Grice’s Basic Idea

We are concerned to arrive at an account of meaning, meaning considered as a remarkable feature sentences in particular. But suppose we ask ourselves, what are sentences really? They are types of marks and noises, individual tokens of which are produced by people on particular occasions for a purpose. When something, it is usually for the purpose of communicating. You deliver yourself of an opinion, or express a desire or an intention. And vou mean to produce an effect, to make something come of it.

So one might infer that the real natural ground of meaningful utterance is in what mental state is expressed by the utterance. Of course we have already introduced the word "express" as designating a relation between sentences and propositions, but here the term has a more concrete and literal use: sentence tokens are seen as expressively produced by speakers' beliefs, desires, and other propositional attitudes.

Grice (1957, 1969) took these facts as the basis of his theory of meaning. He believed that sentence meaning is grounded inthe mental, and pro-posed to explicate it ultimately in terms of the psychological states of individual human beings. We can think of this as no less than the reduction of linguistic meaning to psychology.

The linchpin of Grice's project was a slightly different notion of meaning, that does not coincide with that of sentence meaning. Here are three examples to illustrate the difference. First, recall Strawson's sentence from Chapter 2, "This is a fine red one." As we saw, the meaning of that sentence itself is not fully determinate; to understand it, we need to know what the speaker is pointing to. One speaker in one context may mean that the pear in her/his hand is a fine red pear, while a different speaker on a different occasion may mean that the third fire-engine on the left is a fine figure of a red fire-engine.

Second, suppose that like some unfortunates I incorrectly believe that the word "jejune" means something like callow or puerile,1 and I say Mozart's 'Piccolomini' Mass is jejune, not good Mozart at all," meaning that the "Piccolomini" Mass is callow and puerile. But "jejune" actually means meager and unsatisfying it is from the Latin word for fasting) t Ie ntence I uttered means that the Mass is meager and unsatisfying, would judge to be false even though I do find the Mass callow and puerile.

Third, consider sarcasm, as when one says "That was a brilliant idea”, meaning that someone’s idea was very stupid. Here too, we get a divergence between the meaning of sentence uttered and what the speaker meant in uttering it (since the speaker means precisely the opposite). The moral is that what a speaker means in uttering a gives sentence is a slightly different kind of meaning from the sentence’s own meaning. Grice called it “utterer’s meaning”; it is also widely called just “speaker-meaning”.

Adopted by Lycan, William G. (2000). Philosophy of Language.  London and New York: Routledge.