H. P. Grice, "Prolegomena"

In the first William James lecture, H. P. Grice examines *three* groups of examples in all of which, he argues, the conflation of meaning with use had led to mistaken accounts of the meanings of certain expressions:

A. An account of a specific concept, such as

-- Ryle’s account of ‘voluntary’

-- Wittgenstein’s account of ‘I know I am in pain’ (as well as ‘He knows he is in pain’) and

-- Wittgenstein's claim that not all seeing is ‘seeing something a s. . .’, claims that ‘looks as if . . .’ applies only in cases of doubt, that one can be said to try only if difficulty in execution is in view, and

-- the general Austinian principle ‘no modification without aberration’

B. An accounts of the alleged divergence between the meaning of the sentential connectives in natural language and their truth-functional counterparts in the logical calculus;

C. speech-act or 'performative' analyses of ‘good’, ‘know’ and ‘true’, according to which the meaning of ‘good’ is characterized by the fact that such sentences as ‘This is good’ are used to commend, the meaning of ‘know’ by the fact that ‘I know that. . .’ is used to guarantee, and the meaning of ‘true’ by the fact that ‘It is true that p ’ is used to endorse.

The inappropriateness of utterance in specimen circumstances, which is held to confirm the proferred analyses in these kinds of cases, is, Grice argued, to be ascribed not to the meaning of the relevant expression, but rather to such principles of discourse as: not to assert the obvious - for example, if it is generally true that one always tries to do whatever one does, it is pointless, because obvious, to say that someone tried to V when they V ’d; or: not to utter a weaker statement when one is in position to utter a stronger one - for example, not to say ‘My wife is either in the garden or in the kitchen’ when one knows perfectly well that she is in in the garden; or: to a co-operative principle of discourse - namely, that one should make one’s conversational contribution such as is required by the accepted purpose or direction of the exchange.

Violating such pragmatic maxims of discourse does not result in saying something false, truth-valueless or nonsensical, but rather in various forms of redundancy or misleadingness.

It is not to the present purpose to examine the details of Grice’s subtle and detailed account of the various forms of conversational maxims.

What is relevant here is whether Grice’s strictures establish a case against Wittgenstein’s account of the relation between meaning and use; in particular, whether, in his analyses, he wrongly allocated to meaning features of the use of expressions that properly belong to pragmatic principles of conversation.

It should be noted that the three groups of examples, Grice's A, Grice's B, and Grice's C, to be examined are, according to Wittgenstein, dissimilar.

The first group of examples, Grice's A, involves a nonsensical utterance, the second group, Grice's B, involves a falsehood and the third group, Grice's C, involves truth-valuelessness.

(a) ‘I know’.

A crucial element in Wittgenstein’s philosophy of language, of psychology and epistemology is his argument that ‘I know that I have a pain’ and similar locutions with respect to other psychological expressions (such as ‘I know what I want, believe, intend, imagine’) do not make genuine knowledge claims.

Rather, they are either emphatic assertions to the effect that I really have a pain, want, believe, intend or imagine something, or (in philosophical contexts) philosophers’ nonsense (see Volume 3, ‘Avowals and descriptions’).

A Gricean attack upon this account would argue that it confuses meaning with use, that while it would be pointless to say ‘I know that I am in pain’ or ‘He knows that he is in pain’, since this is something anyone knows when they are in pain, it is nevertheless true in appropriate circumstances.

But there would only be a point in asserting such a sentence if there were some further condition the satisfaction of which would, for example, provide some reason for thinking that the person in question might not know that he is in pain.

The criticism would be misconceived.

First, Wittgenstein did not argue that there is any condition which must be satisfied for an epistemic use (i.e. use to make a knowledge claim) of ‘I know I have a pain’ or ‘He knows he has a pain’. His argument was not that its use presupposes the satisfaction of a condition which, if not fulfilled, renders the utterance either false or truth-valueless.

Rather, he argued that, construed as philosophers have typically construed ‘I know I have a pain’ (viz. as a claim to knowledge, which is typically held to be privileged and indubitable), it is unconditionally nonsense; however, it does have a respectable (non-epistemic) use: namely, as an emphatic assertion that I am in pain (and there are other uses one might add, e.g. as a concessive remark to someone who tiresomely keeps on telling one that one is in pain).

