Grice: Meaning

1
Grice Meaning

• Nyelv és elme, 2007
• Jakab Zoltán

2
Natural meaning

• (1) Error is not possible. The spots mean
  measles, but when the spots occur without
  measles, they do not mean measles perhaps they
  mean whatever other cause has brought them about.
• (2) The sentences cannot be written in passive
  it is a non-intentional notion. The spots are not
  there to mean anything.
• (3) The natural signs are not intended by anyone.
  (Supplements (2)).
• (4) The indication in natural signs is
  non-concept-involving (obviously). It is not a
  cognitive relation in any sense.
• (5) Facts indicate other facts The fact that he
  has those spots means that he has measles ? this
  can be paraphrased as The fact that he had those
  spots indicated the fact he had measles.
• A paraphrase that would obviously be incorrect
  The fact that he had those spots represented the
  fact he had measles, where represented is
  understood roughly as had the function of
  indicating. (This is closer to Dretske than to
  Grice, still, it shows nicely what natural
  meaning is not.)

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Non-natural meaning

• (1) Error is possible
• (2) The sign is there to mean something.
• (3) There was someone who meant something by the
  sign.
• (4) A conceptually mediated relation.
• (5) What such sentences assert is not that facts
  indicate other facts.
• Another sense of mean (128)
• A meant to do so-and-so by x Something was done
  with a goal in mind, but the goal had nothing to
  do with communication That building that was
  meant for storage. The sentence By his remark,
  John meant to criticize the editor is not what
  Grice has in mind at this point.

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The causal account of meaningNN

• For x to mean something, (i) x must have a
  tendency to cause in an audience a cognitive
  attitude also, (ii) x must have a tendency to be
  caused in the speaker by the same kind of
  attitude.
• Problems (i) putting on a tailcoat suggests
  that the person who does it is going to dance.
  This counts a meaning on this account, but it is
  not meaning as a matter of fact. Thus we need
  more the causal tendency theory is
  insufficient. If we supplement this account with
  the criterion of attending the use of the sign in
  communication, then the account will be circular
  the notion of comunication, and that of a sign
  presupposes the notion of meaning.

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• (ii) on this account, part of the meaning of
  Jones is an athlete is that Jones is tall.
• But we do not want to count being tall as part of
  being an athlete. We may want to allow that there
  are nontall athletes.
• So, contra the account being discussed, we do
  want to say that being tall is not part of the
  meaning of being an athlete.
• The account, as it stands, does not allow us to
  introduce this rule. Such a rule would be
  semantic it would presuppose that athlete,
  for instance, has a meaning, and that guides us
  in applying such rules as the one just mentioned.

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Criteria for meaningNN

• (1) Intend to induce a belief in the audience
• This alone wont do. Example manipulation
  (murderer leaving a misleading trace at the
  scene).
• (2) Intend the audience to recognize the
  belief-inducing intention behind the utterance
• These two together are still insufficient.
  Example pale kid St John the Baptists head.
  The kid intended to induce in her mom the belief
  that he needs help he also intended his mom to
  recognize that he intended her to believe that he
  needs help.

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• Example Showing a photo of adultery vs. drawing
  a picture of adultery. The former is not meaning,
  the latter is, or at least the performer of the
  act of drawing means by this act that an adultery
  has taken place.
• What is the relevant difference?
• In the photo case the audiences recognition of
  the performers intention to make him believe
  that (there has been an adultery) is irrelevant
  to the production of the photos relevant effect.
  If Mr. X simply finds the photo by accident, that
  would have had the same effect.
• Think of this to understand Grices point
  casting a glance at the photo is analogous to
  getting a chance to peep into Mrs. Xs bedroom
  through the keyhole. There is no communication
  here, and the mere fact that someone hands over
  the photo to Mr X. is of little significance from
  the point of view of communication.

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• Drawing, on the other hand, is different unless
  the audience (Mr. X.) recognizes the addressers
  relevant belief-inducing intention, the picture
  drawn will not have the belief-inducing effect it
  was created to have. (If the recognition does not
  happen, then Mr X just keeps looking at the
  drawing person wondering what the heck he is up
  to.)
• So we have a third condition
• (3) The audiences recognizing the addressers
  belief-inducing (informing) intention plays a
  role in the effect of the transmitted sign.

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• Frowning
• - Can be spontaneous, without communicative
  intent, and be a sign of displeasure.
• - It can also be deliberate, such that the
  onlooker recognizes all intentions properly, and
  still result in the same effect (the audience
  concludes that one is displeased).
• Problem the communicative intent makes no
  difference wrt. the effect of the frown do we
  have an analogy with the photo case here, where
  there is no meaning?
• Grices reply The deliberate facial gesture has
  the same effect as the spontaneous one only if
  the audience recognizes the communicative
  intention behind it.
• So can there be an intermediate case, where the
  gesture is neither taken to be spontaneous, nor
  is the complete intentional structure behind it
  recognized correctly?
• What exactly might this amount to?

