Blackwell Reference Online

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Individuals perform intentional actions, and among these are linguistic acts. Individuals also perform conventional actions, and among these, as well, are linguistic acts. Some philosophers have taken these facts as the starting-point for an understanding of language and meaning.No one would deny that intentions must have a place in a completed account of linguistic meaning, but only some have insisted that reference to speakers and their intentions is of fundamental importance in the understanding of language (see § 2). One philosopher who gives a clearly defined and central place to speakers and their intentions when accounting for meaning is H. P. Grice. In his 1957 paper, “Meaning”, Grice proposes an analysis of meaning in terms of a speaker's intention to produce a response in an audience. Grice's analysis of meaning is an analysis of speaker meaning (see §§ 6 and 7). Grice further proposes that we use this analysis of speaker meaning as the foundation of an account of linguistic meaning. One difference between the two sorts of meaning is this: linguistic meaning is timeless, while speaker meaning is tied to a particular occasion of utterance. One way of effecting the transition from speaker meaning to linguistic meaning is to introduce the notion of convention. David Lewis (1969) and Stephen Schiffer (1972) have constructed an analysis of the notion of convention which dovetails ... log in or subscribe to read full text