Work · Analytic Philosophy
Meaning
To mean something by an utterance is to intend that the hearer respond in a certain way because they recognise this intention.
Introduction
H. P. Grice, a philosopher at St John’s College, Oxford, wrote the paper in 1948 but published it only in 1957 in The Philosophical Review, reportedly after Strawson had submitted it. He distinguishes natural meaning, as in “those spots mean measles”, from non-natural meaning, as in “three rings on the bell mean that the bus is full”. His analysis of the latter has three parts: the speaker intends to produce a response in the hearer, intends the hearer to recognise that intention, and intends this recognition to be part of the hearer’s reason for responding. The paper founded intention-based semantics; Grice refined the analysis in later work, and Strawson, John Searle and others debated it for decades.
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