Now for a sketch
of Grice's reduction of sentence meaning to speaker-meaning, and indications
of how he would have approached Obstacles 1--4 had he been fully aware
of them.<9>
He first concentrates
on the narrow notion of: sentence meaning for a particular individual,
that is, the meaning that the sentence has in that individual's personal,
distinctive speech or idiolect. (No two English speakers'
idiolects are exactly alike.) And he restricts his initial target
further, distinguishing structured utterances from unstructured
ones. A structured utterance has meaningful parts, such as individual
words, which contribute to the utterance's overall meaning; any declarative
English sentence is an example of this, since it contains words that are
individually meaningful and it means what it does in virtue of those words'
meaning what they do. An unstructured utterance is a single expression
or nonverbal gesture, such as "Ouch" or a beckoning motion that means "This
way," whose meaning is not compositional in that sense. (Note that
Grice uses the term "utterance" very broadly, as including nonverbal communicative
acts.)
After some backing
and filling, Grice hypothesizes that x [an unstructured expression]
means that P in S's idiolect, just in case (roughly) S has
in her/his repertoire the following procedure: to utter x if, for
some audience A, S intends A to believe that S
believes that P. (That last clause is a simplified version of "S
speaker-means that P"; Grice argues that the simplification is harmless
here.)
Now he expands this
analysis to cover utterance meaning for a group of speakers: x
[unstructured] means that P for group G just in case (a) many members
of G have in their repertoires the procedure of: uttering x
if, for some A, they want A to believe that they believe
that P, and (b) the retention of that procedure is for them conditional
on the assumption that at least some other members of G have that
same procedure in their repertoires.
I think what are supposed
to overcome Obstacle 1 are (a) and (b), that the relevant procedure is
widespread in the community and that individual members of the community
rely on the other members to maintain that procedure as well. This
seems exactly right.
But now the trick will
be to go from the analysis of unstructured-utterance meaning to ordinary
sentence meaning, since ordinary English sentences are all structured.
Grice brings in the notion of a "resultant" procedure. At this point
Grice's article becomes dense and obscure, but I think the idea is this:
Just as English sentences are made up of smaller meaningful parts -- words
and phrases -- in virtue of which the whole sentences mean what they mean,
an individual speaker will have in her/his repertoire a complex, abstract
"resultant procedure" made up of the concrete procedures attaching to its
respective composite parts. Thus, a sentence's meaning will not be
directly a function of speaker-meaning, but rather a function of the individual
utterance meanings of its ultimate parts. Only then will the core
Gricean idea, and (crucially) his analysis of utterance meaning for a group,
be invoked as explicating the utterance meanings of the parts.
I emphasize "abstract
resultant procedure," because very few of those "abstract" procedures will
ever actually occur. And it is that feature that will help Grice
with Obstacles 2 -- 3. For the theme of those obstacles is that unuttered
and novel sentences do not correspond to any actual speaker-meanings.
But at least arguably, they do correspond to the hypothetical speaker-meanings
that would be generated by Grice's abstract resultant procedures.
The appeal to abstract
procedures may also help to overcome Obstacle 4: Even though a certain
sentence's literal meaning is never matched by any actual speaker-meaning,
it may still correspond to a hypothetical resultant speaker-meaning.
Yet I believe that
this absolutely necessary appeal betrays the spirit of the Gricean program.
In effect, it gives the game away to a competing theory of meaning; I shall
argue that in Chapter 9.
Footnote
9. Schiffer (1972, Chapters V-VI) pursued a different method,
employing Lewis (1969)’s theory of conventions.