Central Meaning and Stating

Sorry for uninspired blog post title, but you'll get the drift.

Jones was wondering about 'central meaning'. Indeed, this was a pre-occupation with Grice:

U centrally means that p iff...

---- He seems to have thought that he KNEW what

U meant that p...

stood for, and so felt comfy about providing distinctions.

---- In WoW:VI, too, he provides analyses of what he calls:

CENTRAL speech-acts.

I loved Grice for that, in that he is providing a nod to Austin.

The idea was later developed by Schiffer (in "Meaning", DPhil, Oxon, and book). For Schiffer, if I recall his theory alright,


a. to state
to mean
b. to utter an imperative 'move'.


And so on. I.e. Schiffer's claim to fame (one of them) was to have provided Griceian definitions for all the 'illocutionary' forces identified by Austin.

Grice is happy enough with just central speech acts. One being 'stating'.

Jary has recently published a book with Palgrave on "Assertion", so one has to be careful here and allow for 'to state' and 'to assert' as more or less synonymous.

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Why do I mention this?

Because I think that Jones's point about the class of the implicatures and the class of entailments never overlapping, as it were, may have to do with the idea of _stating_. Or not.