Stephen Schiffer (born 1940) is an American philosopher and currently Silver Professor of Philosophy at New York University . He is a specialist in the philosophy of language .
93-403: Herbert Paul Grice (13 March 1913 – 28 August 1988), usually publishing under the name H. P. Grice , H. Paul Grice , or Paul Grice , was a British philosopher of language who created the theory of implicature and the cooperative principle (with its namesake Gricean maxims), which became foundational concepts in the linguistic field of pragmatics . His work on meaning has also influenced
186-589: A Ph.D. in philosophy from Oxford University in 1970. He taught at the University of California, Berkeley , University of Arizona , and Graduate Center of the City University of New York before moving to New York University Department of Philosophy . He was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2007. He has specialized in the philosophy of language , and
279-418: A semantic fact (i.e., the proposition that is represented by "The horse is red"). In other words, a propositional function is like an algorithm. The meaning of "red" in this case is whatever takes the entity "the horse" and turns it into the statement, "The horse is red." Linguists have developed at least two general methods of understanding the relationship between the parts of a linguistic string and how it
372-597: A convention exactly is, and how it is studied, and second regards the extent that conventions even matter in the study of language. David Kellogg Lewis proposed a worthy reply to the first question by expounding the view that a convention is a "rationally self-perpetuating regularity in behavior". However, this view seems to compete to some extent with the Gricean view of speaker's meaning, requiring either one (or both) to be weakened if both are to be taken as true. Some have questioned whether or not conventions are relevant to
465-408: A conventional implicature). Grice did not elaborate much on the notion of conventional implicature, but many other authors have tried to give more extensive theories of it, including Lauri Karttunen and Stanley Peters , Kent Bach, Stephen Neale, and Christopher Potts. To conversationally implicate something in speaking, according to Grice, is to mean something that goes beyond what one says in such
558-441: A discipline that some literary theorists claim overlaps with the philosophy of language. It emphasizes the methods that readers and critics use in understanding a text. This field, an outgrowth of the study of how to properly interpret messages, is closely tied to the ancient discipline of hermeneutics . Stephen Schiffer Schiffer was awarded a Bachelor of Arts in philosophy from the University of Pennsylvania in 1962 and
651-538: A full theory of generalised conversational implicatures that distinguishes them from particularised conversational implicatures, on one hand, and from conventional implicatures, on the other hand, but later philosophers and linguists have attempted to expand on the idea of generalised conversational implicatures. In his book Studies in the Way of Words (1989), he presents what he calls Grice's paradox . In it, he supposes that two chess players, Yog and Zog, play 100 games under
744-458: A particular occasion in virtue of special features about the context, cases in which there is no room for the idea that an implicature of this sort is normally carried by saying that p ." Generalized implicature, by contrast, arise in cases in which "one can say that the use of a certain form of words in an utterance would normally (in the absence of special circumstances) carry such-and-such an implicature or type of implicature." Grice does not offer
837-459: A philosophy job, and his letter reads as follows: "Dear Sir, Mr. X's command of English is excellent, and his attendance at tutorials has been regular. Yours, etc." (Gloss: A cannot be opting out, since if he wished to be uncooperative, why write at all? He cannot be unable, through ignorance, to say more, since the man is his pupil; moreover, he knows that more information than this is wanted. He must, therefore, be wishing to impart information that he
930-419: A range of correctness. He also argued that primitive names had a natural correctness, because each phoneme represented basic ideas or sentiments. For example, for Plato the letter l and its sound represented the idea of softness. However, by the end of Cratylus , he had admitted that some social conventions were also involved, and that there were faults in the idea that phonemes had individual meanings. Plato
1023-407: A real commonality of form, he is more often considered a proponent of moderate realism . The Stoics made important contributions to the analysis of grammar, distinguishing five parts of speech: nouns, verbs, appellatives (names or epithets ), conjunctions and articles . They also developed a sophisticated doctrine of the lektón associated with each sign of a language, but distinct from both
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#17327657332711116-522: A referent. Such a "mediated reference" view has certain theoretical advantages over Mill's view. For example, co-referential names, such as Samuel Clemens and Mark Twain , cause problems for a directly referential view because it is possible for someone to hear "Mark Twain is Samuel Clemens" and be surprised – thus, their cognitive content seems different. Despite the differences between the views of Frege and Russell, they are generally lumped together as descriptivists about proper names. Such descriptivism
1209-430: A series of images of imaginary aliens. Whether each alien was friendly or hostile was determined by certain subtle features but participants were not told what these were. They had to guess whether each alien was friendly or hostile, and after each response they were told if they were correct or not, helping them learn the subtle cues that distinguished friend from foe. A quarter of the participants were told in advance that
1302-433: A speaker apparently says something without meaning it—are actually examples of what he calls "making as if to say", which can be thought of as a kind of "mock saying" or "play saying". Another point of controversy surrounding Grice's notion of saying is the relationship between what a speaker says with an expression and the expression's timeless meaning. Although he attempts to spell out the connection in detail several times,
1395-664: A speaker means by an utterance. (Grice didn't introduce this label until "Logic and Conversation." The more common label in contemporary work is "speaker meaning", though Grice didn't use that term.) Timeless meaning : The kind of meaning that can be possessed by a type of utterance such as a word or a sentence (rather than by an individual speaker). (This is often called "conventional meaning", although Grice didn't call it that.) The two steps in intention-based semantics are (1) to define utterer's meaning in terms of speakers' overt audience-directed intentions, and then (2) to define timeless meaning in terms of utterer's meaning. The net effect
