for the GC
As W. Janssen notes in his study on "Grice without an addressee" and related topics,
Grice "spent a lifetime trying to answer [the problem of the addressee] and reading Grice for the first time made me think he could be on the right track."
Although Grice makes a huge effort in explaining utterer’s-meaning, his answers and
solutions are sometimes far from straight-forward and several different interpretations exist on a lot of his proposals.
Part of this, Janssen thinks is probably due to his style of philosophical ‘uttering’, on which we can find the following anecdote in Grice’s article Meaning Revisited:
"My sometimes mischievous friend Richard Grandy once said, in connection with some other
occasion on which I was talking, that to represent my remarks, it would be necessary to
introduce a new form of speech act, or a new operator, which was to be called the operator of
quessertion. It is to be read as “It is perhaps possible that someone might assert that …”2
In Paul Grice; philosopher and linguist Siobham Chapman makes the following similar remarks about
the style of Grice’s writings:
"Grice’s work was often characterised by the speculative and open-ended approaches he took to
his chosen topics. At times the result can be frustratingly tentative discussion of crucial issues
that display a knowing disregard for details or for definitions of key terms. Ideas and theories
are offered as sketches of how an appropriate account might succeed, or how a philosopher - by
implication either Grice or some unnamed successor – might eventually formulate an answer.
[…] There is something of an air of ‘work in progress’ about even the published version of
‘Logic and Conversation’ that indicates problems to be solved rather than simply ideas to be
applied.3
Janssen confesses that "Reading Grice was quite a struggle and on multiple occasions I seemed to have lost track of Grice’s
aims."
"In Paul Grice and the philosophy of language we can find Stephen Neale, who might fairly be
called a Grice-expert, writing that “[…] a substantial amount of detective work is still needed if one is to
1 Dummett (1978) p.96
2 Grice (1976) p.297
3 Chapman (2005) p.215
present Grice’s work on meaning and language in anything like its best light” and “[…] establishing
what Grice is up to can sometimes be hard work and misunderstandings can easily arise.”4
"As a Griceneophyte," Janssen says, "I can only agree in full with Professor Neale’s remarks on Grice’s work and I would like to
apologize in advance for any misunderstandings forwarded on my behalf.
Janseen then focusses on the role of the addressee or recipient in Grice’s accounts on meaning and implicatures
Janseen's view is that most of the so-called Neo-Griceianism is an attempt to misundestand Grice, as he "will also try to show some misunderstandings by ‘the audience’, by which I mean: his interpreters."
4 Neale (1992) p. 511
We often want to communicate our thoughts (beliefs/intentions) to others.
In doing so utterers use
sentences containing words to make available to our hearer what it is that we want to communicate.5
Communication isn’t always successful, but we would want to say that in normal circumstances
something was meant by an utterer; not meaning anything in communication seems to be a rather useless
enterprise.
Grice is world-famous for his short essays, "Meaning" (1948) and "Logic and Conversation" (1967, lecture II), in which he offers
possible solutions for multiple difficulties and problems within the Philosophy of Language.
Grice offers
an account of ‘meaning’, argued for the existence of rationality in conversation and heavily influenced
the debate on semantics and pragmatics with his notion of ‘implicatures’.
Grice wasn’t keen on
publishing, always pushing himself to the limit in to what he expected from his articles.6
Even though he
only published a relatively small number of papers -- ALL OF WHICH were the result of LECTURES he was engaged in -- Grice’s influence on the philosophy of language is
not easily overestimated.
Influenced by (and part of) the ‘Play Group’, a group of ordinary language philosophers in
Oxford at that time, Grice took seriously the criticism on formal theories of language.
In his eyes natural
language is not just ‘badly used’ formal language; it is used in this way for other reasons.
But, in contrast
with several of his colleagues (e.g. Austin), Grice, besides being convinced by some of the critique by
ordinary language philosophy, also highly appreciated the advantages of the formal languages.7
Grice can
be seen as an intermediate who wants to reconcile the virtues of both, while dismissing their vices.8
Grice’s first highly important article Meaning9, is famous for drawing a distinction between
‘Natural meaning’ and ‘Non-natural meaning’, separating meaning due to the things themselves
(entailed) and meaning due to human intentions (non-entailed). Natural meaning comes with certain
physical events
Smoke means fire.
, while non-natural meaning is of a totally different type. After
analyzing multiple sentences in English, Grice attributes Non-natural meaning to the intentions had by
persons, without which the same kind of meaning cannot be found (‘That bell means come home’).
With
Grice, utterer’s-meaning, the intentions somebody wants to convey by uttering something, is the primary
type of meaning and all other types of meaning like utterance- and sentence-meaning, are eventually
dependent on this primary notion of utterer’s-meaning. This makes Grice one of the founding fathers of
‘intention-based semantics’.10
His second highly influential article is Logic and Conversation11.
In this lecture, part of a seven-item set, Grice puts
forward a way to deal with the comments made by P.F. Strawson in Introduction to Logical Theory12.
Here, Strawson draws attention to the differences between the formal logical devices
monadic truth-functor:
¬
polyadic truth-functors:
Λ
V
→
and
their counterparts in natural language (not, and, or, if…then). In formal logic, for example, two
5 I will follow Grice in using the word ‘utterer’ for the person intending to communicate his thoughts. Normally this will be an
individual who speaks. However, since communication isn’t always verbal, ‘utterer’ also stands for individuals intending to
communicate through non-verbal behavior with gestures or a combination of both.
6 See e.g. Chapman (2005, chapter 1) or Neale (1992) p.556
7 See e.g. Neale (1992) p. 512 or Chapman (2005) p.61
8 See e.g. Avramides (1997) p.62
9 Grice (1957)
10 Other terms are sometimes used for the difference between natural and non-natrual meaning. E.g. Martinich uses the terms “noncognitive
meaning” and “communicative meaning” respectively. See Martinich (1996) p.22-23.
11 Grice (1975a)
12 Strawson (1952)
propositions can be joint by the connective V in two ways (one or the other proposition first), without this
making a difference to the truth value of the total proposition. In natural language, Strawson claims, this
is different. Saying ‘Peter took of his shoes and went to bed’ would describe a very different situation
being true from ‘Peter went to bed and took of his shoes’. In his article, Grice tries to answer Strawson’s
remarks by asserting that there is no real difference between the formal devices and natural language
connectives at the layer of what is said; what we have strictly said is the same in using a natural language
of logical operator, but what is meant may vary. Within natural language we only communicate
something more (pragmatics) in addition to what the connective establishes as truth value (semantics).
This can be understood once we apply Grice’s ideas about ‘implicatures’, which I will explain in more
detail further on. In short this idea amounts to the following: implicatures are what a hearer has to infer
the utterer to be intending to communicate. For Grice, utterer’s-meaning is primary: (in short) the
intentions an utterer wants to convey is what he meant. Utterance-meaning is whatever an utterance
means in the context of utterance and is somehow dependent on utterer’s- and sentence-meaning.
Sentence-meaning is timeless and its meaning is, in some sense, the same at any time any place. A rough
sketch by Michael Hancher will show the difference between Grice’s ideas and others with different ideas
on semantics:
The conventional theory of verbal meaning discourages any inquiry into what a particular
speaker might mean by a word in a particular utterance. To understand the meaning of the word
as uttered it is supposed to be enough to know what the word "means" tout court. But Grice
holds that what-the-word-means derives from what various speakers have meant by uttering it;
speaker-meaning is prior to word-meaning. Furthermore, "what a particular speaker or writer
means on a particular occasion . . . may well diverge from the standard meaning of the sign.”13
Intuitively, Grice’s general picture is not that hard to understand.
If I want to convey an intention to my
collocutor, I can use different utterances to do this. Simple intuitive examples would be the following:
1:
A:
Is there another pint of beer?
B:
I’m going to the supermarket in five minutes.
14
2:
A:
Are you going to Paul's party?
B:
I have to work.
15
"In the first example it is intuitively clear that A should infer that there is no beer at this moment, but B will go get some from the supermarket shortly."
"In the second example A can easily infer that B isn’t
coming to Paul’s party, although strictly B hasn’t said so. These words and sentences are not normally
associated with intentions like this, but they could be used in this way in some particular scenarios.
Although this might all be intuitively clear, a theory which can account for all of this is much harder and
difficult to state.
13 Hancher (1981) p.50
14 Davies (2007) p.2309
15 Adapted from Davis (2010) §1
Although very influential, Grice’s idea’s are far from uncontroversial.
One of his earlier followers, Stephen Schiffer, first wrote Meaning (1972) in which he elaborates and refines Grice’s program. In his later book Remnants of Meaning (1987) he demolished it. He became very critical about both Grice’s and
his own work on ‘meaning’.16 Articles by e.g. Paul Ziff and Charles Travis are also critical and expect
nothing impressive from the Gricean program in the future.17
Against these critical attitudes more
positive points of view exist. Groups especially within linguistics labeled Neo-Griceans (e.g. Horn, Atlas
and Levinson) and Post-Griceans or Relevance Theorists (e.g. Sperber, Wilson and Carston), can be said
to work within the Gricean paradigm.18
In philosophy, Grice’s work is extensively mentioned in most
introductory works on the Philosophy of Language and several Intention-Based-Semantic philosophers
still exist.19
Janssen focusses on the role of the audience in Grice’s ideas on meaning by either what
was said or implicated.
This role is a matter of some debate and several different interpretations on the
audience’s influence are forwarded by some of Grice interpreters. Some (e.g. Saul) have forwarded an
interpretation of the role of the audience which is rather active; the audience is actively part of
determining what is meant by either what was said or implicated by an utterer. I think this interpretation
is wrong. In my opinion the audience only plays a passive part in what was meant; their actual mind state
(their understanding itself) plays no active role in what was meant by either what was said or implicated
by an utterer.
By quoting a famous passage in Lewis Carroll’s Through the looking glass where Alice is in
conversation with Humpty Dumpty on the meaning of a word, we can already illustrate the need for the
audience to play a role in determining what could be meant. But, this role is only what I will label
‘passive’ which I will later try to clarify by stating the ‘Conversational Procedure’:
I don't know what you mean by 'glory,'" Alice said. Humpty Dumpty smiled contemptuously.
"Of course you don't-till I tell you. I meant 'there's a nice knock-down argument for you!'"
"But
'glory' doesn't mean 'a nice knock-down argument,'" Alice objected. "When I use a word,"
Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, "it means just what I choose it to mean-neither
more nor less." "The question is," said Alice, "whether you can make words mean so many
different things." "The question is," said Humpty Dumpty, "which is to be master-that's all."20
I think every reader of this passage will notice something strange happening here. Intuitively, we feel Humpty Dumpty cannot be the master of the meaning of his words, while on the other hand it certainly
seems he is master of which words he uses to convey a particular intention. Somehow we need Humpty
Dumpty to be constrained by something to use his words in effective communication. No wonder Alice is
in the dark about what Humpty Dumpty meant by uttering these words. Humpty Dumpty is hiding what
his words mean and thereby makes his utterance impossible to understand, which doesn’t make
16 See e.g. Neale (forthcoming) on where Schiffer did and where he did not abandon the intention based semantics enterprise.
17 See Ziff (1967) and Travis (1991). For a short overview see Chapman (2005) p.74-84.
18 Divisions and attribution of labels by Sbisá (2006).
19 See e.g. Miller (2007) chapter 7, Martinich (1996) and Lycan (2000) chapter 7.
20 Hancher (1981) p.49
communication effective; there is nothing available for Alice to determine what is meant by him.21 This is
were the audience has an important role to play: Humpty Dumpty should be constrained by some sort of
convention about normal sentence-meaning (something his audience is able to grasp somehow) in order
to be able to communicate effectively. If there is no hope of your audience to understand what you mean,
there seems to be no reason to try to communicate anything at all.
The primary concern here will be the difficulties that arise out of this problem. The main
question will be: What role does the audience play in determining what was meant by either what was
said or implicated? In chapter 2, I will expand on the basic ideas Grice put forward in Meaning (§2.1) and
Logic and Conversation (§2.2). The first paragraph will deal with Grice’s basic ideas on utterer’smeaning.
I will not attempt to deal with all problems which could still be forwarded at this stage. My
primary concern here will be conveying the basic idea. In the second paragraph I will forward Grice’s
ideas on communication and implicatures. In chapter 3 I will forward (§3.1) the ‘Conversational
Procedure’ which should clarify the role played by the audience in accounting for meaning and
implicatures. In §3.2 I will try to deal with some objections. A conclusion will follow in chapter 4.
21 Hancher argues Humpty Dumpty isn’t guilty of being secretive about his language; this appears only so because of the way
Carroll designed his story. See Hancher (1981) p.50
In his widely known article Meaning Grice forwards the basic idea that ‘meaning’ depends primary on
what utterers intend. Grice begins analyzing the following sentences:
1-
“Those spots mean (meant) [he had] measles.”
