resultant procedure for

*+R

takes one of two forms.

U has the resultant procedure of:

uttering *+R if, for some A, U wants A to ψ that p; or
uttering *+R if, for some A, U wants A to think U to ψ that p.

Call these type 1 and type 2 resultant procedures.

As a definition of structured utterance-type meaning we can say that, where

p ε ∏(*+R), *+R means p in a group G if and only if members of G have, with respect to *+R, a type 1 or type 2 resultant procedure, the type being determined by the type of the mood operator *."

"Qualifications will, of course, be necessary to handle ‘audienceless’ cases."

"So far, perhaps, so good. There are pleasant quibbles over details, but in broad outline, the account is a very plausible description of meaning. In fact, at least three authors, Bennett, Loar and Schiffer, have developed their own more detailed accounts along Gricean lines."

"However, when we turn from description to explanation, plausibility appears to decline."

"The explanatory idea is to see communication as a rational activity where audiences reason their way to beliefs or intentions via their recognition of the utterer's intention to produce such results."

"What about the problem that utterers and audiences rarely if ever engage in such reasoning? Grice's work on reasoning contains the answer."