Grice on Meaning: The Ultimate Counter-Example Author(s): N. L. Wilson Reviewed work(s): Source: Nos, Vol. 4, No. 3 (Sep.

, 1970), pp. 295-302 Published by: Blackwell Publishing Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2214430 . Accessed: 01/11/2011 07:37
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Grice Meaning: Ultimate on The

Counter-example'
N. L. WILSON
MCMASTER UNIVERSITY, CANADA

Recently (in [3]), H. P. Grice has taken another crack at elaborating and defending the theory of meaning first offered in [2]. I shall try (I) to show that Grice is on the wrong track of what he is ostensibly after, (II) to show that he is on the right track of something else, and (III) to sketch what I believe to be the right track of what Grice is ostensibly after. I Grice concedes (on p. 151 of [3]) that the definiendumof
primary interest is (A): "By uttering x U meant that p." Neverthe-

less he devoted most of the 1957 paper and a considerableportion of the present one to a treatmentof (B), "By uttering x U meant something."Then, elaboratingon that treatmenthe proceeds to an analysisof (A). For the moment I shall deal with (B) and I shall
discuss the initial unrefined definiens (taken over from the 1957

paper) because my objections will apply equally to the refined versions.The initial definitionis (more or less, p. 151 of [3]):
U meant something by uttering x iff, for some audience

A, U uttered x, intending (1) A to produce a particular [emphasis added] response r, (2) A to think (recognize) that U intends (1), [and] (3) A to fulfill (1) on the basis
of his fulfillment of (2).
1 Some of the ideas in this paper stem from the period during which the author was a recipient of NSF grant GS572.

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I suggest that we have here a confusion between what the uttererintended to say (convey)-i.e., the alleged fact he intended to report-and what he intended to accomplish by saying it. [At Oberlin I taxed Grice with this point. His reply, if I rememberit correctly,was: "But that's my thesis I may be mistaken, but I'm not confused."]I shall speak of these intentionsrespectively as the primary (linguistic) intention and the secondary intention. There might be cases where we would to talk of tertiaryintentions.At any rate it seems to me that the primaryand secondary intentions may vary independently, and, if so, Grice's analysis is not just faulty, but on the wrong track.If I am right it would explain why so many with Grice. people have had so much fun playing counter-examples -To make out my case I shall have to move back and forth between the two definiendaabove, (A) and (B). Suppose someone offers 'Qx and Rx' as an analysis of 'Px'.To attack the analysis one invents a (consistent) scenario in which either a is Q and R but not P (too broad!) or in which a is P but not Q and R (too narrow!). I shall do the latter. Suppose (and here beginneth the firstscenario) I am conversingwith Grice. I say 'Snow is white'. By uttering 'Snow is white' I mean that snow is white. It follows that by uttering 'Snow is white" I mean something. Accordingto Grice it follows that I intend (1), (2) and (3) above. Now I do intend to say (report the fact) that snow is white, but the only secondaryintention I have is to avoid having any of the intentions Grice attributes to me in this or any subsequent papers of his. If Grice amends his definition,I amend my scenario.He can'twin. That is why I call this the ultimate counterexample. One might cavil at the suggestion that one can intend to avoid intending to bring about y, but it hardly matters, since one can certainly avoid trying to accomplishy. Now the foregoing may sound a bit like the open question argument. It is to the extent that I dogmatically claim that intuitively we can see that there is no inconsistency in a scenario whose last act is: So. By uttering 'Snow is white' you meant something.Did you intend to produce this response in me? Myself: (correctly-that's essential): No sir! Grice: That response? Myself: No. There is no response such that I intended to elicit that response from you. But you can't claim that I wasn't really talking to you. Of course I was. If you hadn'theard Grice:

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me I would have repeated myself in a louder voice. As a matterof fact I didn'teven intend that you should abandon your views. If I had, I might, of course, have played into into your hands. In any case-and this is more to the point-you can only intend to produce an effect if you deem it possible to do so (as you have pointed out) and everybody knows it is not possible to persuade a philosopherto give up a cherished doctrine. To repeat, I wasn't trying to produce any particularresponsein you at all. My only intention was to behave in a counterexemplaryway. Now let us turn for the moment to (A), the more interesting of the two definienda. It is central to Grice's view that "generic differencesin type of response would be connected with generic differences within what is meant" ([3], p. 165). Now the word "generic"may, I think, be ignored; otherwise it constitutes an escape hatch that would trivialize the position. (How generic?!) We have the claim, roughly,that if the definitionis of the following form: By uttering x U meant that p iff, for some A, U intended A to produce response r and .... then there is a specifiable covariance between p and r, between what is meant and the response that the utterer intends to elicit. Again, a counter-exampleis forthcoming. The previous scenario will serve and moreover,we may relax a restriction. Now I may indeed, without imperilingmy position, utter 'Snow is white' meanin that snow is white, with the sole intention (however naive) of dislodging Grice from his position. Here there is no correlation between what I meant and what psychic change I intended to produce in my interlocutor. Now, however, we must wonder how much importanceis to be attachedto a successfulcounter-example, the more ingenious and and intricate the scenario,the more we wonder. Perhaps no interesting philosophicalposition is immune to attack by some kind of I counter-example. may say, too, that I don't think a position is to be dismissedjust because it has a certainprima facie implausibility. But where there is that implausibilitythen a counter-example may serve to nail down the case against the position beyond reasonable doubt. And the covarianceclaim, the claim that what is meant and the hoped for response co-vary, does seem implausible. If I wish