“Those spots didn’t mean anything to me, but to the doctor they meant
measles.”
“The recent budget means that we shall have a hard year.”22
Next, Grice expands on some features of meaning by analyzing these sentences. 23 Sentences 1 and 3
cannot be followed by (A) a denial (respectively: “[…], but he hadn’t got measles” and “[…], but we
shan’t have.”). In these examples X mean(s/t) that P entail P. It is also (B) impossible to argue from 1
and 3 to anything like: “What was meant by those spots was that he had measles,” or “What was meant
by the recent budget is that we shall have a hard year.” From 1 and 3 it’s also inconceivable (C) to
conclude “that somebody or other meant by those spots so-and-so.” Also, the above sentences cannot be
(D) restated by putting the remaining sentence after “mean” in quotation marks. (e.g. from “Those spots
meant measles” to “Those spots meant ‘measles’’’). But, Grice remarks, all these sentences (E) can be
restated by a phrase beginning with: “The fact that …” (e.g. “The fact that he had those spots meant that
he had measles.”)
Grice then asks us to consider the following sentences about which different statements appear
to be true:
4- “Those three rings of the bell (of the bus) mean that the bus is full.”
5- “That remark, ‘Smith couldn’t get on without his trouble and strife’,
meant that Smith found his wife indispensable”.24
Following Grice we can let sentences 4 and 5 be followed by (A) a denial (e.g. “[…], but it isn’t in fact
full, the conductor has made a mistake” and “[…], but in fact Smith deserted her seven years ago.”)
where X mean(s/t) that P does not entail P, (B) an argued statement of some sort about “what was
meant” (e.g. “by the rings on the bell.”), (C) an argument that somebody meant something (e.g. “by the
rings that the bus is full”), (D) a restatement where ‘meant’ is followed by a phrase in quotation marks
(e.g. “Those three rings on the bell mean “the bus is full”). But, these two sentences cannot be (E)
restated using a sentence like “The fact that …”; because these would differ in meaning (e.g. “The fact
that the bell has rung three times means that the bus is full”). Grice proposes to call the type of meaning
22 Grice (1957) p.213. Sentence numbers are my own for the ease of exposition.
23 All quotations are form Grice (1957). The additional “[he had]” cannot be found in original, but is added because Grice
sometimes uses this in his examples. See Avramides (1997) §4 for a short defense of the use of analysis in philosophy.
24 Grice (1957) p.214. Sentence numbers are my own for the ease of exposition
in the first set of sentences Natural Meaning. When meaning is used as in the second kind of sentences,
Grice labels them Non-Natural Meaning.25
After differentiating between Natural meaning and Non-natural meaning Grice elaborates on
the definition of ‘meaning’ he thinks is intuitively apt by analyzing natural language. Natural meaning
is thus, in short, due to the physical things themselves (e.g. ‘Those spots mean measles’). Non-natural
meaning, on the other hand, is quite different and needs an intention by an utterer (e.g. ‘Those three
rings of the bell (of the bus) mean that the bus is full’). Without this intention the three rings of the bell
wouldn’t mean anything. After separating these two types of meaing Grice can try to account Utterer’smeaning.
In the secondary literature there are several definitions of Utterer’s-meaning which all differ
slightly due to certain counterexamples. Since my primary concern here is the role of the audience I will
not pay to much attention to this; it is Grice’s general idea that matters here. We can summarize Grice’s
aim in Meaning as put forward by Avramides:
Griceans aim to construct an analysis which provides conditions which are both necessary and
sufficient for speaker-meaning. The initial idea for the analysis comes from Grice, but the
analysis has developed in response to counter-examples […]. The basic ideas is to give an
analysis of non-natural speaker-meaning of a whole utterance on a particular occasion in terms
of, roughly, a speaker’s intention to produce a certain response in an audience.26
But, as Grice analyses in Meaning, just any intention is not yet sufficient. Consider a case where person A leaves B’s handkerchief at a crime scene to induce in the detective the belief that B actually is the
murderer. We wouldn’t want to say A meant ‘B is the murderer’ by leaving his handkerchief at a crime
site to make the detective belief that B actually is the murderer. Although there is an intention, this is
obviously not a clear case of meaning, because it doesn’t seem to be the right sort of intention; it seems
we need an additional feature in order to cope with cases like this to establish the intention to be a
communicative one.27 Avramides:
This, however, is too rough; as it stands there is nothing that reflects the fact that what is being
analysed is an act of communication between a speaker and a hearer. We move closer towards
an analysis of an act of communication if we say, not only that a speaker must have an intention
to produce a certain response in an audience, but that the audience must recognize this
intention.28
I think Avramides formulation might be a little troubling; “that the audience must recognize this
intention” should probably better be formulated as “that he must also have the intention for the audience
to recognize this intention”. Grice’s original formulation at this part of the analysis is the following:
25 Both Avramides (1997) p.70 and Travis (1991) p.252 call this ‘factive’ (probably
after Grice (1976) p.291) Since Non-Natural meaning is my concern here, ‘meaning’ will be used as non-natural unless mentioned otherwise. For a suggestive account by Grice on the relation between natural and non-natural meaning see Grice (1976) p.290-297
26 Avramides (1997) p.71
27 See Grice (1957) p.217
28 Avramides (1997) p.71-72. See also Doerge and Siebel (2008) on communication in Grice.
Clearly we must at least add that, for x to have meantnn [non-natural] anything, not merely must
it have been “uttered” with the intention of inducing a certain belief, but also the utterer must
have intended an “audience” to recognize the intention behind the utterance.29
Avramides formulation might suggest that the audience actually has an active role to play, but this isn’t
the case, which we can see in Grice’s own formulation: by uttering x, the utterer must have intended an
audience to recognize the intention behind the utterance. Avramides’ formulation might suggest that the
actual ‘mind state’ of the audience plays a part, while in Grice’s version it doesn’t; the one is ‘active’,
the other ‘passive’. What’s important to note for our understanding of Grice’s analysis is that an
utterance, besides being intended by an utterer to induce a certain belief in an audience, must also be
uttered with the intention to be recognized by this audience. 30
Avramides continues:
Yet even this is not adequate to account for communication, since the audience may indeed
recognize the speaker’s intentions, but not come to have the intended response because of this
recognition. To capture this it must be added that the audience’s recognition of the speaker’s
intention should function as at least part of the reason for the response.31
Grice ads this last feature in order to cope with examples like the following. Consider the following
cases: Herod presents Salome the head of St. John the Baptist or a father leaving china, broken by his
child, laying around the house for the mother to see when she gets home. In both cases there is an
intention of this to be recognized, but both cases don’t mean anything by themselves.
32 The recognition
of the intention by Herod and the father must somehow play a part in inducing a belief in the audience;
presenting the head of St. John the Baptist could be enough to induce the belief that he is dead, but for
this to be meant we also want the recognition of Herod’s intentions to be part of the reasons for Salome
to adopt this belief. At this point Avramides adds a last feature before stating a formal definition to
capture our insights this far:
Furthermore the audience must come to have its response as the result of its recognition that the
speaker’s utterance has a certain feature […].33
Grice’s basic definition of what he calls an ‘M(ean)-intention’, can now be stated as forwarded by
Avramides (in which she largely follows Schiffer):
(1) Speaker S meant something in uttering x if and only if S uttered x intending
(a) that x have a certain feature, f
(b) that A recognize that x has f,
(c) that A infer at least in part from the fact that x has f that S uttered x intending:
29 Grice (1957) p.217. My addition.
30 Once you know this, Avramides’ formulation is not confusing anymore.
31 Avramides (1997) p.72. Neale and others think this third clause might be unnecessary. Neale discusses the necessity of this
third clause in Neale (1992) p.548
32 All examples paraphrased from Grice (1957) p.218
33 Avramides (1997) p.72
(d) that S’s utterance of x produce response r in A,
(e) that A’s recognition of S’s intention (d) should function at least as part of A’s
reason for r.34
But, this analysis is still not sufficient. Counterexamples are still possible in which all conditions stated
thus far are satisfied. Only this time the problems seem rather difficult to overcome. At this point, as
Schiffer notes, it is still possible to give counterexamples satisfying Grice’s conditions on M-intending,
which makes the original Gricean account inadequate. An example by Strawson, modified by Schiffer,
brings out the problem of a possible infinite regress: A, a friend of S, is about to buy a house. S thinks
the house is rat-infested, but S doesn’t want to mention this straightforwardly to A. S decides to let loose
some rats in the house, knowing that A watches him doing this, but also knowing that A doesn’t know
that S knows that A is watching him. S knows that A will not see his action as natural evidence that the
house is infested with rats, but S also knows (this is what he intends), A will take S’s action as a way of
inducing in him the belief that the house is a rat-infested.35
In this example, all Grice’s conditions on M-intending are satisfied, but we don’t have a clear
case of meaning. An additional condition is needed which stresses that the utterer should also intend his
audience to recognize his intention to get his audience to recognize his intention, to induce a belief in
his audience. Avramides:
There is a slight deception on S’s part which results in a lack of openness between S and A
about what is going on. Strawson then suggest, “It seems a minimum further condition of his
trying to [communicate with A] that [S] should not only intend A to recognize his intention to
get A to think that p, but that he should also intend A to recognize his intention to get A to
recognize his intention to get A to think that p”36
But this will not do, because we can now compose a counterexample with one additional “intend A to
recognize his intention to get A to recognize his intention […].”37 This will lead to an infinite regress
and thus shows a possible serious defect in the Gricean account.
One way of dealing with this, would be the so labeled ‘mutual knowledge’ condition by
Schiffer, which states that a speaker S, and an audience A mutually know that p, if and only if S knows
that p, and A knows that p, and S knows that A knows that p, and A knows that S knows that p, and so
on.38 This also seems to involve an infinite regress, which probably puts us in no better position than the
one we started out with in the first place. Schiffer has argued that this regress is in fact harmless.39
Another way of dealing with this regress is to prohibit so called ‘sneaky intentions’, which is Grice’s own solution to this problem.
Sneaky intentions are what Grice labels intentions which support
34 Avramides (1997) p.72. Additionally we should note that a minor change is needed when we are dealing with indicative
sentences. As Neale (1992) p.545 notes: “Where x is an "indicative" utterance, r is A's believing something”, in stead of a
response. In secondary literature quite a few different definitions exist of Gricean M-intentions. For the aim of this paper it is
important to notice that whatever formulation Griceans forward, there is never any audience control over what is meant.
35 Paraphrased from Schiffer (1972) p.17-18
36 Avramides (1997) p.72.
37 Examples can be found in Schiffer (1972) p.18-19
38 Paraphrased from Avramides (1997) p.73
39 See Schiffer (1972) p.32
the audience to belief something on the basis of a certain feature of an utterance by a speaker, while his
actual intentions are different.40 Neale says the following on this:
At the end of 'Utterer's Meaning and Intentions', and again at the end of 'Meaning Revisited',
Grice proposes a way out of blocking an infinite regress by adding a condition that would
prohibit any "sneaky" intention: instead of adding a fourth (fifth,...) clause, the idea is to add a
second part to the entire analysis, the rough import of which is that U does not intend A to be
deceived about U's intentions (1)-(3). As long as U does not have a deceptive intention of this
sort, U is deemed to mean that p.41
Whether any of these solutions is sufficient is a matter of much controversy.42 Grice’s own story on how
to deal with this regress in Meaning Revisited is very speculative and with the role of the audience as
our primary concern, this is neither the time nor the place to deal with it any further.43 Two other
problems might exists for cases where 1) no audience is present when somebody utters something (e.g.
diary entries) and 2) the utterer has (in indicative cases) the intention to induce a certain response in his
audience, but it isn’t part of his intention that part of the audience’s reason for this response is that he
actually intended to produce this response (e.g. teaching situations). I think these cases can be fixed
without too much difficulty.44 We can summarize Grice’s most important ideas in Meaning as put
forward by Stephen Neale:
It ought to be possible, he suggests, to explicate the meaning of an expression (or any other
sign) in terms of what its users do with it, i.e., in terms of what its users (could/would/should)
mean by it on particular occasions of use. Two important ideas came out of Grice's sensitivity
to use. The first is that the most "basic" notion of meaning is that of an utterer U meaning
something by doing something on a particular occasion. […] The second idea is that the
locution
intentions on the part of U.45
These are Grice’s basic ideas on ‘meaning’ in short.46 The most important thing to note for our present
purpose is that the definition of M-intending given above does not permit any direct influence by the
audience on what was meant by an utterer.47 All these intentions must be had by the utterer, and as soon
as he thinks these conditions are satisfied something was meant by the utterer; whether the audience
actually understands this is not important. But, although the audience has no direct influence, there is
some influence by the audience in a rather different and passive way on which I will elaborate in the
40 Paraphrased from Avramides (1997) p.75. For Grice’s own solution see Grice (1976).
41 Neale (1992) p.550
42 See e.g. Avramides (1997) for elaboration on the suggested ‘repairs’.
43 See Grice’s Retrospective Epilogue (1989) p.299-203 for Grice’s speculative solution.
44 See e.g. Suppes (1986) p. 119-121 or Neale (1992) p.545-547. Avramides (1997) p.78
: “At the end of the day, both kinds of
counter-example to the necessity of the analysis of (speaker) meaning can be accommodated either by a more careful
understanding of the example or a small emendation to the analysis.”