Secondly, were Grice’s criticism correct, then ‘I don’t know whether I am in pain’ would normally have to be false, for its standard falsity is what supposedly renders the utterance ‘I know I am in pain’ pointless, because too obvious to be worth saying. But, according to Wittgenstein, it too is nonsense, not false.

So whether Wittgenstein is right or not, his argument does not turn on confusing meaning with conversational conditions of use. For his claim is that there are no conversational conditions for the (epistemic) use o f‘I know that I am in pain’ or ‘He knows that he is in pain’.

Thirdly, the application of Grice’s argument assimilates ‘I know I am in pain’ to such utterances as ‘I am breathing’.

The latter, or indeed its third-person counterpart, would indeed only be uttered in circumstances in which there is, or might be supposed to be, some reason for thinking that the person in question is not breathing. But the assimilation is unwarranted.

For one can readily specify such circumstances, but one cannot specify circumstances in which the putative knowledge claim ‘I know that I have a pain’ has any point.

Indeed, Wittgenstein’s reasons for excluding it as nonsensical (as invoked by philosophers) have nothing to do with circumstance dependence or non-satisfaction of required presuppositions of use, but rather with the absence of the requisite conceptual connections with doubt, certainty, recognition, evidence, finding out and the like.

But rejecting Grice’s criticism does not imply that Wittgenstein’s case does not require elaboration, refinement and careful qualification.

(b) 'Trying'

Grice faults Wittgenstein’s description of the grammar o f ‘trying to V ’ as requiring the satisfaction of a further condition over and above F-ing (in contexts in which the agent did indeed F): namely, that F-ing needs, or is thought by the agent (or, Grice adds, by the speaker or his addressee) to need, some effort.

On Grice’s construal, we would not say that someone who Fs also tries to F, but that is again because we would not say the obvious, and we would not want to be misleading. It would be misleading, because it would conversationally imply that the person had to, or thought he had to, make an effort, that condition being what gives a point to the assertion that he tried.

But the non-satisfaction of that condition does not imply that the statement is not true. For whenever one Fs, one tries to F.

However, if Wittgenstein’s view is correct, this account is misconceived.

For Wittgenstein argues that in the absence of actual or supposed impediments or difficulties, it is false, not truth-valueless, that if an agent Fs he also tries to F. For some Fings, ‘A F ’d effortlessly, without even trying’ makes perfectly good sense. ‘I saw A F ’, ‘I saw A trying to V ’, and ‘I saw A trying to Fsuccessfully’ are quite different statements, with different criteria for their assertion.

'I saw A catch a bus' does not imply that I saw him trying to catch a bus ; the latter would be true if I saw him running for it, not if I simply saw him stepping leisurely into the stationary vehicle. There are specific criteria for trying to F, which involve such features as effort or , anticipated effort, recognition by the agent of impediments or difficulties and so on.

These are partly constitutive of the meaning o f ‘try’. They apply both when the agent tries and succeeds in Fing and when he tries but fails, and these criteria are not satisfied in the overwhelming range of cases of Fing simplkiter.36 (For detailed argument, see Volume 4, ‘Willing and the nature of voluntary action’, §6.)

(c) 'Recognizing'

Similar Griceian arguments might be brought against Wittgenstein’s description of the grammar o f ‘recognize’.

To be sure, a Griceian argument would run, we do not say that we recognize the familiar. But that is not because it is false, but because it is too obviously true to be worth saying.

However, Wittgenstein did not argue that in the normal case it is false that I recognize familiar objects, but rather that it is truth-valueless (presumably because ‘recognize’, unlike ‘try’, is an achievement verb, the negation of which implies that one did not know the identity of the person or object encountered). When I greet my family at the breakfast table each morning, I neither recognize nor fail to recognize my wife and children.

There are distinctive behavioural criteria for recognizing, as there are for failing to recognize, none of which is satisfied in normal encounters with the familiar. True, no one would normally say ‘When I breakfasted with my wife this morning, I recognized her’.

But that is not because it is too obvious to be worth Saying (for a detailed account of recognition, see Volume 4, ‘Memory and recognition’, §5). The onus is now upon the Gricean to explain what he takes to be the criteria for recognizing such that every case of seeing the familiar satisfies those criteria. A more careful examination of the relation between meaning and use and a comprehensive survey of Wittgenstein’s account of that relation was given by B. Rundle.

