Stanley Louis Cavell on Herbert Paul Grice: Must We Disimplicate What We Shouldn't?

Speranza

Cavell writes:

"I am not, of course, denying..."

Implicature: "Something is suggesting this!"

"... that what you say"

or explicate, if you mustn't.

"depends upon what you intend"

"to be saying."

I separate the phrases to avoid the circularity.

Cavell:

"I am, rather, denying that intending is to be understood as a wanting or wishing."

Cfr. Grice, "Intentions," The Grice Papers.

Cavell:

"And I am suggesting that you could NOT *mean* one thing rather than another ( = you could not mean anything) by a given word [or expression, to use Grice's favoured parlance] on a given occasion without relying on a (general) meaning of that word which is independent of your intention on that occasion (unless what you are doing is giving the word a special meaning). For an analysis of meaning in terms of intention, see Grice, op. cit."

And for a total contradiction to that!

Unless you take too serious Cavell's 'unless' ("unless what you are doing is giving the word a special meaning").

Grice's example:

By uttering "It is raining," the philosophy tutor means that the tutee must hand a paper by Friday.

"The newspaper?"

No.

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Cavell:

"[Y]ou could not mean one thing rather than another ( = you could not mean anything) by a given word on a given occasion without relying on a (general) meaning of that word which is independent of your intention on that occasion (unless what you are doing is giving the word a special meaning). For an analysis of meaning in terms of intention, see Grice, op. cit."

Grice, "Meaning" (1948), ages before the Mates-Cavell symposium! Grice is very clear that what an expression or word MEANS is a function of what a population of utterers do mean.

Grice refers to this as "Deutero-Esperanto".

His example is Grice his self lying on the tub and designing a new High Way Code.

And succeeding!