45 Neale (1992) p.514-515
46 See e.g. Avramides (1997) §6 for the sufficiency of the Gricean analysis, §7 for the necessity. See Sbisá (2006) for a discussion
of the difference between Neo- and Post-Griceans on meaning. For a general discussion on this subject see e.g. Lycan (2000,
chapter 7), Miller (2007, chapter 7), Grandy and Warner (1986, §1), Doerge and Siebel (2008; especially on meaning and
communication) or Chapman (2005, chapter 4).
47 See e.g. Saul (2002a) p.232
following chapters. In the next paragraph I will elaborate on Grice’s aims in Logic and Conversation in
which he, besides forwarding his ideas on implicatures, states some important ideas concerning rational
behavior which raises the need to be clear on what role the audience plays.
About implicature, too, some important remarks are made in order for us to
answer our question on the role the audience plays.
Logic and Conversation starts by pointing to a
supposed distinction, “widely accepted by philosophers”, in meaning between formal devices, defended
by “formalists” and natural-language, defended by “informalists”. All formal devices seem to have a
counterpart in natural language, but applying them both to the same sentences sometimes intuitively
changes our ideas on their truth-value. In formal logic the sentence ‘Peter took of his shoes, and went to
bed’ (Peter took of his shoes V Peter went to bed) is true whichever sentence comes first; as long as
Peter went to bed and Peter took of his shoes are both true, the conjunctive sentence is true. In natural
language something different seems to be the case. The natural language sentences ‘Peter took of his
shoes and went to bed’ and ‘Peter went to bed and took of his shoes’ seem to require two different
scenarios to make these sentences true; either he went to bed first or he took his shoes of first. With this
in mind, Grice sets out his task in Logic and Conversation as follows:
I wish rather two maintain that the common assumption of the contestants that the divergences
do in fact exist is (broadly speaking) a mistake, and that the mistake arises from an inadequate
attention to the nature and importance of the conditions governing conversation. 48
Grice wishes to explain that what is conveyed/implied/hinted at by an utterer might not always be
coinciding with the level of what is said (semantics): sometimes what an utterer tries to convey must be
attributed to another level (pragmatics). Grice first explains what he labels ‘Conventional
Implicatures’49. When I utter:
He’s a tool.
there are several readings of what I meant by uttering this
sentence. Initially we could try to understand the ‘sentence-meaning’ of “He is a tool” with whatever we
can grasp without the particular context: somebody, a person or animal, is at this time, e.g. either
compared with or used as a tool. In accounting for the ‘utterance-meaning’ (or ‘what is said’), it is
somehow specified who the referent is, when the utterance was uttered and what is meant with the
particular words in a phrase.50 Thus, for example, ‘He’s a tool’ could be specified as: Albert Visser is
using himself as a hammer, putting up a gardening fence in his backyard. But, when I utter ‘Peter took
of his shoes and went to bed’ or ‘Peter went to bed and took of his shoes’ there might be no difference
between both at the level of what is said according to Grice. But, there is another level at which there is
48 Grice (1975) p.24
49 Implicature is a sort of blanket term for implying/suggesting/indicating. See Grice (1969a)
50 I will elaborate on ‘utterance-meaning’ in the next chapter.
a difference; I conventionally implicated that there was a certain chronological order in which these two
events took place by using the word ‘and’ (this is somehow conventional in our language population).
The following should clarify what Grice is trying to explain. Some readers will know that there
also is a different understanding of “He is a tool”, whereby what is meant is probably more or less: He
is a typical male. When I, for example, utter: “He is a tool”, while watching Albert Visser showing his
muscles by crunching a tin of beer on his head, what I mean (with the right sort of intentions in place) is
not at all the same as what I said. This is due to conventions (which I have to expect to be recognizable
by my audience) about particular sentences. Because of the conventional way ‘He is a tool’ works in our
language, Grice calls these ‘Conventional Implicatures’. In this case, what I said (the utterancemeaning)
differs from what I meant (but both ‘what is said’ and what is conventionally implicated is
‘conventional’ in a certain sense).51
The other effort in Logic and Conversation is in putting forward an account of what Grice calls ‘conversational Implicature’.
52
The following example should make clear what these implicatures are
basically about: I’m talking to Menno Lievers and I ask him,
What about Visser’s published paper on Kripke in Noûs?”
and Lievers replies:
Some journals aren’t what they used to be.
Though strictly
Lievers has said nothing about Visser’s paper, we also seem to grasp some additional information
Lievers tries to make known to us: Visser’s paper is no good. We should notice the difference between
conventional and conversational implicatures; conventional implicatures are due to conventions I expect
to be in place about particular sentences, while with conversational implicatures this is not the case at
all. In short: “He is a tool” can only be understood by my audience if they know about this convention
being there; in some sense it has become a (more or less) normal way to convey that somebody is a
typical male. But, in the case of conversational implicatures this is not the case.
Some journals aren’t what they used to be.
has no such conventional use; it is only used this way on this particular occasion.
If I utter “He is a tool” in a random place, bystanders might start looking for a typical male, just like I
expect them to look for danger when I utter “Watch out”. But, I don’t expect anybody to think that
Visser’s paper is not that good, because I utter “Some journals aren’t what they used to be” in my local
supermarket. Neale:
The principal difference between a conventional and a conversational implicature is that the
existence of a conventional implicature depends upon the presence of some particular
conventional device (such as 'but', 'moreover', 'still', 'yet', or heavy stress) whereas the
existence of a conversational implicature does not.53
The existence of conversational implicatures still being intuitive, we need some explanation to make
this plausible.
For conversational implicatures to be more than intuitive, Grice first elaborates on what
he thinks are the general conditions of communication he thought “inadequate attention” was given to.
51 Modified example from Grice (1975) p.25. With Bach (2005, §10) I agree that Grice’s notion of conventional implicatures
seems rather unnecessary, but, I will follow Grice here for now.
52 With Saul (2002b) I agree 1) that this idea has immediate appeal, and 2) many misunderstandings seem to exist, although I think
Saul is actually forwarding some herself as we will see later on. See also e.g. Neale (forthcoming) p.7-8 or Davis (1994) on the
existence of several misunderstandings of Grice’s ideas in general.
53 Neale (1992) p.524. “He is a tool” of course also is such a conventional device.
Grice and his audience Wouter Janssen
16
Conversational implicatures arise, according to Grice, from certain general features of discourse.54 Grice
sets out the following as a first approximation of these general features:
Our talk exchanges do not normally consist of a succession of disconnected remarks, and would
not be rational if they did. They are characteristically, to some degree at least, cooperative
efforts; and each participant recognizes in them, to some extent, a common purpose or set of
purposes, or at least a mutually accepted direction. […] at each stage, some possible
conversational moves would be excluded as conversationally unsuitable. 55
This is a very important part of Grice’s ideas for us to note in order to answer our main question. For
Grice, communication is a rational enterprise, which highlights the fact that they are cooperative to
some extent. From this observation Grice extracts a general principle which he labels the Cooperative
Principle which he normally expects people to observe:
*************************** CO-OPERATIVE PRINCIPLE ********************
Make your conversational contribution such as is required,
at the stage at which it occurs, by the accepted purpose
or direction of the talk-exchange
in which you are engaged.
*************************************************************
56
This principle should be seen as a principle that we already adhere to in uttering anything; it is what we
tacitly do (and should do) when uttering something. From this Cooperative Principle, Grice extracts a
set of maxims, which should normally be adhered to, although not obeying one of them should not be
confused with not being cooperative in Grice’s technical sense. Grice places the maxims in the
following categories:
1) Quantity:
Make your contribution as informative as is required (for the current
purposes of the exchange).
Do not make your contribution more informative than is required.
(Clarification: while mending a car and asking for four screws, don’t
give me two or six)
2) Quality:
The super maxim: Try to make your contribution one that is true.
And more specific:
Do not say what you believe to be false.
Do not say that for which you lack adequate evidence.
(Clarification: If I need sugar don’t give me salt, if I need a spoon don’t
give me a trick spoon)
Relation: Be relevant.
(Clarification: if I am mixing a cake don’t hand me an oven cloth)
4) Manner:
The super maxim: Be perspicuous.
And more specific
Be brief.
54 Grice (1975) p.26.
55 Grice (1975) p.26
56 Grice (1975) p.26.
Grice and his audience Wouter Janssen
17
Be orderly.
Avoid ambiguity.
Avoid obscurity of expression.
(Clarification: make clear what your contribution is)57
These maxims should not be taken as a strict set of rules people in communication should adhere to.
They should better be interpreted as guidance in conversation. Grice expects that the general
Cooperative Principle and maxims are operating the way they do, not just because of the simple
observation that they seem to be in place, but because this is rational: those who care about achieving
certain goals in communication will only have an interest in participating in communication that is
profitable, and this seems only possible under the assumption that communication takes place obeying
certain general principles:
So I would like to be able to show that observation of the Cooperative Principle and maxims
is reasonable (rational) along the following lines: that anyone who cares about the goals that
are central to conversation/communication (such as giving and receiving information,
influencing and being influenced by others) must be expected to have an interest, given
suitable circumstances, in participation in talk exchanges that will be profitable only on the
assumption that they are conducted in general accordance with the Cooperative Principle and
the maxims.58
From this we can conclude that all rational attempts at communicating are done to convey certain Mintentions
(although the exact definition might still vary), because there is no rational reason to try to
communicate if we are not trying to be cooperative to some extent. This formulation seems problematic
(and it might be to some extent), but we should notice that a need for cooperation probably came first
historically and as soon as we want to be cooperative we should only try to communicate with
something like the intentions Grice had in mind. We are not trying to be cooperative if we don’t 1) have
the intention of inducing a certain belief in our audience (if not: why utter anything?), 2) have the
intention for them to recognize this intention (if not: why utter anything?) and 3) have the intention for
their response to be partly due to their recognition of our intention (if not: why utter anything?).
Chapman notes the following remarks on Grice’s explanation of cooperation being rational in Logic and
Conversation:
This is a wordy explanation, and also a troublesome one. It seems to create a loop linking the
aim of explaining cooperation to an account of conversation as dependent on cooperation, a loop from which it does not successfully escape. The link between reasonableness and cooperation is far from explicit.
Nevertheless, this passage offers Grice’s account of his own
preferences in seeking an answer to the question over the status, and hence the motivation,
57 Neale (1992) p.524. Presentation slightly adjusted for the sake of clarity. The clarifications are paraphrased from Grice (1975)
p.28-29. Grice also thinks other maxims might be needed, but doesn’t elaborate on this. In secondary literature there are quite a
few errors in stating Grice’s maxims. In Grice’s formulation, we have four categories in which the maxims are placed.
The maxim ‘Be relevant’ falls within the category of RELATION in Grice’s original phrasing, but in secondary literature it is often noted under
the category of Relevance!
This is a minor error and the latter formulation should work just as well -- if you ignore Kant! (Actually, Grice used "Mode" before he turned to "Manner", because he thought "Mode" was a better English translation to Kant's Latinate "Modus" -- (although it does seem to show
that a lot of articles written on this subject are based on secondary literature).
See also Horn (2004) p.5-8 for some confusion on
the interpretations of reasons for Grice in stating his maxims.
58 Grice (1975) p. 29-30
Grice and his audience Wouter Janssen
18
for the Cooperative Principle. His preference, particularly his reference to ‘rational’
behaviour, was to prove important in the subsequent development of his work.59
I think Chapman is right in her observation, but I don’t have time to enter this discussion here.
Discussing Grice’s work on rationality and the notion of value that plays a big part in it would take us to far away from our present purpose.60
For now we should notice that for Grice, being rational is for us to
be cooperative to a certain extent.
