Paul Grice and the philosophy of language (original) (raw)
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Grice's account of speaker meaning.
The philosophy of language like its empirical cousin the psychology of language is a somewhat overlooked field, but I doubt for very much longer due to its massive potential to revel critically important insights into, human evolution, and the mind's structural and functional aspects. In this essay I will first briefly discuss Grice's account of speaking meaning, what he hoped to achieve by it and its success at describing meaning. Then I shall look at counterexamples to Grice's theory and Grice's reply to those examples and attempt to fix problems raised by them. Finally I shall look at the success of his ultimate goal of reducing sentence meaning to speaker meaning.
International Journal of Language Studies, 2022
The existing theories of meaning are classifiable into semantic and foundational categories. After a brief overview of these categories, the current paper will dwell on a discussion of what has urged pragmaticists to endorse a dovetailing of semantics and pragmatics in their attempts at presenting a comprehensive and exhaustive account of meaning. The paper then uses Balkhi’s analogy of ‘the elephant in the dark room’ to argue that (a) all of the existing theories of meaning are inadequate, and that (b) the Gricean vicious cycle is also the product of pragmaticists’ mistaking complimentary distribution for inclusional distribution. Arguing in favor of a physiological theory of meaning, the paper concludes that a comprehensive theory of meaning has to be a theory of human brain and/or mind and should be foundational.
How implicatures make Grice an unordinary ordinary language philosopher
Pragmatics. Quarterly Publication of the International Pragmatics Association (IPrA), 2006
Since Paul Grice first propounded his ideas surrounding conversation and implicature in 1967, they have had a continuous and tremendous impact on theorizing, and indeed on the design of entire research programmes, in philosophy, but also in many other disciplines, in particular linguistic pragmatics. Much of what builds on Grice’s original suggestions now belongs to the most powerful hypotheses in the respective fields. But while scholars outside philosophy usually acknowledge Grice’s merits for their own areas of interest, they hardly ever pay attention to his original philosophical intentions. These intentions are the central topic of the present paper. Its primary concern is to show how the theory of conversational implicature enabled Grice to adopt a unique theoretical position within 20th century analytic philosophy. In doing so, it also hopes to eliminate a number of widespread misconceptions regarding the explanatory ambitions of Grice’s original theory.
Non-Verbal Predication in Ancient Egyptian, 2017
The fields of semantics and pragmatics are devoted to the study of conventionalized and context-or use-dependent aspects of natural language meaning, respectively. The complexity of human language as a semiotic system has led to considerable debate about how the semantics/pragmatics distinction should be drawn, if at all. This debate largely reflects contrasting views of meaning as a property of linguistic expressions versus something that speakers do. The fact that both views of meaning are essential to a complete understanding of language has led to a variety of efforts over the last 40 years to develop better integrated and more comprehensive theories of language use and interpretation. The most important advances have included the adaptation of propositional analyses of declarative sentences to interrogative, imperative and exclamative forms; the emergence of dynamic, game theoretic, and multi-dimensional theories of meaning; and the development of various techniques for incorporating context-dependent aspects of content into representations of context-invariant content with the goal of handling phenomena such as vagueness resolution, metaphor, and metonymy. The fields of semantics and pragmatics are devoted to the study of the semiotics of language. The fact that two separate disciplines have developed for this purpose reflects the complexity of human language as a semiotic system, as well as the debate as to how it should be analyzed. This complexity is of at least four types. First, we use language not only to represent information (or thought) to ourselves and convey it to others, but also to act on and interact with others in ways that do not directly have to do with the transmission of information, such as greetings, exclamations or orders 1,2. Second, language is simultaneously highly systematic and flexible. On the one hand, interlocutors are under strong pressure to be consistent in their use of language to transmit messages; otherwise, communication would be more difficult and less reliable than it is. On the other, they continually innovate in using existing linguistic forms to convey new, and sometimes even radically different, messages via metaphor 3 , irony 4 , and other devices 5. Third, even if we assume a certain stability in the relation between linguistic form and what is communicated, the immediate context of use is Related Articles Article ID Article title COGSCI-086 Lexical Semantics COGSCI-106 Semantics, Acquisition of COGSCI-201 Discourse Processing
Paul Grice, reasoning and pragmatics
2000
Grice (1957, 1975, 1989) argued that communication involves inference and that speaker meaning is grounded in reasons. For Grice (2001), reasoning can be explicit and conscious or intuitive and unconscious. This paper suggests that pragmatic interpretation, even when unconscious, counts as reasoning, where reasoning is a goal-directed activity involving reason-preserving transitions, and that this was Grice's view. An alternative view
The Blackwell Guide to the Philosophy of Language
Journal of Pragmatics, 2009