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my guests to leave, there are any number of different things I might say (and mean by what I say) in order to shoo them out. On the other hand, if I say, "Ifs getting pretty late," meaning that it's getting pretty late, there might be any one of a number of differentthings I expect of my audience. There just is not the kind of covariancenecessary to make Grice'stheory go.

II
At this point I shall take time out to indulge in a bit of sympathetic exegesis. If a philosophermentioned the problem (let us say) of analyzing"xcauses y" and immediatelyshifted his attention to "x causes something"we should think he was wasting our time. Grice'sconcernwith "Byuttering x U meant something"' puzzling is but I don't believe it to be in the same case. The 1957 paper can be read as simply elaboratingthe distinction between those cases where we have "natural" meaning (symptomatizing,being a symtom of) and those cases where we have "non-natural" meaning (signaling). The following scenarios are reminiscent of Grice's frown examples in the 1957 paper, but my treatment is slightly different. (a) I cough (spontaneously). You infer that I have a chest cold. The cough meansN (symptomatizes) a chest cold. (Cf. "Smoke means fire","Thosespots mean measles".) (b) I say to you, "I have a chest cold." By my utterance I signal to you that I have a chest cold. You infer that I have a chest cold. But this inference-if that is what it should be called-is vastly different from that in (a). There you observe my response and engage in causal theorizingabout it. Here you "read"my response, or as Austinputs it. There is "uptake" understanding. And of course what is involved in having this kind of understandingis precisely what is of such very great interest to a language-theoretician. (c) My boss appearsat my door. I don't want to dismisshim and at the same time I don't want to ask him in. Knowingthat he has a horrorof germs I cough several times, deliberately,thus simulating case (a). ["That'squite a cold you've got there. I'll be on my way and let you take care of it."] (Sub-cases: (i) I really do have a cold and (ii) I really don't have a cold.) Here we have a case of what could be called quasi-signaling. There is the intention of conveying information(or, possibly, misinformation)and at the same

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time the intentionof concealingthat there is that intention.I could have signaled that I had a cold simply by saying so [but since my boss is slightly paranoidI thought it more prudent to avoid saying anything he could misconstrue and instead, to jockey him into taking the initiative]. Now it is possible to signal y by signaling x. [I signal to my hostess that it has been a very pleasant evening by saying so in an appropriatetone of voice. And thereby signal that I am grateful for having been invited.] And one can quasi-signalby signaling. I shall not give an example. Sufficeit to say that Lifemanshipin its most advanced forms depends on this fact. But it does not seem And the reason is that the copossible to signal by quasi-signaling. will carryright through.(The vertnessof the originalquasi-signaling sycophanticbridge player (in [3], p. 154) is, I judge, Stampe-Grice by a case of quasi-signaling simulated quasi-signaling.He is quasisignaling to his boss that he wants him (the boss) to know that he has a good hand and he does so by a too transparentquasi-signalthe simulation of a simulated smile (supposing that's possible). of What is covert is the deliberate transparency the "inside"quasisignal. What is clear in any case is that the variety of possible combinationsmust be just about limitless.) At any rate Grice'spapers may be read as pointing out that whatever else signaling is, it is of the essence of signaling (in contrast to its cousins) that the signaler intend that the signalee should recognize that the signaler is deliberatelysignaling and, moreover, that the signalerintend, or at least take for granted,that the signalee should recognizethat he is (primarily) signalingthis and not something else. (Grice has bent his efforts to breaking the above circularity.) This observation on signaling seems to me to be true and interesting. It is, however, a contributionto what would be called the pure sociology of speech behavior, not to semantics or meaning theory.To the latter we now turn.

III
I want to go back and consider (A), "By uttering x U meant that p". It seems to me that one can get some leverage on the analysisof (A) by asking:How does one attackthe question 'Vhat did U mean by uttering x?"?Suppose I am crossing the Kalahari Desert. An African comes up to me and says (utters), 'Hut sut rawson ona rillaraw'.How do I find out what he means? I do not