But, this technical notion of cooperation should not be confused with
the more practical connotation of ‘cooperation’ in which cooperating would mean being as helpful as
we can be in communication. As Davies notes:
What Grice (1975) does not say is that interaction is ‘cooperative’ in the sense which is found
in the dictionary. In fact […] it could be argued that the existence of this pattern of behaviour
enables the speaker to make the task of the hearer more difficult; speakers can convey their
intentions by a limitless number of utterances and it is up to the hearer to calculate the utterer’s
intention. It would seem from this that the CP is not about making the task of the hearer
straightforward; potentially it is quite the reverse. It allows the speaker to make their utterance
harder, rather than easier, to interpret: speakers can omit information or present non-literal
utterances, and expect hearers to do the extra work necessary to understand them.61
We should pay careful attention to the last sentence in the quote above in answering our primary
question. We expect our hearers to do the extra work (for reasons of cooperativeness
in Grice’s technical
sense), which entails our expectancy of them being able to do so; it does not entail our audience’s ability
to actually being able to do the extra work. With this in mind it is still possible to M-intend something
without the right uptake by our audience taking place; in miscommunication something is still meant,
but not communicated. In a more general sense, the Cooperative Principle just seems to expect from
utterers as rational behavior to try to communicate (thus utter something) only insofar as we want our
intentions to be able to be understood by our audience. We should not only intend for our audience to
recognize this intention; it must also be recognizable. There is no need to communicate if we don’t want
and expect our M-intentions to be possibly conveyed (although this should not be confused with being
cooperative in the more practical sense).
The Cooperative Principle should be seen as a ‘default
position’ both utterer and audience expect to obtain when something is uttered by somebody. In short:
the utterer should only utter anything to M-intend something that is recognizable and the audience
should expect him to do so too (unless clear reasons to think otherwise). Very roughly we could say that
Grice tries to explain the following: as soon as something is uttered there is something meant by either
saying or implicating it. Although no clear evidence can be found in Grice’s work for this interpretation
(in short: in communication there is always something meant), it is at least in line with the interpretation
offered by Neale:
In his William James Lectures, Grice proposes to make a distinction within the "total
signification" of a linguistic utterance between "what [U] has said (in a certain favored, and
59 Chapman (2005) p.103
60 See e.g. Grandy and Warner (1986) §3 ‘Psychological explanation and meaning’ p.15-27
61 Davies (2007) p.2310. My italics.
maybe in some degree artificial, sense of "said"), and what [U] has implicated (e.g., implied,
indicated, suggested)" (p. 118). (1) Although there is no explicit textual evidence on this matter,
it is at least arguable that a specification of the "total signification" of an utterance x made by U
is for Grice the same thing as a specification of what U meant by uttering x.62
Although Neale’s primary concern here is the total division of ‘meaning’ in what is said and what is
implicated itself, he also highlights the fact that an utterance is to be separated in either one of them;
thus, in uttering something, something was meant.
Not obeying one of the maxims is no immediate evidence for a failure to adhere to the
Cooperative Principle, although it may seem like it at first glance: this can be done for other reasons
while still being cooperative. Failing to fulfill a maxim can be done in several ways. Besides 1) quietly
violating a maxim, whereby: misleading takes place, 2) opting out, whereby: somebody is ending the
conversation and 3) failing to fulfill because of a clash of maxims, whereby: obeying one maxim is only
possible by disobeying another, we can also 4) flout a maxim, as in blatantly failing to fulfill it, which
especially gives rise to conversational implicatures. This must all be seen as being cooperative in
Grice’s technical sense. Davies:
If an utterance does not appear to conform to this model […] then we do not assume that the
utterance is nonsense; rather, we assume that an appropriate meaning is to be inferred. In
Grice’s terms, a maxim has been flouted, and an implicature generated. Without such an
assumption it would not be worth a co-interactant investing the effort needed to interpret an
indirect speech act.63
In flouting a maxim an utterer seems able to obey all of the maxims, but obviously isn’t obeying all of
them. The utterer must expect his audience to expect him to be cooperative, even though this might not
be so at the level of what is said. Generating a conversational implicature in this way is what Grice
labels exploitation of a maxim.64 In exploitation an utterer is being cooperative, but in a rather unusual
way for other reasons. In addition, I think it is important to note that e.g. uttering something which
would obviously ‘end’ a conversation the utterer is still being cooperative in the more technical sense
which Grice forwarded. The following example can be found in Davies:
A is a faculty member in an English department; B is a new member who has been employed
as a poet to teach creative writing. The conversation takes place at a departmental party.
A:
What sort of poetry do you write?
B:
Name me six poets. [said aggressively]
This exchange can scarcely be considered ‘cooperative’ in the non-technical sense: it is
evidently unhelpful, and is certainly leading to clarification and repair (in an interpersonal
62 Neale (1992) p.520. Neale is referring to Grice’s Studies in the way of words.
63 Davies (2007) p. 2309-2310
64 Grice (1975) p.30. Cruse (2000) p.358 summarizes the exploitation of maxims as follows: “The second mechanism involves a
deliberate flouting of the maxims, which is intended to be perceived as deliberate by the hearer, but at the same time as none the
less intending a sincere communication, that is to say, without abandonment of the co-operative principle.”
sense). However, the implication is obvious. There is a flout of the maxim of relevance here,
and B’s reply implicates that A’s question is not worth answering because A knows nothing
about poetry. So, B’s utterance is not ‘cooperative’, but it fits the model for interpretation
suggested by the CP.65
If we are M-intending our dislike to communicate any further (at least on a certain question), we still
want this to be understandable by our audience; we are being cooperative in the more technical sense.
Grice now characterizes conversational implicatures as follows:
*****************DEFINING "IMPICATURE" ****************
A man who, by (in, when) saying
(or making as if to say) that
P has implicated that Q, may
be said to have conversationally
implicated that Q, provided
that
(1) he is to be presumed to be
observing the conversational maxims, or at least the Cooperative Principle;
(2) the supposition
that he is aware that, or thinks that, Q is required in order to make his saying or making as if to
say P (or doing so in those terms) consistent with this presumption; and
(3) the speaker thinks
(and would expect the hearer to think that the speaker thinks) that it is within the competence of
the hearer to work out, or grasp intuitively, that the supposition mentioned in (2) is required.
*********************************
66
This formulation is a bit tricky.
"The first part of the sentence already states something to be implicated
(“A man who, by (in, when) saying (or making as if to say) that P has implicated that Q”), but the
second part is formulated as if there still has to be decided if anything was implicated (may be said to
have conversationally implicated that Q)."
This characterization is meant by Grice to be about the Q part
(what it is that is implicated) and not about there being a conversational implicature (the existence of an
implicature is all on behalf of the utterer as we will see further on).
This type of confusion can easily
arise, because Grice is trying to explain to an audience what implicatures are, but there also is an
audience present in his examples.
To disable this kind of misunderstanding Grice should probably better
have talked about himself (e.g. “I, by saying P have implicated Q etc, etc.”), because the part is about
the reasoning of the utterer himself.67 Again: adhering to the Cooperative Principle is the default
position which we all tacitly assume to be in place.
Clause (1) might likewise cause some misunderstanding. This formulation also leaves room for
different interpretations with a subtle nuance.
“He is to be presumed”
might be understood to be about
active ‘presuming’ in the audience on the specific occasion, but it might equally be understood to be
about our (the readers of this article) ‘presuming’ about the utterer to act in accordance with the
Cooperative Principle (thus: the default position of the Cooperative Principle to obtain for both utterer
and audience).
I think Grice is here saying that we (the audience of the lecture/article) should take for
granted that neither the utterer or the hearer on this occasion has reasons to doubt the default position to
be in place; so it is in place. What is important to note is that everybody is always presumed to be
observing the Cooperative Principle, unless clear reasons to think otherwise; this is the default position
and no active presuming is to be done by the audience at this stage. “He is to be presumed”, should be
interpreted in this explanation as (more or less) “The utterer is genuinely trying to convey something” so
65 Davies (2007) p.2314.
66 Grice (1975) p.30-31
67 Grice should have probably talked in first person to be more clear; less misunderstandings would probably occur.
that we can assume the default position to obtain (it is more like a ‘situation sketch’ in some sense). The
latter reading seems to be more in accordance with our earlier findings that in communication something
must be meant by an utterer in uttering something for him to be acting rationally: everybody who utters
something is presumed to be observing the Cooperative Principle, unless they have clear reasons to
expect otherwise. As soon as somebody utters something, it is rational to passively assume him to be
trying to convey something (again: why utter anything otherwise?). If we take this latter interpretation,
what this clause secures is just that something was actually meant by the utterer on this occassion. There
is no ‘active’ role played by the audience; the role is only ‘passive’.
Grice expands on three general groups of conversational implicatures: Group A) where no
maxim seems to be violated; Group B) where a maxim is violated but this is explained by the
supposition of a clash with another maxim and; Group C) where exploitation takes place; a maxim is
flouted on purpose, apparently violating a maxim, to generate a conversational implicature. In contrast
with conventional implicatures, conversational implicatures have the feature of being able to be ‘worked
out’. In the ‘He’s a tool’ example there is no way of working out from what was said that ‘Albert Visser
is a typical male’. We can only understand this from knowing the conventional meaning of this sentence
in this typical way. Grice summarizes a general approach (a general pattern) for working out
conversational implicatures:
*********************** WORKING-OUT SCHEMA FOR A CONVERSATIONAL IMPLICATURE ****
“He has said that P;
there is no reason to suppose that he is not observing the maxims, or at
least the Cooperative Principle; he could not be doing this unless he thought that Q;
he knows
(and knows I know that he knows) that I can see that the supposition that he thinks that Q is
required;
he has done nothing to stop me thinking that Q; he intends me to think, or is at least
willing to allow me to think, that Q and so
he has implicated that Q.”
68
But, although the stating of this ‘general pattern’69 might suggest a fair amount of work to be done by
the audience for an implicature to arise; this is not the case. The general pattern is what an utterer might
reasonably take his audience to undertake; it is not about the active working out of the implicature by the
audience. Neale:
A necessary condition on conversational implicatures that is intimately connected to
condition (3) is that they are intended.
This follows, if not from condition (3), at least from
the fact that
(a) what U implicates is part of what U means, and
(b) what U means is
determined by U's communicative intentions. A hearer may think that, by saying that p, U
has conversationally implicated that q (A may even have reasoned explicitly in the manner
of
(i)-(vii) above).
But if U did not intend the implication in question it will not count as a
conversational implicature. This point has, I think, been missed, or at least insufficiently
appreciated, in much of the literature.70
All Grice expects from an utterer to implicate something is for him to think his audience is able to work
this out by following something like the think pattern forwarded by Grice. The audience doesn’t actually
68 Grice (1975) p.31.
69 Grice (1975) p.31
70 Neale (1992) p.528. See also Bach (2005) p.23
have to do so. It is the utterer that does the implicating, the audience only has a passive role. But, this
passive role does have a serious effect on what an utterer can M-intend. An utterer can (and should)
have different expectations about the abilities of different audiences to work this out: a five year old
child or a mentally disabled person can normally not be expected to have the same abilities as an adult to
work out an implicature. The misunderstanding on the role of the audience can be highlighted by
forwarding an example by Jennifer Saul with whom I disagree on an important part:
The presence of clause (3) guarantees that there will be cases in which the audience is wrong
about what is conversationally implicated.
Imagine, for example, that I believe my student Fred
to be applying for a job as a typist.
I write a reference for him, discussing only his typing
abilities and punctuality, as I think these are the traits his potential employers are interested in.
I
actually think that Fred is a fine philosopher, but I don’t take that to be relevant to his
prospective employers’ concerns.
Sadly, I’ve been misinformed, and Fred is applying for a
philosophy job.
The audience will take me to have conversationally implicated that Fred is a
poor philosopher.
But I certainly did not think that the audience was capable of working this out
from my utterance – I don’t believe that Fred is a poor philosopher, and if I’d thought the
audience would arrive at this conclusion, I would not have made the utterance that I did.
Clause
(3), then, fails to be satisfied.
This means that my utterance did not implicate that Fred is a poor
philosopher.71
Janssen can agree with Saul that in this case we don’t have a genuine example of an implicature.
But, Janssen disagree with Saul on the reason why.
For Saul this isn’t a conversational implicature, because in the end
she didn’t expect her audience to be able to work out the supposed implicature (Fred being a poor philosopher).
Supposed is in italics for a specific reason: there actually is no implicature and never was,
because there wasn’t meant to be one.
When Saul wrote (uttered) about Fred’s typing abilities and
punctuality, she intended here audience to take her words (more or less) literally.
But, to generate an
implicature, she should have (e.g.) intended her audience to recognize that she blatantly failed to fulfill a
maxim (exploitation) by uttering anything of which she thinks her audience will be able to recognize as
such.
Saul didn’t not-implicate anything, because she didn’t expect her audience to be able to work out
that Fred is a poor philosopher, but Saul didn’t implicate anything, because there was nothing to be
worked out in the first place.
She should have intended the implicature for it to be there.
Saul’s
retrospective misjudgment of the particular occasion changes nothing about here earlier M-intentions.