Rundle points out that Wittgenstein hesitated between claiming that the meaning of an expression is to be identified with its use and claiming more circumspectly that the meaning of a word is determined by its use. On the one hand, we find such emphatic remarks as ‘The use of a word in the language is its meaning’ (PG 60) and ‘A meaning of a word is a kind of employment of it’ (C §61). On the other hand, we find more qualified claims, such as ‘isn’t the meaning of the word [‘cube’] also determined by this use?’ (PI §139); ‘Not every use, you want to say, is a meaning’ (LW I §289); ‘Suppose we take the meaning of a word to be the way it is used. To use the phrase “the meaning of a word” as equivalent to “use of a word” has the advantage, among other things, of showing us something about the queer philosophical case where we talk of an object corresponding to the word’ (AWL 44); and ‘use of a word comprises a large part of what is meant by “the meaning of a word” ’ (AWL 48).

Wittgenstein’s hesitations appear to turn primarily upon the fact that our criteria of identity of use, on the one hand, and of meaning, on the other, are not sharp, and the area of indeterminacy differs. It is not always clear whether we should say that a given word has one meaning or two closely related meanings; and equally, it is not always clear whether two words have the same or different meaning (synonymy, as argued (p. 212), not being an all-ornothing affair). Wittgenstein himself was inclined to say, for example, that ‘walk’ and ‘walks’ mean exactly the same thing - they mean this - and we would demonstrate walking (LW I §274), but (presumably) their use differs. In a language which had two different words for negation ‘X’ and ‘Y’, where reiteration in the one case constitutes affirmation and in the other constitutes emphatic negation, the question whether ‘X’ means the same as ‘Y’ in sentences without any reiteration can be answered differently with equal justification (PI §556). The considerations that are brought to bear upon questions of identity of use in penumbral cases are not necessarily the same considerations that bear upon questions of identity of meaning in such cases.

Marginal differences in use (and in the rules for the use) of a pair of expressions do not always justify claiming that there is a difference in meaning; it depends upon whether the difference in use is important, and that is a context- and purpose-relative consideration. (If, in some country, chess were so played that before moving the queen, one had to rotate the piece three times, no one would say that this was a different game, or that it was chess with ‘a queen’ in a different sense.)

Rundle points out that the expressions ‘use of a word’ and ‘meaning of a word’ are not themselves used in the same way. This seems correct, but one must take care not to blur the distinction between use (a normative notion which stands in contrast to misuse) and usage.

As Wittgenstein employs the term ‘use’, it is, at least typically, employed normatively."

To the extent that the notion of use is identified with that of meaning, it is the manner in which the expression is to be used (which is given by an explanation of meaning) that is equated with the meaning of the expression. Rundle suggests that we may say that the use of indexicals in certain contexts requires the accompaniment of a deictic gesture, but not that the meaning of an indexical does. The expression ‘the use of “X” ’, he contends, is not substitutable in all contexts for ‘the meaning of “X” ’. For we ask ‘What does “X” mean?’, but ‘How is “X” used?’ (But note that the example has shifted from noun to verb.)

Moreover, there are expressions in a language which might be said to have a use but no meaning: for example, ‘Abracadabra’ or ‘Tally-ho’.

It is unclear whether certain differences of ‘tone’ or ‘atmosphere’ (to use Wittgenstein’s phrase) are to be allocated to meaning or to use: for example, the difference between ‘over’ and ‘o’er’ or ‘horse’ and ‘steed’ (cf. LW I §726, in which his example is ‘Sabel’ and ‘Sabel’). It is not obvious, pace Wittgenstein, that it is correct (or useful) to speak of personal names as having a meaning (other than in the sense in which ‘Peter’ means ‘rock’), but we do explain the use of such a name in a sentence, in the sense that we explain whose name it is - that is, to whom reference is being made.

And there are numerous expressions in the language, most obviously prepositions and various sentential connectives and modifiers (‘perhaps’, ‘however’) which sit uneasily in juxtaposition with ‘means’ but not with ‘use’. It is difficult to judge what weight to give to these considerations. But nothing of note is lost by retreating to Wittgenstein’s more cautious position, insisting that although not every feature of use is necessarily a feature of meaning, it is the use that determines the meaning of an expression, and every difference of meaning is a difference of use.