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The interdependence of intentions

• Intention to induce belief, and
• Intention that the audience recognizes it as such
  
• are not independent.
• A uttered x with the intention of inducing a
  belief by means of the recognition of this
  intention

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Imperatives

• Grices principle seems to generalize smoothly.
  (The policeman stopping a car.)
• Assimilating interrogatives into the scheme of
  speaker meaning
• S may mean that A is to do such-and such (not
  just that such-and-such is the case). The
  policeman, raising his arm, means that the
  motorist approaching is to stop.
• Analogously
• If S asks A her name, then S means that A tell
  her name to S.
• (However, if the question sounds What is your
  name?, then it has to be given compositional
  interpretation. Well return to this below.)

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From speaker meaning to expression meaning

• (1) Who exactly means something by a sign on an
  occasion may become indeterminate (e.g., seeing
  the red light at an intersection), still, the
  communicative intention of some general agent
  remains clear.
• (2) Eternal meaning can be equated
  (specified?) by a statement about what people
  generally intend to effect by a sign.

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What kind of effect will do for meaningNN?

• Not just any kind, Grice says.
• Grunting and blushing if the hearer blushes
  (something like a conditioned response) whenever
  the speaker grunts, then we do NOT have a case of
  meaning. Why? Because the effect must be in the
  control of the audience.
• A reason for believing something is supposed to
  be semantic, something understood, interpreted
  by one.
• A reason for doing something is more like a
  cause.

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• Example Being hungry is a reason for eating.
  However, being hungry is not a reason for
  believing that one is hungry, only a cause of
  that belief. A reason for believeing that one is
  hungry is the recognition of signs of hunger as
  such. (Listen, how my stomach rumbles. Gosh,
  arent I hungry!)
• Grice
• Recognizing an utterers intention is a way of
  having a motive for accepting what the utterer
  says.
• Still, recognition leaves room for deliberation
  so this is more than a mere cause.
• The recognition of the intention behind x is for
  the audience a reason, and not merely a cause.
• What I can mean by a gesture (what can be meant
  by a gesture) is not completely up to me it is
  within the control of the audience. For the
  audience Ss utterance is a reason for, not a
  brute cause of, the effect intended by S.

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The reduction base intentions

• The nature of intentions is not the target of
  Grices analysis.
• Argument for the mind-first option linguistic
  and non-linguistic intentions are quite similar,
  Grice argues. Thus it is not question-begging to
  build a theory of meaning for language that is
  based on the notion of intention. (If intention
  presupposes language including, in this case,
  semantics), then analyzing meaning in terms of
  intention would beg the question.

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Problems with Grices account

• 1. From speakers meaning and utterance meaning
  to expression meaning. How is this project to be
  carried out?
• How do, for instance, unused sentences mean? To
  take care of this question, compositionality is
  the first option. But, for Grice, this would mean
  saying what the intended effects of the
  constituents of language (words, morphemes, etc.)
  are.
• 2. Complex thoughts also raise the possibility
  that having at least some intentions already
  presupposes language. Which threatens the Gricean
  account with circularity.

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• 3. The assumption of complicated intentions. For
  example, when a child says, I want candy (i)
  she means that she wants candy, yet (ii) it
  remains unclear whether she intends to induce the
  belief in her mom that she wants candy, and do so
  by means of moms recognizing her intention.
  Perhaps all she wants is the candy, and she uses
  the expression as an operant response?
• Interestingly, recent findings about
  mentalization and childrens theories of mind
  might be taken to show that even young children
  are pretty good at understanding, and predicting,
  others intentional states. (Think of the
  broccoli-cookie experiment in which 18-month-olds
  are successful.)
• Thus, perhaps it is not completely unreasonable
  to attribute Gricean intentions to human
  communication across the board (more or less).

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Intention-Based Semantics and speaker-meaning

• The goal of IBS is
• - to define the semantic notions of (public)
  language
• - in terms of propositional attitudes
• - such that the propositional-attitude concepts
  themselves do not presuppose anything about
  meaning in public language.
• Speaker-meaning a persons act of conveying that
  such-and-such is the case (or that the audience
  is to do such-and-such). It should be definable
  in terms of behavior underlain by intention to
  activate belief (or behavior).
• Expression-meaning the meaning of natural
  language expressions. Should be definable as
  correlations between word forms and speaker
  meanings (types of acts).