In
short: If an utterer doesn’t intend to implicate something, then there is no implicature. There is some
reason for Saul to think this might not be the case, but I think this comes from overestimating an unclear
formulation by Grice (probably due to the ‘explaining situation’) on conversational implicatures at a
place where this is not the genuine subject of the article:
[…] what is implicated is what it is required that one assume a speaker to think in order to
preserve the assumption that he is following the Cooperative Principle (and perhaps some
71 Saul (2002b) p.350
conversational maxims as well), if not at the level of what is said, at least at the level of what
is implicated.72
From this (she quoted the above part right before) Saul concludes:
Far from seeming like a part of what the speaker means, conversational implicatures,
according to this, are entirely removed from the control (or possibly even awareness) of
speakers. What is conversationally implicated is not what the speaker is trying to
communicate via the assumption that she is following the Cooperative Principle, but what
the audience must assume the speaker to think in order to maintain this assumption.73
This conclusion is wrong. In the opening part of this article, Grice is explaining what he forwarded to his
audience thus far in his William James Lectures. He is not giving an exact definition of conversational
implicatures; he’s is giving a short reminder to his audience (which the rest of the text makes clear).
Grice is talking to his audience about another audience, which confuses things.74 The formulation of the
reminder is probably a little off (if it was to be a definition), but Saul could have known this was not an
exact definition. First 1) it seems very likely (as we have seen above) that Grice meant implicatures to
be meant by an utterer because of the Cooperative Principle and second 2) Grice also forwarded a very
important feature which all conversational implicatures must posses: cancelability.75
Grice’s idea on
cancelability in short: conversational implicatures can be canceled by the utterer after generating them.
We can explain this by elaborating on the earlier ‘party/work’ example in the introduction (to repeat):
2: A: Are you going to Paul's party?
B: I have to work.76
A is supposed to think B will not be able to come to the party (to be sure: this is what B implicated no
matter if A actually understands). But, B might add after short additional deliberation (B now
remembers the party being postponed by a day or so): “But I think I will be able to make it”. The
implicature B originally meant to convey is thereby cancelled (but it was still meant in the first place).
Since it is clearly impossible to cancel something of which you have no idea of it being there (e.g. you
cannot cancel a hotel reservation of which you have no idea it exists), utterers must M-intend
conversational implicatures for this feature to be in place. Conversational implicatures cannot be
“entirely removed from the control of speakers” as Saul argues, because this would deny their
cancelability. It might be a little strange to deny an implicature you have just intended to be there, but
certain situations might put an utterer in just such a situation.77 With Neale we can agree on the
following:
72 Grice (1969a) p. 86
73 Saul (2002a) p.230
74 See e.g. Davis (2007) p.1659
75 See e.g. Grice (1978) (p.44)
76 Adapted from Davis (2010) §1
77 Besides changing your mind after deliberating on e.g. your schedule, the following might just do: You overlooked your mother
in law being in the same room when replying on a question about her with the following words: ‘I think she’d look great on a
cemetery’ (intending to implicate that you don’t like here), then 2) spotting her and then 3) cancelling the implication by saying
“She always looks great when wearing black). Some speculation: the cancelability of implicatures might actually be good reason
Saul bases these and other claims on rather blinkered readings of selected passages in
Grice’s published work and appears to overlook (in both the readings and the consequent
arguments) the importance of the following to Grice’s project: (i) the cooperative nature of
typical talk exchanges and its rational underpinnings; (ii) the epistemic asymmetry of speaker
and hearer, which engenders different theoretical locutions when switching perspectives; (iii)
the reciprocal or dovetailed nature of these perspectives, including the fact there is meant to
be a default assumption that, in the absence of evidence to the contrary, (a) the audience
presumes the speaker to be operating in accordance with the Cooperative Principle, and (b)
the speaker presumes the audience to be so-presuming; (iv) the severe constraints beliefs
place on the formation of intentions; and (v) the fact that the communicative intentions Grice
is concerned with (so-called M-intentions) are (a) audience-directed, (b) intended to be
recognised, and so (c) severely constrained by the speaker’s beliefs about the audience
towards whom the intentions themselves are directed, in particular his beliefs about the
likelihood of his intentions being recognized by the audience. (What the audience is to think
and infer is an important part of the full story about the speaker’s communicative intentions:
what the speaker can M-intend is largely determined by what he can expect his audience to
think and infer.)78
Point i is in my eyes more or less equivalent to: ‘Don’t talk if you don’t want to convey any intentions
on the basis of the recognition of this intention you want to induce a response/belief in your audience (as
noted in various phrasings earlier on).’ This is just the rational nature behind trying to communicate (and
Saul certainly expected this to be in place when writing about Fred’s typing abilities and punctuality).
Point ii seems (I’m not sure on my interpretation) to be about the same as noted above when I discussed
the particular occasion on which Grice forwarded this formulation of conversational implicatures.
Explaining something to an audience as difficult as this is very hard to keep up without sometimes
accidentally confusing perspectives. At point iii we can see Neale also making more or less the same
point as noted earlier about the ‘presuming part’ on the Cooperative Principle in clause 1 of Grice’s
characterization of conversational implicatures. The ‘presuming’ is not really active in the sense that an
audience is to actively think about this at the moment; it’s what we expect in general to be the case (as
Neale notes: it is the default position). People (audience and utterer) are in normal circumstances always
presuming this: it is only when there are obvious reasons to think otherwise. The following might
clarify: On a first encounter with somebody with Tourette syndrome (of which we do not know yet) we
will still expect an utterance of vulgar words (a symptom of Tourette syndrome labelled ‘coprolalia’) to
be uttered to M-intend something. As soon as we know somebody to have Tourette syndrome, we will
not expect this in the same way for every utterance anymore. Part iv is about the constraints on the
formation of intentions: e.g. I cannot intend to become a prime number or intend to digest food through
my lungs. In short: I cannot intend what I believe impossible (because it would be strange to expect
others to work this –the something I think is impossible- out).79 Part v is about the importance of the
for using implicatures: what you meant is probably less straightforward and therefore less ‘strong’ (although you meant it, it is
probably easier to withdraw what you meant by an implicature than by what you meant by what you said, in certain situations;
politicians seem to love them for that reason)
78 Neale (2005) p.181-182 footnote 30.
79 Paraphrased from Neale (2005) p.181
constraints that ensures some intentions to be impermissible because they are not recognizable. This is
more or less a summary of part of what I have been trying to forward only roughly above about the
passive role of the audience.80
Davis notes the following on Saul’s misunderstanding about implicatures being meant (which
also strengthens the reading forward above):
Saul […] also claims that ‘‘speaker intentions are nowhere mentioned’’ in the full Theoretical
Definition quoted above. She observes, as I did, that nothing in clauses (1)–(3) entails that the
speaker has any intentions. But these do not exhaust the definiens. The passage quoted from
‘‘Logic and Conversation’’ […] clearly tell us that (1)–(3) are the conditions under which a man
who has implicated p may be said to have conversationally implicated p. Since ‘‘implicate’’ for
Grice means ‘‘mean (imply, suggest) without saying,’’ which entails that the speaker has certain
intentions, this tells us that the intentions necessary for meaning (implying, suggesting) are also
necessary for conversationally implicating.81
What we have seen emerging is that the audience plays a ‘passive’, but also rather crucial role in Mintending:
If I genuinely think my audience is able to infer that I want to convey that the Pope is a
Muslim by uttering “I would like five please” in a given context, than this is what I have meant. This
might be a rather extreme hypothetical case (and I don’t see any reason for it to work on any occasion),
but it isn’t impossible per se. Neale:
So without some stagesetting A cannot mean that Jones is no good at philosophy by
producing the sentence ‘Jones has excellent handwriting and is always punctual’, for
example, or by reproducing the mating call of some exotic bird.82
Back to our earlier example of the conversational implicature by Lievers. What must be intended in this
particular example? Thus, for Lievers to M-intend the implicature about Visser’s paper, he should also
intend us to recognize this implicature and expect us to be able to do so. He should expect us to be able
to reason more or less as follows: I (Lievers) intend to communicate the implicature (this is what I mean
and think possible) that Visser’s paper is not that good, by saying “Some journals aren’t what they used
to be”, because W (my audience) has 1) no reason whatsoever to expect I’m opting out of the
conversation and 2) the irrelevance of my utterance is only apparent if W supposes me to mean
something like, ‘Visser’s paper is not that good’ and I know that W knows that I know that W is able to
work this out. Now, If Lievers expects this all to be possible, he is implicating that Visser’s paper on
Kripke is not that good by saying “Some journals aren’t what they used to be”. My actual understanding
of the implicature to be there doesn’t matter for it to be implicated. Again we can see there to be a role
to be played by the audience, but this would again be ‘passive’ (but crucial at the same time); Lievers
only has to expect W to be able to work out his implicature. He has to assume some things about W (in
80 See e.g. also Horn (2004) p.1 for the “categorical mistake” to attribute implicatures to hearers or sentences, or Bach (2001b)
p.29-31
81 Davis (2007) p.1659-1660. Davis is referring to Saul (2002a) p.237. Although this part supports the interpretation forwarded
here, Davis also puts forward several points of criticism on Grice’s ideas in this article.
82 Neale (2005) p.181
short: W being able to understand what he means), but he already has to assume this before uttering
anything.
Thus far, these were all what Grice labels ‘particular conversational implicatures’. Grice
contrasts these with ‘general conversational implicatures’, which should not be equated with
conventional implicatures (although this may be hard sometimes). All examples of general
conversational implicatures by Grice are generated by the use of ‘a’ followed by a possessive noun. In
all of these cases it is possible to take the ‘a’ (e.g. ‘a house’) as ‘his/her’ (e.g. ‘his/her house’), because
people normally posses (have a specified relation to) these things. For example, if I say: “Menno Lievers
went to a house yesterday”, I will not expect my audience to normally equate this with ‘Menno Lievers
went to his house yesterday’, but probably with ‘Menno Lievers went to somebody else’s house
yesterday’. The same goes for: “Albert Visser is meeting a woman tonight”. Grice puts forward the next
account for these types of conversational implicatures:
When someone, by using the form of expression an X, implicates that the X does not belong to
or is not otherwise closely connected with some identifiable person, the implicature is present
because the speaker has failed to be specific, with the consequence that it is likely to be
assumed that he is not in a position to be specific.83
So, general conversational implicatures differ from conventional implicatures and particular
conversational implicatures, although the first two types may be easily confused.84 Again, the
implicature must be intended for it to be there. If I said “Albert Visser is meeting a woman tonight”
without the intention (and thus the expectancy) for this to be recognized as “Albert Visser is meeting
another woman (than his wife) tonight” this isn’t implicated.
The literature on Grice’s account of meaning, the Cooperative Principle together with the maxims and implicatures is enormous and confusing.
The debate on Grice’s basic ideas is still ongoing and several disagreements exist on what Grice’s ideas actually amount to.
Since the general problem of Janssen's essay is in elaborating on the role of the audience, he does not discuss these (other) issues here any
further.85
For now it is important to note that what is meant is either said or implicated and the role of
the audience is ‘passive’; they only play a role in determining what M-intentions might possibly be
conveyed.
In short: As soon as I utter anything, my audience has no role to play anymore in determining
what I meant by either saying or implicating it. In the next chapter I will elaborate on the passive part
played by the audience.
83 Grice (1975) p.38.
84 Grice (1975) p.37
85 For a general discussion on implicatures see e.g. Gauker (2003, chapter 3), Lycan (2000, chapter 13) or Cruse (2000, chapter
17). See Bach (2005) for some misunderstandings on implicatures.
With Grice’s general ideas on meaning, implicatures and the rationality of cooperative communication
in the background, we can start accounting for the passive role the audience does actually play.
In using
words and sentences I have already been relying on our grasp of how we normally understand words
and sentences, and utterers in other circumstances have to do the same.
For an audience to be able to understand utterer’s-meaning in effective communication we
need to understand why we should use particular words and sentences. Trying to convey M-intentions
would be a rather useless enterprise if an utterer uses random sounds, thereby establishing something
which we would call words, by which he tries to make his intentions known to an audience. As we have
seen in the previous chapter, the idea Grice forwards on communication is that there is a way of
speaking which we all take as standard behavior. We take communication to be guided by several
maxims, but even if an utterance doesn’t appear to be so guided at first glance, we still assume the
utterance to be conveying a genuine M-intention because of the ‘Cooperative Principle’. As Davies
notes:
When we produce or hear an utterance we assume that it will generally be true, have the right
amount of information, be relevant, and will be couched in understandable terms. If an
utterance does not appear to conform to this model, then we do not assume that the utterance is
nonsense; rather, we assume that an appropriate meaning is to be inferred.86
But, if I M-intend to communicate that ravens are black, I won’t get anyone to understand this by
uttering “Grieu plof eh” (assuming there is nobody in my audience for whom this utterance has any
clear meaning). In this case I have no reason whatsoever to think anybody is able to understand what I
try to convey (strictly I have of course not ‘meant’ anything in the Gricean sense, since I don’t think it is
recognizable and therefore do not utter anything): the words were made up by me so it would be rather
ignorant to think anybody could grasp what I tried to communicate (and a major coincidence if there
was somebody who could grasp this intention). But, since utterer’s-meaning is primary in Grice’s
account, our utterances must somehow also be constitutive for the ‘standard meaning’ of the words I
chose to convey this. If words don’t have a ‘standard meaning’, establishing what somebody meant by
either saying or implicating it seems impossible.87 But, this standard meaning has to ‘exist’ in some kind
of way. Some theorists have forwarded the following problem with Grice’s ideas about the primacy of
utterer’s-meaning in explaining sentence-meaning:
The idea of using utterer's meaning to explicate sentence meaning is thought by some
philosophers and linguists to conflict with the idea that the meaning of a sentence is a
function of the meanings of its parts (i.e., words and phrases) and their syntactical
86 Davies (2007) p.2309
87
This seems in some sense circular, but I don’t think it is.
