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Can meaning be explained in terms of intention? (Maarten Steenhagen's…

- - - - Frege, early Wittgenstein- sentence meaning is more fundamental
      - Grice, later Wittgenstein- speaker meaning is more fundamental
  - - - Natural meaning- 'Your spots mean that you have the measles' 'that tree's rings mean that it is one hundred years old'
        
        Natural meaning is causal in some sense-this is how it acquires meaning
      - Non-natural meaning 'The gong sounding means that dinner is over'
        
        Non-natural meaning is the sort that Grice's theory is inteded to deal wit- its meaning is conventional/ communicative, not causal
      - Criteria for decidning whether something is a natura or non-natural case of meaning
        
        In the case of natural meaning, then there is an entailment between the sign and some consequence
        
        Wit natural meaning, you can say that the fact that something is the case means something- you can't in the case of non-natural meaning- the fact that you have spots means that you have measles, whereas the fact that the gong sounds doesn't mean that dinner is over- it is not the fact, but the ringing itself that means that
    - - Speaker meaning-
        Establishing necessary and sufficient conditions for a speaker to mean something by a symbol/sentence/statement:
        
        working the criteria out
        
        Example: in the presence of Boris, Theresa says 'there will be a third runway'- by this, Theresa intends Boris to cmeto know that there wil be a third runway
        
        Problem- However, it is not as simple as the speaker simply intending to convey information- for example, if I plant drugs in Fred's house, I may be intending for the detective to come to believe that Fred is guilty of being a drug dealer. However, it does not seems right to say that my planting the drugs means this.
        
        So, in addition to the intention to cause a belief in the mind of another, we also need the intention for your intention to be apparent. This is what is missing in the case of the drugs.
        
        Another problem-what if Theresa shows Boris a phto of the third runway being built, rather than telling him that there will be a third? Is that what the photo then means, given Theresa's intentions? Surely not? Even if Boris puts no credence in Theresa's communicative intention, he may still be conviend by the photo that there will be a third runway. So, it seems that intention+receiving of intention are not enough
        
        So, we need another condition: the listener needs to come to bleive the information because thye recognise the speaker's ntetion, not because of some other feature of the interation
        
        Theresa means something by her utterance of 'there will be a third runway' iff: 1. Theresa intends her utterance of "There will be a third runway." to induce in Boris the belief that there will be a third runway. 2. Theresa intends Boris to recognise the intention behind her utterance of "There will be a third runway." 3. Theresa intends that Boris' recognition of her intention will play a part in his forming the belief that there will be a third runway.
      - Sentence meaning- what is it for a sentence to mean something, not on a particular occasion of a speaker's use? what does the sentence itself mean? how can we derive this from speaker meaning?
        
        "x means (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". (Steenhagen's summary)
    - - Implicatures work because of the norms of conversation- when someone appears to violate the norms of conversation,we seek to provide an interpretation which makes sense of what they said- we assume that our conversational partners are cooperative, and seeing to proivde relevant information, etc.- Grice's conversational maixms
- - - - Frege thought of sentence meaning as primary
      - Some general remarks on how Strawson charaferised this debate as a 'Homeric struggle' with 'gods' of such stature as Frege+early Wittgenstein on the one side, and Grice+ later Wittgenstein on the other
      - Then launches into a description of Grice's theory of speaker meaning as primary
        
        "Note that Grice’s analysis of sentence- or linguistic meaning is intended to be a reductive analysis: the notion of speaker’s-meaning is defined in terms of utterers’ intentions, in a way that requires no use of the notion of sentence-meaning; and the notion of sentence-meaning is defined in terms of speaker’s-meaning and convention, in a way which requires no use of the notion of sentence-meaning. The meaning of language is non-circularly analysed in terms of mental content."
        