(paperback) GBP 21.99. x + 446 pp. Also available online through Wiley InterScience subscription service This is no less than the nineteenth in the Blackwell Guides to Philosophy series. One might have expected Philosophy of Language to have appeared earlier in the series. It consists of an introduction and 20 chapters, often of about 15 pages each but sometimes more. Devitt and Hanley have assembled a genuinely distinguished set of authors. Following the introduction there are three sections: Foundational Issues, which consists of a single article by Martin Davies, followed by sections on Meaning and on Reference. This rather traditional principle of organization covers a reasonably broad range of topics. Given the importance of theories of meaning that depend on reference and truth there is considerable intermingling of content between the second and third sections. The way the series works is for authoritative authors to provide an overview of issues in the field, while not concealing their own positions. A reader of this journal who felt they wished to be exposed at a serious level to some of the main current themes in the Philosophy of Language could do well to look into this volume. There are other places to look, for example The Oxford Handbook of the Philosophy of Language which has well over twice the number of pages and double the number of articles, some on more specialized topics. The Blackwell Guide has its place, though, being perhaps less daunting and significantly more portable. Devitt and Hanley's 16-page introduction is indeed a good place to start for a reader with, say, a linguistics training and no great acquaintance with contemporary philosophy. It takes the reader through the topics discussed in the volume and thus lays out the nature of some of the obsessions and directions of philosophers with an interest in language. Martin Davies' Chapter 1: Foundational Issues is understandably challenging, but worthy of interest from readers of this journal. It is one place where you will see a philosopher's perspective on the relationship between semantics and pragmatics. But that is just one of a variety of foundational issues discussed, others being whether semantics can be a philosophical project, and the contrast between Davidson's (1984) and Grice's (1989) approaches to meaning. Chapter 2: The Nature of Meaning, by Paul Horwich, provides a kind of overview of the section on meaning. It covers: meaning scepticism, reductionism, language and thought, compositionality, normativity, externalism, deflationism, prospects for a use theory of meaning, and further problems. Looking through the authors referred to in that chapter gives you a good selection of the major players in the field. The semantics/pragmatics relationship, which was mentioned in Chapter 1, is developed more fully by Kent Bach in Chapter 8: Speech Acts and Pragmatics. The chapter covers performative utterances, the locutionary/illocutionary/ perlocutionary act distinction, kinds of illocutionary acts, Gricean reflexive communicative intentions (used to illuminate some illocutionary acts, as recommended by Strawson, 1972), conversational implicature and Bach's (1994) own notion of impliciture, conventional implicature (the notion originated in Frege, 1952!), the semantics/ pragmatics distinction, including the distinction between wide context (where there is contextual information relevant to ascertaining the speaker's intention) and narrow context (involving only information relevant to providing semantic values of context-sensitive expressions). There is also an interesting section on the significance of the semantics/pragmatics distinction. This illustrates Grice's stance against postulating unnecessary ambiguities, showing how the phenomena can be explained in terms of implicatures. It also covers how a simplistic association of meaning and use by ordinary language philosophers can lead to error, for example the move from the observation that describing something as good is typically used to express www.elsevier.com/locate/pragma
Semantics and Pragmatics, 2020
Meaning-making is at the center of all human communicative events. Communication is an exchange of meanings encoded in written or spoken words, non-verbal cues, signs, symbols, and so on. Creating, exchanging, and interpreting meaning is ingrained in human nature since prehistoric times. Language is the most sophisticated medium of communication. It is through language that we set meanings or in other words — refer, define, and signify the things in nature and the ideas in our mind. (Griffiths, 2017) The term ‘meaning of meaning’ was first coined by anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski in 1923. According to him meaning is related to multiple phenomena. It has various facets and these features are related to the external world (extra-linguistic factors) and the linguistic properties (phonetics, morphology, syntax, and semantics) The concept of meaning is vast and has many moving parts. Questing for the answer — ‘what is the meaning of meaning’ makes us take a multi-disciplinary approach; from linguistics, philosophy, neurology, to semiotics. In this essay, I will reflect on the meaning of ‘meaning’ from a multidisciplinary approach, discuss the challenges of doing meaning, and the role of context in understanding the meaning of words and sentences.
Journal of Linguistics, 2001
These are all very large and indeed, as Davis remarked on page , ' fascinating ' questions but they do not receive anything like an adequate treatment in the present book. But this book seems to be the preface to a larger project. Davis mentions at several points that he has another book in the works, entitled Meaning, expression, and thought, in which these matters are considered at greater length so perhaps a final verdict on his work ought to await the completion of this story. REFERENCES Atlas, J. D. (). Philosophy without ambiguity : a logico-linguistic essay. Oxford : Clarendon Press. Carston, R. (). Implicature, explicature, and truth-theoretic semantics. In Kempson, R. M. (ed.), Mental representations : the interface between language and reality. Cambridge : Cambridge University Press. -. Cohen, L. J. (). Some remarks on Grice's views about the logical particles of natural language. In Bar-Hillel, Y. (ed.), Pragmatics of natural languages. Dordrecht : D. Reidel. -. Cohen, L. J. (). Can the conversational hypothesis be defended ? Philosophical Studies . -. Cohen, L. J. (). How is conceptual innovation possible ? Erkenntnis . -. Davis, W. A. (a). Speaker meaning. Linguistics and Philosophy . -. Davis, W. A. (b). Cogitative and cognitive speaker meaning. Philosophical Studies . -. van Deemter, K. & Peters, S. (eds.) (). Semantic ambiguity and underspecification (CSLI Lecture Notes ).