I can start calling something an ‘Ipod’ to try to communicate a M-intention
and people can start using this word too, where after I can use it because I assume other people use it in the same way;
not because I initially used it this way.
My reasons for using it have changed. I’ll elaborate on this further on.
organization. The worry here seems to be that Grice's project gets something "backwards".
Surely any attempt to model how we work out what someone means on a given occasion will
progress from word meaning plus syntax to sentence meaning, and from sentence meaning
plus context to what is said, and from what is said plus context to what is meant.
And doesn't
this clash with Grice's view that sentence meaning is analysable in terms of utterer's
meaning?88
In the quote above we again see the need for some sort of ‘normal meaning’; we need the words and
sentences to have a normal meaning before we can establish what was meant by an utterer. But, where
does this normal meaning come from? It surely didn’t magically fall from the sky, because of our need
to communicate more effectively.
In Meaning Revisited Grice elaborates on a specific way language
(use) came about in our human history.89 I will not try to explain all this right here (it would take far to
long), but one important feature is extremely relevant in arguing against people who are not willing to
accept the primacy of utterer’s-meaning: what is M-intended must have come into ‘existence’ before
anything we would label the ‘literal’ meaning of words and sentences (eventually out of a certain need
to communicate). Suppes:
[Grice] has, in general terms, sketched the sense in which his approach to meaning provides
a kind of prototheory of how language came about and came to be used. It seems to me that
an argument that this is not the correct order of development can scarcely be taking
seriously. An account of the genesis of language that supposed that first came literal
meaning and then, as a derivative from that, utterer’s-meaning, seems hard to conceptualize
even in the barest and thinnest sort of outline. Surely language must have begun from
attempts at communication between a few individuals. At first these efforts at
communication did not have very much stability of literal meaning. Only slowly and after
much time did a stable community of users lead to the abstract concept of literal meaning. in
fact, ‘abstract’ is exactly the right term, taken in its primitive sense. There is no hard and fast
platonic literal meaning that utterer’s attach themselves to and play upon in their need for
dependence and shelter. The story surely is exactly the other way around. Utterer’s develop
similar meanings, but not identical meanings.90
I think we have to agree with Grice and Suppes on this account of the genesis of language; what other
account could there be?
Besides the primacy of utterer’s-meaning, there are two other features that this
story suggests that are important to note in trying to communicate M-intentions effectively: 1) the need
for choosing certain words or gestures to convey our M-intentions (we know our audience cannot
understand random words, sentences or gestures), and the 2) the reasons why we should be choosing
particular words, sentences or gestured (the audience must somehow be acquainted with them91). It
seems only natural to assume that certain signs/sounds (that later evolved into words and sentences)
came into ‘existence’ because of the need to communicate at a higher level then possible without them.
And this naturally invites the thought that using them and being successful (saying “look” would now be
88 Neale (1992) p.551
89 Grice (1982) p.291-297.
90 Suppes (1986) p.113. See also Grandy and Warner (1986) p.15-27 on Grice’s story about the genesis of language.
91 From now on I will only elaborate on words and sentences.
considered successful if somebody responds by looking somewhere) contributed to their future use in
similar occasions. If somebody were to move from one group to another group in both of which a
separate language evolved, it seems natural to assume these two features will emerge to him when trying
to communicate.
Janssen thinks we are now able to clarify the passive role the audience plays. We will start by looking
at the way translation works, because I think this will clarify and strengthen the idea of utterer’smeaning
as primary. Every time we use words and sentences in translation we personally choose certain
words and sentences to convey our M-intentions and thereby to induce a certain response in a specific
audience. If I want to convey the M-intention of a certain chair being black and I utter the words (at a
particular audience at a particular time) ‘This chair is black’ or ‘Deze stoel is zwart’, I chose these
particular words with the M-intention to achieve the same response, but in a different audience. When
using a sentence to convey what I M-intend in communication it is highly effective to use those specific
terms which I think my audience also regards effective to choose if they would want to M-intend
something similar; this is a matter of our knowledge about certain conventions. More importantly: in
communication there always is an audience so in some sense we are always translating our intentions to
communicate effectively: every word and sentence we utter is always chosen (although this may
sometimes be in a very weak sense) for a specific use on a specific occasion if we want our M-intentions
to be conveyed and we have good reasons for choosing certain words and sentences.
What I would like to M-intend is a subjective notion before uttering; I only choose particular
words and sentences for communicating my M-intentions. Neale:
Person A intends to communicate something to some other person B. He selects a form of
words X that he thinks will, in the circumstances, get across his point (and, perhaps, also get
it across in some particular way or other). A knows what he means by uttering, ‘That’s his
bank,’ for example. He knows which thing he meant by ‘that’, who and what relation he
meant by ‘his’ and what he meant by ‘bank’.92
But, actually conveying what I mean is ‘a best effort approach’ and my choice for these words can be
ineffective: I can choose particular words, which I think would also be used by my interlocutors for
conveying similar M-intentions in these situations wrongly, because they actually aren’t in my audiences
‘communicational repertoire’ (they are not available to them). But, I am still master of which words I
choose, because I am the authority on what I M-intend with certain words and sentences; the words I
choose to communicate this with are only chosen for conveying my M-intention effectively in
communication. My use could be ineffective, but what I M-intend, (thus what I meant by either saying
or implicating it), would still be the same (as long as I of course think my audience can somehow
recognize this).93 Since the Cooperative Principle is a rational principle, we have reasons for choosing
certain words: we want communication to be effective and choosing words that are possibly
92 Neale (2005) p.180. My underline.
93 I can M-intend somebody to follow me by uttering “Follow me”, “Volg mij” (on which what I M-intend should be taken to be at
the level of what is said) or “Miles Davis is a better trumpeter than Dizzy Gillespie” (on which what I M-intend should be taken to
be at the level of what was implicated); which of these will be effective will depend on my background information, my specific
audience and context.
Grice and his audience Wouter Janssen
30
understandable by our audience creates our chance at successful communication. With Grice, we can
agree that trying to convey M-intentions is only useful (and thereby allowed) if you think your audience
has at least a chance to grasp what you meant. A Neale notes:
What U meant by uttering X is determined solely by U's communicative intentions; but of
course the formation of genuine communicative intentions by U is constrained by U's
expectations: U cannot be said to utter X M-intending A to φ if U thinks that there is very little
or no hope that U's production of X will result in A φ-ing.94
And, because human communication is only needed to convey intentions, this condition must be met as
soon as we utter certain words to a certain audience with the Cooperative Principle in place.95
Communication wouldn’t be useful if we didn’t at least want what we meant to be conveyed.
This doesn’t mean we always succeed, but it does mean that, as soon as we utter something for the right
reasons, we also want an audience to grasp what we meant (again; unconscious uttering of words by e.g.
people with Tourette syndrome does not count as being cooperative).
This would all be rather problematic, if there was no reasonable way for ensuring the words we
chose to be effective in communicating our M-intentions.
But, we have such reasons.
A general meaning
of words and sentences is already more or less in place before we were even born.
How?
The following seems perfectly tenable.
By choosing certain words to convey an M-intention with certain superficial
features we strengthen, by having actually uttered these words in what we would afterwards consider successful communication (which we must assume to be achieved somehow for words to ‘stay around’
both generally and particularly) the ‘link’ in a population (however small this might be) to use the same
words in tying to convey their M-intentions with similar superficial features.96
Nothing just is a ‘car’.
We choose the word ‘car’ in conveying (part of) our M-intention, because using this word seemed to be
successful on earlier occasions (our memory somehow ‘pushes this up’) and we think other people
would also use this word in communicating M-intentions with similar superficial features.
Again: we
might be wrong.
But, it doesn’t seem implausible to think that our memory somehow establishes a
stronger relation between M-intentions and certain words and sentences the more often they occur
together in successful communication (we might even see this as a supportive argument for the
conditioning of certain sentences to be in place; more on this later).
Since we are born in a community which already uses certain words (‘a language’) it becomes
highly effective to use already ‘existing’ words in communicating similar M-intentions (instead of
creating sounds/words for conveying particular M-intentions which needed to be done when language
‘came about’).
Why create your own words if certain words already seem to be ‘in place’ and these were
actually effective (why would they else still be around?) in conveying certain intentions in particular
situations?
This all fits nicely with Grice’s ideas about the dependence of the meaning of words and
sentences on utterer’s-meaning.
Grice’s idea is that a sentence has its ‘timeless-meaning’ because people
94 Neale (1992) p.552
95 This also seems to be in accordance with the story about the genesis of language:
although communicating them might be almost
impossible, it seems only rational to utter anything if a think it will be possible for my M-intentions to be conveyed.
96 When this link gets a certain status among some members of a population and this is acknowledged by these members it can be
labelled ‘sentence-meaning’ (but it will still not be ‘platonic’).
have in their repertoire these sentences (not to be confused with what is meant by uttering them) for
meaning something in specific situations:
For population group G, complete utterance-type X means "p" iff (a) at least some (many)
members of G have in their behavioral repertoires the procedure of uttering a token of X if they
mean that p, and (b) the retention of this procedure is for them conditional on the assumption
that at least some (other) members of G have, or have had, this procedure in their repertoires.97
In short: sentences have a particular sentence-type-meaning x in a particular population, because a
significant part of the population have in their repertoire a procedure for using a particular sentence (and
words), to convey M-intention p and the particular use of the sentence (and words) p is kept in place,
under the assumption that other members of the population also have this procedure in their repertoires.
For example: the words “Ravens are black” have the sentence-type-meaning they have, because other
people use(d) this sentence for conveying the M-intention of ravens being black (this is not meant to be
circular). In general this must be something conventional which has grown over time and still is in place,
but can change. Grice:
It seems to me, then, at least reasonable and possibly even mandatory, to treat the meaning of
words, or of other communication vehicles, as analyzable in terms of features of word users or
other communicators; nonrelativized uses of “MeaningNN” are posterior to and explicable
through relativized uses involving references to word users or communicators. More
specifically, what sentences mean is what (standardly) users of such sentences mean by them;
that is to say, what psychological attitudes toward what propositional objects such users
standardly intend (more precisely, m-intend) to produce in hearers by sentence utterers or to
attitudes taken up by hearers towards the activities of sentence utterers.98
The availability of these words and sentences originated itself in the degree of successfulness in
communication of conveying M-intentions by individuals earlier on, which establishes a certain
convention (and of course this is far more economical than trying to make up your own words every
time you want to convey a certain intention). There are no good reasons for choosing
Grieu plof eh.
to
convey
ravens being black, because I should pick words that seem understandable by my audience and I
have no reason to suspect this to be the case:
Grieu plof.
wasn’t made available to me in the right sort
of way (there are no reasons whatsoever to think conveying my M-intentions will succeed by uttering
this); nobody has ever done so that I know of. I probably should have picked (certainly in cases where
context is lacking)
Ravens are black.
because I expect (‘know’ might be to strong, but something
stronger than ‘think’ will probably be the case) these words will be effective. But, “Grieu plof eh” could
in principle become a sentence in a particular population to convey the M-intention of ravens being
black if there are reasons to expect this sentence to be more effective than any other words and
sentences. Since we have good reasons for choosing words and sentences that have already established a
certain convention in a population, this would be very unlikely. The following example should clarify
97 Neale (1992) p.353
98 Grice (1987) p.350. See also e.g. Avramides (1997) §9 or Neale (1992) §6
how a certain convention arises and thereby makes available reasons for choosing these particular words
and sentences:
The word
Gavagai.
(Quine) may come into existence by pointing to (what we would now
label) a rabbit, its parts or some other more specific features and uttering the word
Gavagai.
We cannot
know for sure what was meant by it on this occasion, but for it to be used effectively it must somehow
be successful in communication to establish a certain availability in a language community. If it never
worked in the past, why would it work now (and there is no reason for it to still exist99)? But, not being
able to specify precisely what this word itself exactly means is no real trouble for communication to be
successful; no other criterion than being effective seems needed (What would it be?). If the use of this
word in communication turned out to be flawed somehow on a particular occasion, we would also learn
something: it was used wrongly on this occasion (and if ‘Gavagai’ never is successful it will become
‘extinct’). In short: for words to ‘survive’ in a population, (them being available for conveying certain
M-intentions on certain occasions), we must assume them to have a certain successful normal meaning,
no matter how vague it is (Why would a certain population keep on using it otherwise?).