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inquire into his intentions.Once I have decipheredwhat he means, then I may be able to hazarda guess as to what his intentionswere in regard to me. What I do is follow him back to his village, whip out my trusty tape-recorderand make motions like a field-worker in linguistics. How we do field-work is a question of theoretical descriptivelinguistics. I shall leave that to the experts and instead do theoreticaldescriptivesemantics.The latter is presumablysomething like the former but is much more artificial. (We cheat in differentways.) An illustration.The second sentence of III.50 of Thucydides is 'Mutilenai6nteiche katheilon'.How do I find out what it means? I do not have a Greek-Englishlexicon and I know only that the text is about the PeloponnesianWar. What I do is rent a computer, stuff it with all we know about the PeloponnesianWar and then feed into it as a corpus of utterancesthe Greektext of Thucydides. If computersare half as good as they are supposed to be then this one ought to be able to decipher the text before you can say 'Zeus', come up with a Greek-Englishdictionary,a translationof the text and, in particular,tell us that the sentence in question means that they razed the walls of the Mytilenaeans.Of course any corpus of utterances can be given an arbitraryinterpretation-any number for of interpretations, that matter.But not every corpushas a single, right interpretation,right in the sense of being that interpretation under which the largest possible numberof sentences of the corpus will be true. (What else could possibly make an interpretation "right"?)The computer operates in accordancewith what I have elsewhere called the Principle of Charity.It seeks that interpretation which, in the light of what it knows of the facts, will maximize truth among the sentences of the corpus. In effect, it plays a very large number of games of twenty questions with the corpus and plays them simultaneously. The point is that it is no good askingthe computerto decipher a single sentence. It cannot work with anything less than a fairly large corpus.Ask Ventris (See [1]). And of course the corpus must be "integral"in the sense of stemming from a single source, a monolingualindividualor language community. As a first stab, then, let us try: By utteringx U meant something=df there is a corpusof utterances (including x) associatedwith U whose one right interpretation is such that under that interpretationx means that (or, is true if and only if) p.

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There is no circularityhere. We explain 'he means p' in terms of 'it means p' and the latter is understood from pure formal semantics. And the merit of this approach,if ultimately successful, is that the definiens contains no intentional words like "intends"or "believes". By utteringx U meant something=df there is a corpusof utterances (including x) associatedwith U which has a right interpretationand endows x with an interpretation. It will be noted that the second of these definitionsis in effect a definition of "Utterancex means something (is meaningful) and is not gibberish". The Grice I presented in ?II, on the other hand, is in effect, defining"Utterancex meansNN something i.e., is a case of non-naturalmeaning (signaling) and is not a case of symptomatizing or quasi-signaling." Now the class of speech acts proper and the class of (linguistic) signalings are distinct. There can, I should think-Grice notwithstanding-be speech acts which are not signalings;and one can signal by spoutinggibberish.(That is the point of Ziff'sexample of the irritableacademic (in [5], p. 2)). At any rate it seems clear that there are two quite distinct analysandafloating around here and I strongly suspect that all the participants (including myself) in the discussions prompted by Grice's 1957 paper have simply confused them. Dennis Stampe (in [4]) has argued convincinglythat meaning is not a doing. There are some relevant things that one can do, viz., utter a token of 'Snow is white', or reportthe fact that snow is white. But meaning that snow is white is not something that you can do. And I think we can see why. It has already been done, so to speak, in virtue of the corpus of utterances lying behind you and giving meaningto what you currentlysay. To put it differently, it is always false to say anything like this: "When I said 'Snow is white' two minutes ago I meant by that utterance that sulphur is yellow."I just do not have the independent control over my meanings. Grice would point out that I can't utter 'Snow is white' and intend or reasonablyexpect to induce in my audience a belief that sulphuris yellow. But-to probe a little deeper-the reason is that both of us are in a very real sense in the grip of our corpora,out past responses and experiences. But I am not simply saying that we are creaturesof habit. I am making the systematic point that the question "What does he mean?" can be answered, not with

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referenceto present psychologicalstates but only with reference to past output, or at least to some corpus which he shares in part. We can break our linguistic patternsbut that requires an explicit repudiationof the past: "Now folks, from here on in, when I say 'Snow is white' I shall mean that sulphur is yellow." (But this kind of switch depends upon establishedlinguistic convention,and I move that we all agree not to let the possibility further muddy our already muddy waters.) Grice has drawnattentionto a puzzling and importantfeature of signaling and done some majorspade work. He is, I think, mistaken in trying to analyze the meaning of an utterance in terms of the immediate, local social transaction that takes place when a person utters a token with meaning. It seems to me that meaning has to be approachedholistically, in terms of a whole corpus of utterances.And I think there are philosophical gains to be made by trying to go as far as possible in treatingthe meaning of descriptive utteranceswithout any referenceto the social transaction.
REFERENCES [1] John Chadwick, The Decipherment of Linear B, Cambridge, 1958. [2] H. P. Grice, "Meaning,"Philosophical Review, LXVI (1957): 377-388. [3] H. P. Grice, "Utterer's meaning and intentions," Philosophical Review, LXXVIII (1969): 147-177. [4] Dennis Stampe, "Toward a grammar of meaning," Philosophical Review, LXXVII (1968): 137-173. [5] Paul Ziff, "OnH. P. Grice's account of meaning," Analysis, XXVIII (1967): 1-8.