        Grice's theory has been subjected to endless counter examples- Miller deals with two (one from Paul Ziff, and one from Searle), and with Searle's refinement as a response to them
        
        The first counterexample is due to Paul Ziff: On being inducted into the army, George is compelled to take a test designed to establish sanity. George is known to be an irritable academic. The test he is being given would be appropriate for morons. One of the questions asked is: “What would you say if you were asked to identify yourself?”. George replied to the officer asking the question by uttering (14): (14) Ugh ugh blugh blugh ugh blug blug.8 George intends the officer to be offended, and, moreover, he intends to induce the officer’s being offended by means of the officer’s recognition of this intention. So according to Grice’s analysis, George meansNN something by (14). But according to Ziff, this is implausible. George does not mean anything by (14) (that is the whole point of his uttering it in this situation).
        
        Suppose that I am an American soldier in WW2 and that I am captured by Italian troops. And suppose also that I wish to get these troops to believe that I am a German officer in order to get them to release me. What I would like to do is to tell them in German or Italian that I am a German officer. But let us suppose that I don’t know enough German or Italian to do that. So I attempt to put on a show of telling them that I am a German officer by reciting those few bits of German that I know, trusting that they don’t know enough German to see through my plan. Let us suppose I know only one line of German, which I remember from a poem I had to memorize in a high school German course. Therefore I, a captured American, address my Italian captors with the following sentence: “Kennst du das Land, wo die Zitronen blühen?”9 Here, the soldier intends to induce the belief that he is a German officer in the Italians, and he intends that they form this belief in virtue of their recognition of this intention. So, according to Grice’s account the following is true: (15) The soldier meansNN that he is a German officer by “Kennst du das Land, wo die Zitronen blühen?”. But according to Searle this is implausible: In this case it seems plainly false that when I utter the German sentence what I mean is “I am a German officer”, or even “Ich bin ein deutscher Offizier”, because what the words mean is, “Knowest thou the land where the lemon trees bloom?”. Of course, I want my captors to be deceived into thinking that what I mean is “I am a German officer”, but part of what is involved in the deception is getting them to think that that is what the words which I utter mean in German.10
        
        Searle thinks that the problem with Grice's account is that it fails to adequately make a connection between what a speaker means to induce in their listeners and what the sentence they utter actrally means in the language.
        
        Moving on to Searle's amendment- we first need to understand the distinction between perlocutionary and illocutionary effects- illocutnionary effects are those effects which are prducd in your audience simpl by their recognition of your intetion. Fr example, if you thanks someone, and they recognise your intetion to thanks them, theyy are thereby thanked- similarly if you order someone to do something , or if you warn them of something. Perlocutionary effects, on the other hand, are not fulfilled simply by the audeince's recognition of your intention- if you intend to embarrass someone, or to amuse or impress them, or for them to form a certain belief, thenthis may or may not be realised even if they have recogised your intention
        
        Searle thinks that Grice's account needs to be refined by stipulating that the effects that you intned to produce by your meaning should be illocutionary
        
        Searle thus adds to Grice’s three conditions on speaker’s-meaningNN the conditions (iv) that the speaker’s intentions be illocutionary and (v) that he intends to respect the conventions governing the use of the relevant expression in the language concerned: In the performance of an illocutionary act the speaker intends to produce a certain effect by means of getting the hearer to recognize his intention to produce that effect, and furthermore, if he is using words literally, he intends this recognition to be achieved in virtue of the fact that the rules for using the expressions associate the expressions with the production of that effect.
        
        This deals with the first counterexample because the effect produced by George would not be illocutionary- George's intent to offend might or might not offend notwithstanding the officer's recognition of George's intent to cause offence
        
        This deals with the second counter example too, which fails Searle's new condition on two counts- first, the effect (for the Italians to believe that the American is a German officer) would not be illocuntionary, and also even if that effect were produced it would not be because of the recognition of the intention to be achieved because of the conventional achievement of this intetionwith the German phrase uttered
        
        Objection- however, this means that the account as modified by Searle is now circular- Searle's final condition seems to presuppose sentence meaning, which in turn is defined in terms of speaker meaning as in Grice's account
        
        Objections to Grice's theory from Mark Platts