Grice as intentionalist; or, Marty's legacy

Speranza

With my gratitude to F. Lietdke.

Herbert Paul Grice’s essay ‘Meaning’ — one of the fundamental works for semantics — was published in 1957.

 

Of course, it was written in 1948, and READ in 1948 at the Oxford Philosophical Society.

 

Grice had been lecturing on Peirce for some years, and thought Peirce's krypto-technical vocabulary needed some Oxonian revision -- or two.

 

Almost fifty years before 1957 (let's recall it was Lady Anne Strawson who typed Grice's handwritten 1948 "Meaning" and her husband who submitted it to the Philosophical Review)  — in 1908 — Anton Marty’s book ‘Investigations into the foundation of general grammar and the philosophy of language’ was published.

 

It had possibly been some years in the making!

 

But Oxford is a whole city dedicated to Philosophy (and other disciplines, granted) while Marty was more of a Continental (and thus, to many, obscure) philosopher...

 

Reading the chapters ‘Preliminaries on meaning in general’ and ‘Supplementary Remarks on meaning in general’, one -- even a Griceian -- notices the strong similarities with the theory and terminology of Grice.

 

Which is odd, because Grice thought he was being VERY ENGLISH -- he had found Peirce perhaps too American and science-oriented. Why would one need to speak of index, symbol, and icon, when good ole 'mean' does for all!?

 

Grice was against all sorts of technical vocabulary in 1948. He even found the distinction between 'natural' and 'artificial' too artificial. Hence his rather artificial talk of 'non-natural' meaning, instead, as in

 

"Those spots meant-n measles to the doctor. They didn't mean anything to mean. When he doctor said, "Those spots mean measles", he meant-nn that that's what those spots meant-n."

 

In those chapters in Marty's book, the Swiss philosopher is concerned with the question of the significance of so-called language devices (Sprachmittel).

 

Grice would prefer 'speech-middle', but then he WAS a literalist!

 

At first, Marty deals with the problem of intentional and unintentional utterances of the inner life of the speaker.

 

Grice prefers to speak of an 'utterer', since 90% of his examples do NOT involve speech or language. He is into signs in general, and being a Fellow of St. John's, Oxford, his favourite example (also Richard Strauss, in his opera) is Salome, that wicked woman, displaying the head of St. John (The Baptist). What Salome means is something very wicked. But she can NOT mean that St. John is dead -- since the role of Salome's intention to have his addressee (Herod) realize that is immaterial.

 

An instinctive cry of a person or utterer is a sign (as Peirce would have it, but Grice wouldn't) of his feeling pain and accordingly a statement signifies that the speaker holds a conviction.

 

Grice disliked the word 'sign', and the correlate verb, 'signify', because he noted, as most Englishmen do, that 'sign' has a different meaning in Oxford. A 'sign' is a 'traffic sign', for example. And who is Peirce (or Aristotle for that matter) to try to convince us that 'words are signs'. Words are NOT signs in ordinary language -- ordinary English.

And what's the good of an ordinary language philosopher such as Grice was in 1948, if he is not going to tell us that philosophers misuse words (even Locke did) when they say, and with pedantic authority, too, that words are signs (of ideas, say).

 

Similarly, a statement does not signify that an utterer has a conviction. Because while Ockam did use 'significare' (and 'significare naturaliter', etc.) 'signs' have little to do with this.

 

Rather a statement when utterered seriously may INDICATE that a speaker or utterer has a conviction.

 

Grice was offended when they related his theory to Moore's paradox.

 

"In my view, I wouldn't have that when I say, "It is raining", I implicate that it is raining. Rather, I EXPRESS the belief that it is raining. This has to do with the function of the indicative mode".

In this Grice did connect, though, with Marty and Buehler.

 

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Consequently the meaning of linguistic expressions is related to the expression of the speaker’s psychological experiences.

 

Especially if we re-write that to read "utterer".

 

Grice is following some nominalistic parlance here. He uses "X" to represent an utterance TYPE, such as the sentence

 

"It is raining".

 

He uses 'x', rather, to indicate a TOKEN of that TYPE. An utterance token. A specific uttering of an utterance type.

Thus,

 

"He is helping the grass to grow"

 

is one type of an utterance. But it can be used on specific occasions to mean different things: he is assisting the material of which lawn is composed -- and not marijuana, say -- to mature. Metaphorically, it may mean he is just fertilizing the daffodils, or pushing up the daisies, which Grice found a rude way of saying that he (the 'he' in the sentence) has kicked the bucket.

 

However, this is not the only relevant aspect of the meaning of the language device, in Marty's parlance.

 

Marty writes:

 

"However, it is not just this way of ‘being a sign’, the expression of one’s psychological life, which is the exclusive and primary aim of intentional speech. What is rather intended is to influence or to control the unknown inner life of the hearer."

 

Grice distinguishes between exhibitive utterances (as in Witters, "I have toothache", on a desert island) and protreptic utterances (as in Witters, "I have toothache", to the secretary of his dentist, while making his appointment.

 

"I have toothache", in a desert island, is Witters's way of reminding himself that expressing pain aliviates it.

 

"I have toothache" said to the secretary of his dentist is Witters's way to influence the secretary into making an appointment for Witters to see his dentist, who would aliviate his pain in a more effective, we hope, way.

 

Marty writes:

"Intentional speech is a special kind of action, which is essentially aimed at evoking certain psychological phenomena in the other person (U 284)."

 

and in this, Marty agrees with Grice.

 

Grice was more generally, and more interestingly interested in showing that conversing is not just a special kind of intentional action, but a special kind of RATIONAL action, or co-ordinated rational agency, rather.

 

The good thing is that all Griceians -- his zillions of students, the world over -- learned that lesson so well!