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"x means NN (timeless) that so-and-so" might as a first shot be equated with some statement or disjunction of statements about what "people" (vague) intend (with qualifications about "recognition") to effect by x. He does so very tentatively with the following definition: Grice next turns to the second step in his program: explaining the notion of timeless meaning in terms of the notion of utterer's meaning. Grice's initial definition was controversial, and seemingly gives rise to a variety of counterexamples, and so later adherents of intention-based semantics-including Grice himself, Stephen Schiffer, Jonathan Bennett, Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson, and Stephen Neale -have attempted to improve on it in various ways while keeping the basic idea intact. (In this definition, 'A' is a variable ranging over speakers and 'x' is a variable ranging over utterances.) Grice generalises this definition of speaker meaning later in 'Meaning' so that it applies to commands and questions, which, he argues, differ from assertions in that the speaker intends to induce an intention rather than a belief. "A meant NN something by x" is roughly equivalent to "A uttered x with the intention of inducing a belief by means of the recognition of this intention". Grice tries to accomplish the first step by means of the following definition: The net effect is to define all linguistic notions of meaning in purely mental terms, and to thus shed psychological light on the semantic realm. The two steps in intention-based semantics are (1) to define utterer's meaning in terms of speakers' overt audience-directed intentions, and then (2) to define timeless meaning in terms of utterer's meaning. (This is often called "conventional meaning", although Grice didn't call it that.) Timeless meaning: The kind of meaning that can be possessed by a type of utterance, such as a word or a sentence. (Grice wouldn't introduce this label until "Logic and Conversation." The more common label in contemporary work is "speaker meaning", though Grice didn't use that term.)
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Utterer's meaning: What a speaker means by an utterance. To do this, Grice distinguishes two kinds of non-natural meaning: His overall approach to the study of non-natural meaning later came to be called "intention-based semantics" because it attempts to explain non-natural meaning based on the idea of a speakers' intentions. Intention-based semantics įor the rest of "Meaning", and in his discussions of meaning in "Logic and Conversation", Grice deals exclusively with non-natural meaning. Instead, he relies on five differences in ordinary language usage to show that we use the word in (at least) two different ways. Grice does not define these two senses of the verb 'to mean', and does not offer an explicit theory that separates the ideas they're used to express. In the 1957 article "Meaning", Grice describes "natural meaning" using the example of "Those spots mean (meant) measles."Īnd describes "non-natural meaning" using the example of "John means that he'll be late" or "'Schnee' means 'snow'". These two lectures were initially published as "Utterer's Meaning and Intentions" in 1969 and "Utterer's Meaning, Sentence Meaning, and Word Meaning" in 1968, and were later collected with the other lectures as the first section of Studies in the Way of Words in 1989. Grice further developed his theory of meaning in the fifth and sixth of his William James lectures on "Logic and Conversation", delivered at Harvard in 1967. One of Grice's two most influential contributions to the study of language and communication is his theory of meaning, which he began to develop in his article "Meaning", written in 1948 but published only in 1957 at the prodding of his colleague, P. Grice married Kathleen Watson in 1942 they had two children. He reprinted many of his essays and papers in his valedictory book, Studies in the Way of Words (1989). He returned to the UK in 1979 to give the John Locke lectures on Aspects of Reason. In that year, he moved to the United States to take up a professorship at the University of California, Berkeley, where he taught until his death in 1988. During the Second World War Grice served in the Royal Navy after the war he returned to his Fellowship at St John's, which he held until 1967. Īfter a brief period teaching at Rossall School, he went back to Oxford, firstly as a graduate student at Merton College from 1936 to 1938, and then as a Lecturer, Fellow and Tutor from 1938 at St John's College. particularised conversational implicatureīorn and raised in Harborne (now a suburb of Birmingham), in the United Kingdom, he was educated at Clifton College and then at Corpus Christi College, Oxford.