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The non-circularity of the notion speaker-meaning

• In defining speaker-meaning, we make reference to
  intentions
• However, these intentions (propositional
  attitudes) have content (aboutness regarding the
  external world), which is a semantic notion.
• Thus, meaning in public language is not
  presupposed in defining speaker-meaning, but
  mental semantics is presupposed.
• Note Fodor gets this problem the other way
  around
• in his wiew, public-language meanings are
  concepts and propositional attitudes which in
  turn are sentences and their constituents in
  mentalese. But how do concepts and mentalese
  sentences become meaningful?

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Summary speaker-meaning

• S means by uttering X that p IFF
• there is an audience A such that
• (1) S intends to induce in A a belief that p
• (2) S intends A to recognize behind the utterance
  the belief-inducing intention mentioned in (1)
• (3) S intends it that As recognizing Ss
  belief-inducing intention play a role in inducing
  Ss belief that p.
• Is this a necessary and sufficient criterion for
  speaker meaning?

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Problems with sufficiency

• Consider the following case (S. Schiffer)
• S is staining the shirt of As husband (Joe) with
  lipstick.
• A observes S doing so
• A thinks S does not observe her
• A reasons thus S is creating evidence that Joe
  has been unfaithful. S wants me to see the traces
  of lipstick on Joes shirt, and infer that they
  got there as a result of his closeness to another
  female. But S is trustworthy he would not be
  doing all this if he did not know that Joe has
  been unfaithful. So Joe must have been
  unfaithful.
• This is exactly how S intends A to reason.

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• Now
• (1) S intends to induce in A the belief that Joe
  has been unfaithful
• (2) S intends A to recognize his (Ss) intention
  to induce the belief that Joe has been
  unfaithful
• (3) S intends that As recognizing his
  belief-inducing intention play a role in inducing
  As belief that Joe has been unfaithful
• According to the definition, S means that Joe has
  been unfaithful.
• Yet this sort of evidence-manufacturing is not an
  act of meaning that Joe has been unfaithful.
  (What it appears to be, once again, is a
  sophisticated form of manipulation, instead of
  communication.)

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Could we amend the definition?

• Notice that
• ? since A thinks that S does not observe her,
• ? A does not know that S intends her to recognize
  his (Ss) intention to induce the belief that Joe
  has been unfaithful
• Still, S does intend A to recognize his (Ss)
  belief-inducing intention, therefore (2) is
  satisfied.
• So perhaps we can add a fourth condition

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• S means by uttering X that p IFF
• there is an audience A such that
• (1) S intends to induce in A a belief that p
• (2) S intends A to recognize behind the utterance
  the belief-inducing intention mentioned in (1)
• (3) S intends it that As recognizing Ss
  belief-inducing intention play a role in inducing
  Ss belief that p.
• (4) The first three conditions are mutually known
  by S and A.
• (I.e., S intends his meaning-constitutive
  intentions to be known to A if two people
  mutually know that p, then both know that p, and
  both know that the other knows that p.)
• This may still not be enough to reach sufficiency

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A different counterexample to sufficiency

• S Dear A, please believe in God, or else you
  will get to Hell, and that would be terrible (for
  both you and me)!
• (S entreats A to bring it about that he, A,
  believes that God exists.)
• Here
• S utters something intending to get A to believe
  that God exists, by means of As recognition of
  Ss intention to get A to believe that God
  exists.
• The original three conditions are satisfied so
  is the fourth one, by the way for Ss act of
  meaning that God exists.
• Yet, obviously enough, what S means is not that
  God exists.

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Counterexamples to necessity

• (1) Convincing arguments. When an argument is
  presented, Ss intention is that A believe the
  conclusion, but not because S wants A to, but
  rather, on the merit of the argument.
• (2) Producing/inducing a belief is not necessary
  either. Think of a case when we simply remind
  someone of something.
• (3) Many other cases come to mind (i) a writer
  writes a manuscript in solitude (ii) sometimes
  we say things to an audience even when we know
  there isnt a chance that the audience will come
  to believe what we say (iii) we just recite what
  our audience already has in mindetc.

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Is there a way out?

• One might try to argue that the non-necessary
  cases are parasitic on a primary case captured by
  the original definition.
• If this case is made, then one might argue that
  only the primary case is important from the point
  of view of expression-meaning.
• The next question is, supposing that we have
  secured the notion of speaker meaning, can it
  underlie an account of natural-language semantics?

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Expression-meaning

• (1) Noncomposite whole-utterance-types (e.g., a
  police syren prearranged gestures, etc.). These
  have sentence-like meanings, but their meanings
  are not determined by the meanings of their
  constituents.
• Example
• Grrr resembles the sound that dogs make when
  angry.
• Based on this similarity, one members of a
  community C (or a few of them) use Grrr on
  certain occasions, to mean that they are angry.
• As a result, Grrr acquires the following
  feature it is the sound by whose utterance
  members of C have meant that they were angry.
• It becomes mutual knowledge that Grrr has this
  feature.