For communicating with language to be effective, our memory has to bring back certain
connections between M-intentions with certain superficial features and the use of certain words in
consciousness. This doesn’t entail that we need some kind of criterion to know we have applied the same
term as we did in M-intending something on earlier occasions. We don’t need to have a private criterion
which establishes the connection between our words and M-intentions again and again (Wittgenstein has
argued this to be impossible). We use these words and sentences from memory, because this is just what
our memory ‘pushes up’. We don’t know if a certain utterance will be successful in conveying our Mintentions;
we just think it will. Only successful communication, after the moment of our use of the
sentences, can be the judge of a right appliance of the chosen words, which is a public criterion. I can
fail in several respects, but failing on some occasions doesn’t make this procedure ineffective (it might
be the best we have).
It seems plausible to say that choosing certain words for conveying certain M-intentions can be
conditioned over time and only require this conscious act of ‘choosing words’ in a very weak sense (but
the uttering itself must be done consciously for utterers to be able to adhere to the Cooperative
Principle). Only when we choose words to communicate rather specific M-intentions (thus: to produce a
certain response in our audience due to the recognition of our intentions) in situations that don’t come
about that often, we choose these words and sentences in a stronger sense.100 For example, most of the
individuals who speak English seem to choose the words ‘This chair is black’ for communicating the Mintention
of a certain chair being black. In trying to convey the M-intention of me wanting something to
model my hair with’ we could think (our memory ‘pushes this up’) the words
Hand me a comb.
are
right for communicating it to our audience, although our audience would use the words
Pass me a brush.
for conveying an M-intention with similar superficial features. If it turns out that there is no real
big difference between the effective use of the two, our act of conveying this M-intention with either of
the words will still be well enough to adhere to the rational goals of communication; their features
99 As we all know, certain words have become extinct in English (and probably in other languages as well).
100 For example in e.g. learning other ‘languages’, new words and sentences due to
new scientific research or 18th century German
philosophy.
probably have a certain overlap, which is sufficient on conveying my intentions on this particular
occasion.101 It doesn’t seem untenable that the use of words and sentences for the communication of
certain M-intentions becomes more specific when our knowledge about certain areas advances, by
which our M-intentions can become more specific (or at least differ more form person to person). But
this doesn’t mean everybody has to use them in that way to communicate successfully.102
This entire idea seems reasonable alongside Grice’s ideas about communication being a
rational activity. Speakers of a language might not be explicitly aware of using this procedure for
choosing words, but it seems plausible for them to become aware of this implicit knowledge in their use
of language (asking somebody what he meant, might be a good candidate; in such a case he might use
other words which to him seem to be similarly understandable by his audience). Again; the relation
between certain words and sentences with certain M-intentions might be conditioned in most cases, but
it does seem reasonable to expect language users, when reflecting on their use of language, to posit
something like this procedure.
We can try to formalize this procedure (which I consider to be a subpart of the Cooperative
Principle) by positing the following sub-procedures, which enables utterer’s to convey their intentions
effectively and thereby we can clarify the passive role played by the audience:
Separation Procedure (SP):
We can separate what we want to M-intend (because of certain superficial features) in consciousness.
What ‘superficial features’ amounts to will depend on the goal of communication. In e.g. studying
physics the need to separate certain parts (e.g. nano-level) will be different from non-meteorologists
talking about the weather (e.g. rain drops): what is separated and why can vary over different
communicational goals. For example: a chair is made out of several pieces, but when conveying
different M-intentions it may be needed to either separate its parts, or separate the chair as a whole. And
some parts of a chair can also be separated into other parts. This can be done until we get to the
fundamental building blocks of the universe, although this is rather unnecessary and inefficient for most
of our M-intentions to be conveyed satisfactorily.103 In a sense this is meant to be the same idea as Neale
noted above (to repeat): “A knows what he means by uttering,
That’s his bank.
for example. He knows
which thing he meant by ‘that’, who and what relation he meant by ‘his’ and what he meant by ‘bank’.”
Baptizing Procedure (BP):
101 But, context is important here: to somebody in a hairdressing store the similar features of ‘comb’ and ‘brush’ might not be
similar enough.
102 If physics professor Richard Feynman would visit Utrecht, he would need a different vocabulary talking to me than when
talking to Gerard ‘t Hooft. See also Grice (1982) p. 299 on the ‘optimal’ state of language use.
103 E.g. when viewing in front of myself I can separate a computer, a table , a bottle, etc. While thinking about e.g. my last vacation
I can also separate a tent, a river and the cooking equipment from each other. But, I can also separate further parts of a computer, a
shoelace or a tent if this is needed to convey my particular M-intention (This would be needed e.g. in discussing certain functions
of the parts of the whole). This procedure is meant to be non-committed to any type of vehicle for ‘thought’; the separation can be
done in language or some other type of mental representation; all we need is the separation procedure to be accomplishable in
thought. See e.g. Grandy and Warner (1986) p.28-31 or Grice (1986) p.73-81 for discussion on propositions.
Grice and his audience Wouter Janssen
Baptism:
When trying to convey an M-intention (applying SP) to produce a certain response in an audience we
are able to choose out of several words and sentences.104
If I want a certain audience to e.g. watch a certain television program (e.g.
You should watch Panorama.
, I know certain words and sentences will be more effective in different audiences. BP is
only meant to be a procedure for knowing that this (certain words being efficient) is the case and being
able to apply this for communicational use. Which words we should use is specified by the next
procedure. Baptizing M-intentions with particular words is only done for use in (effective)
communication.
Term Choosing Procedure (TCP):
I choose certain words (applying SP and BP), because I think my specific audience is able to understand
what M-intentions I try to convey by using them.105
TCP is a rational procedure which can result in choosing differently, depending on assumptions about a
specific audience. For example: When talking to a philosopher, it will be more effective (thus: to
achieve a certain response) and thereby rational to assume the availability of other specific terms, than
when talking to a non-philosopher. For instance, I expect ‘Sinn’ (unless reasons to believe otherwise in
specific circumstances) to be in a ‘philosophers repertoire’, but I could of course be wrong on a
particular occasion.106 The same goes for the following: If I know my audience to speak French (this is
for them to have what I think we would call a French repertoire/language) communication would be far
more effective if I would (of course depending on the availability of these words and sentences by me)
choose French words and sentences. If I know my audience is from a certain French speaking country,
but with some language differences I happen to know about, it would be rational to use these different
words when they seem needed for conveying my M-intention effectively. In a sense this is meant to be
the same as what Neale noted above: “He selects a form of words X that he thinks will, in the
circumstances, get across his point (and, perhaps, also get it across in some particular way or other).”
But, expecting a certain repertoire to be in place could still turn out to be inferred wrongly and our
communicational effort will probably fail (although I will still have M-intended the same). As Hancher
notes:
No speaker will actually intend a meaning for an utterance without taking into account what
he supposes to be relevant linguistic conventions, supposed conventions that he thinks
adequate to enable him to get his point across. To that extent a sense of convention is integral
104 Translation will be a good example of this procedure. The word ‘Table’ can be translated into e.g. ‘Tafel’, ‘Tisch’, or ‘Tavolo’
etc. Why certain words should be chosen is specified in the next procedure.
105 Thus, if I want somebody to follow me I will choose the words “Follow me”, “Walk with me”, “Volg mij”; whichever words I
think will communicate my M-intention effectively should be chosen.
106 Although I think we can have some sort of “division of specialist labor”. People can, more or less, have authority on what
would be the minimal superficial features for baptizing something a ‘car’; they can try to convince us we should adhere to their
reasons for baptizing certain things a ‘car’ thereby enhancing or minimizing our concept of what we would baptize a car (in a
sense this is just applying TCP with a certain extra authority on the appliance of SP and BP by certain specialists). In some sense
this is of course what we learn children in school (we are not trying to teach them essential features, we are trying to teach them
superficial features).
or essential to any verbal intention. But a sense of convention is not the same thing as
convention itself; and the particular conventions that a speaker supposes to obtain may not
obtain in fact.107
The three named procedures will, in conscious rational and thus cooperative communication, be applied
together for reasons of effectiveness. While applying SP is a purely subjective conscious action which
could be done without the need for communication (in thinking), TCP is a rational intersubjective
reason for choosing specific terms when applying BP in trying to communicate. I will name this total
procedure, plus the assumption that my audience uses the same procedures (SP, BP and TCP), the
‘Conversational Procedure’:
Conversational Procedure:
We apply SP, BP and TCP together for effective rational communication, because we assume our
audience to use this same procedure.
An audience has to apply something like this procedure, in reverse order, when confronted with specific
words they try to understand, but this is not the same procedure.108 Neale:
B [the audience]’s situation is quite different: B is trying to work out what A meant and he
must use anything he can get his hands on to get the job done since he has no direct access to
A’s communicative intentions. The words A uses constitute partial evidence for what A
meant. Other evidence may come from the physical environment, from B’s take on the
conversation up to that point (if any), from B’s beliefs about A, and a whole lot more besides.
The epistemic asymmetry of speaker and hearer underscores (i) the need to separate the
metaphysical question concerning what determines (or fixes) what A means and the
epistemological question concerning what is used by others to identify what A means, and
(ii) the need to scrutinize simplistic appeals to contexts, maxims of conversation, salience,
and pragmatic factors, which are frequently (and mistakenly) introduced together with
intentions in contemporary discussions as if these things conspire to bridge certain
interpretive gaps. Scanning the context of utterance for salient objects and bringing to bear
pragmatic principles (e.g. Grice’s conversational maxims) is not going to provide A with any
information that will help him identify what he meant.109
By now we can see why it isn’t fair to attribute to Grice a ‘Humpty Dumpty’ attitude to meaning.
Grice
only allows the possibility of M-intending what we want with words we think are possibly
understandable by our audience. But, our reasons for thinking this to be possible places heavy
constraints on what is a rational and effective way to get our intentions across to somebody else.
107 Hancher (1981) p. 55-56.My italics.
108 See also Neale (forthcoming, p.5), that stating what he labels the Master Question suggests an immediate distinction between
what an utterer means and what a hearer identifies as what was meant. Neale (forthcoming, p.6-8 and 39-40) suggests we should
separate a) ‘constitutive’ questions he thinks are involved with theories of meaning and b) ‘evidential’ questions which are
involved with theories of interpretation.
109 Neale (2005) p.180. My addition.
Humpty Dumpty is not adhering to this at all (and he knows he is not).110 But, in actual situations we do
have rational reasons for choosing certain words and sentences for conveying our M-intentions.
Although this may not always work, it at least is effective in a lot of cases (the story about the genesis of
language supports this). What troubles Grice’s notion of ‘meaning’ is that being able to recognize the
intention of the utterer may be an important part in M-intending, but there are no universal rules
attached to when an intention could possibly be recognized; an utterer can assume these conditions to
obtain, but he cannot know if this is in fact the case. The choosing of certain words and sentences could
be a serious misjudgment on the utterer’s behalf, (e.g. the utterer thought his audience was Dutch, but in
fact they were from Spain), but in this case we can still speak of utterer’s-meaning:
From A’s perspective, context and pragmatic principles have already fulfilled their rôles: A’s
perception of the context—whatever a context turns out to be—his perception of B’s
perception of the context, the assumption that B is operating in accordance with the same
pragmatic principles as A, and A’s estimation of B’s ability to work things out (and probably
a whole lot more besides) have already impinged upon whatever processes led A to use the
particular form of words he used with the particular intentions with which he used them.111
In the end, it is very important to keep in mind the following: because communication is a rational
cooperative activity (the Conversational Procedure is a sub-part of this rationality of being cooperative),
consciously uttering something, implies that it is done for conveying a certain M-intention. If somebody
is irrational there is no possibility of understanding what he meant: if you don’t want to be understood,
like the fictional irrational character Humpty Dumpty (that is, if you don’t want to convey any Mintention),
there is no rational reason for uttering anything. And, in addition, there is no way of
establishing what somebody like him meant, because nothing is actually meant.112 My words
He is at that restaurant.
at a particular occasion (let’s say as a response to the question “Where is Frank? I need
to talk to him right now”), must be chosen with the intention of the intended effect to be achieved (thus
probably: to let him know where Frank is). If I think my interlocutor has no idea what ‘that restaurant’
means, it would be better for me to convey my M-intention differently. But, if I don’t have the
availability (from memory) to use other words or misjudge the availability of certain sentences in my
audience, my communicational efforts will probably fail.113 But, communicating my intentions
effectively isn’t always the same as being most straightforward: sometimes I use implicatures for other
reasons.
