Grice: the priority of the obliqua

From Dale's PhD dissertation, online, "The theory of meaning", ch. 4, section II:

"[N]o one knows what the logical form is of sentences _like_ [emphasis mine. Speranza]

"'Snow is white' means in English that snow is white"."

Dale notes:

"Without knowing the logical form of such a sentence, it cannot be known how to derive the sentence via the laws of logic from some set of axioms."

--- For the record, note that for Grice, utterer's meaning specifications seem to be only in 'oratio obliqua'. I refer to WoW:V:

"(4) "U meant by uttering x that ..." (Specification of utterer's occasion-meaning)."

--- and cfr. ch. ii of Dale's thesis for a scarily similar expression to H. Paul Grice, 'occasion meaning' in the work of H. Paul: 'occasional' "bedeutung" -- Paul was German).

Grice's pre-gloss:

"The varieties of meaning-specification
so far considered all make use of
quotation marks (or, perhaps better, italics". [Italics mine. Speranza -- as a tribute to Grice].

"The fourth and last type to be considered
involves, instead, the use of indirect
speech. If it were true
to say of U that HE meant by S (i) (and [ii]),
it would also be true to say of him that when
he uttered S (by uttering S) HE MEANT THAT
if he would then be dead he would now know
what was going on in the world, and that,
when he uttererd S HE MEANT THAT (or PART OF
WHAT HE MEANT WAS THAT) one advantage of being
dead woud be that he would be protected from
the horrors of the world. Even if, however,
when he uttererd S, he meant, by the words "I shall
then be helping the grass to grow," "I shall then
be dead," it would NOT be true to say that he meant
by these words THAT he would be dead. To have meant
THAT he would then be dead, U would have had to
commit himself to its being the case that he would
then be dead; and this, when uttering S, he has not
done."

---- A slightly similar case is an ironic remark. Grice's "A gave B quite a beating" (at chess) (WoW: 119ff) -- with Grice analysing the attending distinctions:

""When U uttered the sentence

Palmer gave Nicklaus quite a beating.

U meant that Palmer vanquished Nicklaus with some ease".

"U might," Grice notes, "have been speaking IRONICALLY [irony -- conversational imlpicature], in
which case he would likely have meant THAT
NICKLAUS vanquished PALMER with some ease."

---

More later, I hope.