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• Two consequences
• (i) Due to this feature, a member of C is able to
  mean that he is angry by uttering Grrr in a
  wide range of circumstances.
• (ii) For the audience, Grrr constitutes very
  good evidence that the utterer means that he is
  angry.
• The use of Grrr to this end spreads in C. As a
  result, Grrr now has a feature that is mutually
  known, namely that members of C utter it whenever
  they mean they are angry.
• Thus Grrr becomes a reliable device for meaning
  that one is angry, and members of C will use it
  in communication.
• In other words, it becomes a convention that
  Grrr means that one is angry.

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Conventions

• Conventions (conventionalized acts of
  speaker-meaning) thus constitute a base for
  expression-meaning.
• On the other hand, the notion of convention is
  itself defined in wholly psychological and
  nonsemantic terms.

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However

• Whole-utterance-types in natural language are,
  most often, sentences.
• Often enough, they are sentences that have never
  before been uttered.
• Despite this, we understand such sentences
  instantaneously.
• But we cannot accont for the meaning of
  never-before-uttered sentences in terms of what
  other members of the community mean by them.
• This is where compositionality enters the picture

32
Now we proceed in big steps

• Intentions are propositional attitudes.
• Propositional attitudes include propositions
  they are relations to propositions.
• NOTE Propositions are semantic entities, but we
  pointed out above that they belong to mental
  semantics, not to natural-language semantics on
  the IBS account anyway and mental semantics
  apparently cannot be eliminated from an idea
  theory of linguistic meaning.
• Propositions have constituents (so we assume
  compositional semantics) properties, relations,
  particulars, connectives, and so on.

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• The sentences that we utter are sentences of a
  language L.
• L has a grammar, which consists of
• (i) correlations between vocabulary items
  (morphemes) and propositional constituents (i.e.,
  their meanings),
• (ii) a finite set of combining operations that
  derive the meanings of any sentence S out of the
  correlations mentioned in (i), for the vocabulary
  items in S.
• An example of how propositional constituents
  become the meanings of vocabulary items
• For example, when S utters Mark Twain, she
  means Mark Twain. This is a conventionalized act
  of speaker meaning which is reliably correlated
  with the vocabulary item Mark Twain. Mark
  Twain has a mutually known feature, namely that
  it is used to mean the author Mark Twain.
  (Compare this with Grrr.)

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• In order for the grammar to explain the ability
  of subjects to understand infinitely many novel
  sentences, we attribute knowledge of the grammar
  to subjects (tacit, and not conscious,
  knowledge). A Chomskian internal realization.
• Due to knowledge of a grammar for L, members of C
  who speak L can segment the sentences they hear,
  and assign to the segments (vocabulary items)
  their meanings. (A crude picture, but details can
  be supplied.)

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So

• The original Gricean picture needed to be
  supplemented with familiar psycholinguistic
  notions, in order to account for the recognition
  of novel sentences.
• Since this is an idea-theory of meaning whose
  goal is to reduce natural-language semantics to
  psychological notions, this is not a very strange
  result.
• Still, one outstanding issue remains

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• Acts that are speaker meanings always seem to be
  (or correspond to) sentence-level utterances, not
  subsentential constituents. When an utterer means
  something, what he means is properly expressed by
  a sentence, even in cases where no spoken
  sentence is produced (think of the policaman
  stopping a car).
• When a child points at an interesint object, and
  says Lamp, as in proto-declarative pointing,
  what she means arguably has the logical form of a
  sentence (ie., That is a lamp Look at that
  lamp or so).
• Thus it remains a somewhat implausible idea that
  we can systematically ground sentential
  constituents in speaker-meaning.
• Ergo Compositionality remains a significant
  problem for the Gricean enterprise.

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Criteria for meaningNN

• Qwertyuiop asdfghjkl zxcvbnm.qaz wsx edc rfv
  tgb yhn ujm ik0,olp.\lt,gt.?/)0(_at_!
  !!!!!!!!!!
• 12345678947/-9goqkufhfugsfyggreitgfgsdhqer
  hgwrtg
• Jhulghfughljfhxjvpeiefaeujeirghskfughsgugrefeubhs
  fjgh

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Problems with sufficiency

• S removes the wheels of As bike in As basement,
  in order to make it seem that the axles are worn
  out.
• A observes S doing so
• A thinks S does not observe her
• A reasons thus Surely S wants me to realize
  that my bike needs repair, that is, he is
  removing the wheels to show me just this. S is
  trustworthy, he would not be doing all this if my
  bike were in good shape.
• This is exactly how S intends A to reason.
• Now
• (1) S intends to induce in A the belief that the
  bike needs repair
• (2) S intends A to recognize his (Ss) intention
  to induce the belief that the bike needs repair
• (3) S intends that As recognizing his
  belief-inducing intention play a role in inducing
  As belief that the axles are worn out
• On the definition, S means that the