Grice's first shot

by JLS
for the GC

I dwelt on this in one of my first publications, which Searle read! (We shared a podium for this at the same congress). My paper considered Grice's notion (important, I thought at the time, and still do) of "optimality" when it comes to word-expressions. But I wanted to trace back this idea to the earliest Grice, which is WoW, p. 220 -- originally 1948. Grice writes:

"Perhaps we may make the following generalisations..."

"x means_NN (timeless) that so-and-so" might as
a first shot be equated with a statement or disjunction
of statements about what 'people' (vague) intend (with
qualifications about 'recognition') to effect by x."

----

Next I should do 'tender'.

Nothing too revolutionary about Grice. That is from his 'seminal' "Meaning", which as I say, he wrote in 1948, and got published (by the Strawsons) in 1957. In WoW Grice cares not only to reprint that, but as an 'antecedent' to what forms the 'bulk' of WoW -- and the logical place to find an expansion on that 1948 earlier remark is in the 1967 William James Lecture, No. 6 -- where he will distinguish between 'idiosyncratic' and non-idiosyncratic. Not sure what the line of criterion is, but surely idiosyncratic applies to just ONE utterer.

Grice wants to keep that as basic. It's the "Deutero-Esperanto" of his essay on 'optimality' and 'meaning' (which forms the third stage of this evolution, in "Meaning Revisited" and also repr. in WoW).

---

Etc. -- so one sees how one single volume, rather pretentiously (but amusingly) titled after Locke ('the way of words', versus 'the way of ideas') already comprises three pretty 'distinct' ways to deal with for Austin was just a joke.

"What-is-the-meaning-of-a-'rat'?" in "The Meaning of a Word", in Austin's Philosophical Papers".

---