A minor problem still exists in cases where I can’t expect the availability of specific words and
sentences, because I do not now who my audience is (or I just met them), but I do know I have an
audience (e.g. writing a book, a television speech or a first meeting). In these cases I should be extra
careful about the abilities of my audience to work certain things out. Consider books. When reading the
sentence
I am in the grip of a vice.
in a book, we must assume the writer meant only one thing; to
110 See e.g. Davvis (2007) p.1661-1663 for an example of a failure to communicate via an implicature because of a similar mistake
as Humpty Dumpty’s by another utterer (Davis’ example is another case of irrational behavior).
111 Neale (2005) p.180. My italics
112 But, we cannot no for sure if Humpty Dumpty actually wasn’t trying to M-intend something he thought was possible for Alice
to realize; therefore we should know his reasoning process. (Although this would probably be labeled ‘sneaky intentions’)
113 Still, what I meant will be the same; I want to adhere to the Cooperative Principle, but I just can’t.
think something to be possibly conveyed seems to entail you knowing what you meant. Although what
he meant can be ambiguous on purpose (let’s say in certain poems), this will still count as one thing
meant (In the poets case this would be for it to be grasped by his audience as ambiguous), which he
tried to convey in the following way. Suppose I am the writer of this book. My reasoning will be more
or less like this: I want to convey (part of) M-intention Σ, which is a part of my consciousness I can
separate because of certain superficial features (applying SP), which I would equate with ‘nasty trait’. In
trying to convey what I meant most effectively I know I must choose specific terms to baptize Σ
(applying BP). I chose the specific term ‘vice’, because I think my specific audience, which is now less
specific then in personal communication (generating part of this additional problem in the first place,
thus to be more precise: the most significant part of my audience) would choose ‘vice’ for baptizing
(part of) an M-intention with similar superficial features (applying TCP) with, while assuming they also
use the Conversational Procedure. Maybe I would normally rather use ‘nasty trait’ in most everyday
situations, but supposing a certain generalness in my audience urges me to pick ‘vice’, because I think
this will convey my intentions best and generates the wanted response in most individuals. There is a
mutual dependence here: by choosing this word I ‘strengthen’ the availability in a population, but its
‘strength’ also made me choose this word. Because of this mutual dependence a language (most of it)
seems to stay in place.
The next paragraph will deal with a famous objection to the primacy of utterer’s-meaning
which I will try to clarify (or better: undo) using the Conversational Procedure.
§3.2 Objections to the primacy of utterer’s-meaning
I think we are now able to deal with a famous objection by John Searle. He asks us to consider the
following case:
Suppose that I am an American soldier in the Second World War and that I am captured by
Italian troops. And suppose also that I wish to get these troops to believe that I am a German
officer in order to get them to release me. What I would like to do is to tell them in German or
Italian that I am a German officer. But let us suppose I don’t know enough German or Italian to
do that. So I, as it were, attempt to put on a show of telling them that I am a German officer by
reciting those few bits of German that I know, trusting that they don’t know enough German to
see through my plan. Let us suppose I know only one line of German, which I remember from a
poem I had to memorize in a highschool German course. Therefore I, a captured American,
address my Italian captors with the following sentence: ‘Kennst du das Land, wo die Zitronen
blühen?’ Now, let us describe the situation in Gricean terms. I intend to produce a certain effect
in them, namely, the effect of believing that I am a German officer; and I intend to produce this
effect by means of their recognition of my intention. I intend that they should think that what I
am trying to tell them is that I am a German officer. But does it follow from this account that
when I say ‘Kennst du das Land ...’ etc., what I mean is, ‘I am a German officer’? Not only
does it not follow, but in this case it seems plainly false that when I utter the German sentence
what I mean is ‘I am a German officer’, or even ‘Ich bin ein deutscher Offizier’, because what
Grice and his audience Wouter Janssen
38
the words mean is, ‘Knowest thou the land where the lemontrees bloom?’ Of course, I want my
captors to be deceived into thinking that what I mean is ‘I am a German officer’, but part of
what is involved in the deception is getting them to think that that is what the words which I
utter mean in German.114
Let’s bite the bullet: suppose I am the American soldier. So, I want to convey the M-intention that I am a
German officer (eventually in order for the Italians to release me). I think that, uttering words which
have the feature to sound like words which I, in this situation, expect the Italian capturers to understand
as ‘I am a German officer’ (the context will play a very important part on my assumption of this to be
possible; it seems to be almost impossible) is able to do the trick in this particular context. To be clear:
it doesn’t matter if I succeed. It does follow as soon as I consciously and rationally utter the sentence
and genuinely expect the Italians to take me saying that I am a German officer.
I think it is perfectly plausible to suggest that by choosing the words “Kennst du das Land, wo
die Zitronen blühen” in trying to convey the M-intention of me being a German officer I mean that I am
a German officer. Since what I mean depends on my intentions, this seems perfectly tenable as long as I
do this for the right reasons (I must genuinely think the Italians are able to take these words to mean ‘I
am a German Officer’, and since I am willing to try this I must think it possible in the actual example).
So, although I wouldn’t choose (BP) to convey this M-intention (SP) with the same words when talking
to an audience with an English repertoire (TCP)115, my M-intention hasn’t changed; I still want to be
released (the entailement of my M-intention of me being a German officer) by uttering ‘Kennst du…’,
which I think is possibly recognizable by my capturers to mean ‘I am a German Officer’. This might not
be what the sentence normally means to some other person, but since I do expect there to be no normal
meaning (at least before my utterance) for the Italian capturers for this sentence I cannot be accused of
misjudging there repertoire; I take them to recognize that I am saying this. The ‘normal’ meaning in
German just doesn’t matter. To be sure: this is not a case of ‘sneaky intentions’, because I genuinely
expect the Italian capturers to recognize my basic intention (I don’t have another intention on which I
actually want them to act). It might be helpful to consider Grice’s own similar solution:116
I think Searle wanted us to suppose that the American hoped that the Italians would reach a
belief that he was a German officer via a belief that the words which he uttered were the
German for “I am a German officer” (though it is not easy to see how to build up the context
of utterance so as to give him any basis for this hope). Now it becomes doubtful whether, after
all, it is right to say that the American did not mean "I am a German officer." Consider the
following example. The proprietor of a shop full of knickknacks for tourists is standing in his
doorway in Port Said, sees a British visitor, and in dulcet tones and with an alluring smile says
to him the Arabic for "You pig of an Englishman." I should be quite inclined to say that he had
meant that the visitor was to come in, or something of the sort. I would not of course be in the
least inclined to say that he had meant by the words which he uttered that the visitor was to
come in; and to point out that the German line means not "I am a German officer" but
114 Searle (1969) p.44-45. For Schiffer’s discussion of this example see Schiffer (1972) p.28-48.
115 Let us not be troubled here by that the situation will of course be a different one.
116 Grice himself considers three ways to deal with Searle’s objection in Grice (1969a) p.100-105. My solution is more or less
equivalent to his second solution (p.101-102) which is quoted here.
Grice and his audience Wouter Janssen
39
"Knowest thou the land" is not relevant. If the American could be said to have meant that he
was a German officer, he would have meant that by saying the line, or by saying the line in a
particular way; just as the Port Said shop-merchant would mean that the visitor was to come in
by saying what he said, or by speaking to the visitor in the way he did. 117
This would still be in accordance with Grice’s ideas on meaning, since what I meant is what I hope and
think possible for my Italian capturers to grasp (I have the right type of intentions), although my words
would mean something different for people with what I would assume to be a ‘German repertoire’.
Grice’s famous ‘handkerchief’ example might seem to be similar to this, but it is different in a crucial
sense. Although the M-intention: ‘Smith being the murderer’, might be extracted from finding his
handkerchief, this is not recognizable by the detectives as an intention by somebody; they will either
think or don’t think somebody planted it there. In the first case the intention conveyed (namely, more or
less: ‘somebody planted this to make us think Smith is the murderer’) will have to be different from what
A wanted to convey and thereby this isn’t a genuine case of meaning. In the latter case there is no
recognizable intention whatsoever (to be clear: because there is no intention at all to be recognized). The
recognizability is different in the ‘handkerchief’ and ‘German officer’ examples; in the latter case they
can possibly recognize my intention.
With this in mind I think we are also able to deal with another objection by Saul in which she
does acknowledge (for the sake of argument) that ‘meaning’ is exhaustively divided in what is said and
what is implicated. I will explain after quoting the example:
But the reading [of exhaustive division of meaning in what is said and what is implicated] is
also problematic. If anything which is meant but not said is implicated, then what speakers
mean as they accidentally utter the wrong words is implicated. Those who commit the Spanish
mistake mentioned earlier implicate that they are embarrassed by uttering words [‘‘Estoy
embarazado’’] which mean that they are pregnant. This seems quite odd to me.
118
Saul is of course right to note that somebody uttering ‘Estoy embarazado’ does not implicate that he is pregnant.
Somebody saying ‘estoy embarazado’ when meaning that he is embarrassed is certainly not implicating that he is pregnant when he thinks he is actually saying (he expects his audience to take him literally) that he is embarrassed. But, to himself, he is actually saying he is embarrassed and thinks his audience will recognize him as saying that he is embarrassed.119
The utterer only misjudged (TCP) the
availability in his audience to understand the words in the same way as he thought they would; he might
have chosen the wrong words, but he did so by accident and since he thought he was right, himself being
embarrassed is what he meant (although the unsuccessfulness of his utterance in trying to convey this
will probably appear to him soon because he will probably not succeed in inducing the right response in
his audience).
117 Grice (1969a) p.101-102. In addition we can here find some support (last sentence of the quote) for the idea that when
something is uttered, something is meant
118 Saul (2002a) p.239. My addition.
The mistake made by the utterer is to confuse two words which look very much alike
(phonetically and additionally the first look more like English):
1)
Estoy embarazada.
(normally used by Spanish people when they
are pregnant) and
2)
Estoy azorada
(normally used by Spanish people when they are embarrassed)
119
If I visit Spain with no knowledge about the Spanish language and somebody is playing a trick on me by teaching me the words
Tres calabazas.
for ordering two beers at a bar in stead of
Dos cervezas.
I think it is plausible to say that I genuinely meant to
order two beers by uttering ‘tres calabazas’.
-----
What we have seen emerge here again is that what we consider to be the normal meaning of
words and sentences can be different from what is meant by them on a particular occasion.
Almost
anything might be meant by any words by either saying or implicating it, as long as the utterer can
reasonably expect his audience to be able to grasp what he meant.
But, since no general rules can be
forwarded (I might assume differently than somebody else) for when this might be adhered to, a decisive
account seems impossible.
There are just too many insecure factors which an utterer must decide upon.
By now we should have a fair idea about the role of the audience
It's TWO PIROTS conversing in Grice’s ideas on meaning, implicatures
and the Cooperative Principle.
Although many problems and many different interpretations exist, there
are a few things that I think must be observed.
It is first of all important to note that Grice’s interpreters
have to be very careful on the reasons why Grice formulates certain ideas in particular ways in his
articles.
Sometimes Grice is explaining something rather loosely to his audience (lectures/articles) and at
other times he is trying to forward definitions.
The second thing we should observe is that Grice’s
definition of ‘meaning’ does not allow any active constraints on what was meant by an utterer.
An utterer
actively grasping what was meant is not a feature of M-intending.
The same goes for implicatures.
If I
don’t intend an implicature to be there, it isn’t there.
No matter what the audience might think.
This is all
secured by the Cooperative Principle which only allows somebody (in that it is only rational) to utter
anything if he wants his M-intentions to be conveyed (even if the conditions Grice stated are to be
revisited, it will probably still be only rational to utter anything with the revisited definition on Mintentions
to be in place).
This is the default position which we all tacitly adhere to.
Only in cases where
we have good reasons to assume the Cooperative Principle to be violated (e.g. people with Tourette
syndrome) an utterance can be done without the right sort of intentions.
But, the audience does play a
passive role in what can be meant by either saying or implicating it.
I can only mean anything if I think
this to be recognizable by my audience.
If I genuinely expect my audience to have no reason whatsoever
(e.g. making up words) to understand what I try to convey, there is no reason to utter anything and
nothing will be meant.
But if I do think my audience to understand what I mean by either saying or
implicating it.
I will have meant something.
The Conversational Procedure is forwarded as a way of
establishing how to act if one wants his M-intentions to be conveyed (the Cooperative Principle is thus
already in place)
1)
we have a certain intention we want to convey.
2)
we know certain words might be
effective while others might not, and
3)
we should choose words we think are recognizable by our
audience.
Since some words and sentences already seem to have a (to a certain extent vague) ‘normal’
meaning, because of their existence (they get and got used) in a particular population, we should use
these words and sentences since their ‘existence’ guarantees their success to a certain extent.
In the end
we can ‘mean’ a lot, but if this is also actually communicated is a whole different story.
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