1488-651: A variable ranging over speakers and 'x' is a variable ranging over utterances.) Grice generalises this definition of speaker meaning later in 'Meaning' so that it applies to commands and questions, which, he argues, differ from assertions in that the speaker intends to induce an intention rather than a belief. Grice's initial definition was controversial, and seemingly gives rise to a variety of counterexamples, and so later adherents of intention-based semantics—including Grice himself, Stephen Schiffer , Jonathan Bennett , Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson , and Stephen Neale —have attempted to improve on it in various ways while keeping
1581-516: A way predicted by grammatical gender . For example, when asked to describe a "key"—a word that is masculine in German and feminine in Spanish—the German speakers were more likely to use words like "hard", "heavy", "jagged", "metal", "serrated" and "useful" whereas Spanish speakers were more likely to say "golden", "intricate", "little", "lovely", "shiny" and "tiny". To describe a "bridge", which
1674-560: A way that it must be inferred from non-linguistic features of a conversational situation together with general principles of communication and co-operation. The general principles Grice proposed are what he called the Cooperative principle and the Maxims of Conversation . According to Grice, the cooperative principle is a norm governing all cooperative interactions among humans. Cooperative Principle : "Make your contribution such as it
1767-451: A whole was understood to be a matter of philosophy of language. In continental philosophy , the foundational work in the field was Ferdinand de Saussure 's Cours de linguistique générale , published posthumously in 1916. The topic that has received the most attention in the philosophy of language has been the nature of meaning, to explain what "meaning" is, and what we mean when we talk about meaning. Within this area, issues include:
1860-480: Is a tradition called speculative grammar which existed from the 11th to the 13th century. Leading scholars included Martin of Dacia and Thomas of Erfurt (see Modistae ). Linguists of the Renaissance and Baroque periods such as Johannes Goropius Becanus , Athanasius Kircher and John Wilkins were infatuated with the idea of a philosophical language reversing the confusion of tongues , influenced by
1953-451: Is also closely connected to what the sentence means. Nonetheless, what a speaker conventionally implicates is not a part of what the speaker says. U's doing x might be his uttering the sentence "She was poor but she was honest". What U meant, and what the sentence means, will both contain something contributed by the word "but", and I do not want this contribution to appear in an account of what (in my favored sense) U said (but rather as
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#17327657332712046-546: Is deeply counterintuitive. Hence, names are rigid designators , according to Kripke. That is, they refer to the same individual in every possible world in which that individual exists. In the same work, Kripke articulated several other arguments against " Frege–Russell " descriptivism (see also Kripke's causal theory of reference ). The whole philosophical enterprise of studying reference has been critiqued by linguist Noam Chomsky in various works. It has long been known that there are different parts of speech . One part of
2139-606: Is different from them, and perceptibles are apprehended each by the one kind of organ, speech by another. Hence, since the objects of sight cannot be presented to any other organ but sight, and the different sense-organs cannot give their information to one another, similarly speech cannot give any information about perceptibles. Therefore, if anything exists and is comprehended, it is incommunicable. There are studies that prove that languages shape how people understand causality. Some of them were performed by Lera Boroditsky . For example, English speakers tend to say things like "John broke
2232-529: Is feminine in German and masculine in Spanish, the German speakers said "beautiful", "elegant", "fragile", "peaceful", "pretty" and "slender", and the Spanish speakers said "big", "dangerous", "long", "strong", "sturdy" and "towering". This was the case even though all testing was done in English, a language without grammatical gender. In a series of studies conducted by Gary Lupyan, people were asked to look at
2325-457: Is his theory of implicature, which started in his 1961 article, "The Causal Theory of Perception", and "Logic and Conversation", which was delivered at Harvard's 'William James Lectures' in 1967, and published in 1975 as a chapter in volume 3 of Syntax and Semantics: Speech Acts . According to Grice, what a speaker means by an utterance can be divided into what the speaker "says" and what the speaker thereby "implicates". Grice makes it clear that
2418-534: Is not necessarily true that if Aristotle existed then Aristotle was any one, or all, of these descriptions. Aristotle may well have existed without doing any single one of the things for which he is known to posterity. He may have existed and not have become known to posterity at all or he may have died in infancy. Suppose that Aristotle is associated by Mary with the description "the last great philosopher of antiquity" and (the actual) Aristotle died in infancy. Then Mary's description would seem to refer to Plato. But this
2511-477: Is often considered a proponent of extreme realism . Aristotle interested himself with issues of logic , categories, and the creation of meaning. He separated all things into categories of species and genus . He thought that the meaning of a predicate was established through an abstraction of the similarities between various individual things. This theory later came to be called nominalism . However, since Aristotle took these similarities to be constituted by
2604-478: Is partly something originally given, partly that which develops freely. And just as the individual can never reach the point at which he becomes absolutely independent ... so too with language. The phrase " linguistic turn " was used to describe the noteworthy emphasis that contemporary philosophers put upon language. Language began to play a central role in Western philosophy in the early 20th century. One of
2697-401: Is possible to use the concept of functions to describe more than just how lexical meanings work: they can also be used to describe the meaning of a sentence. In the sentence "The horse is red", "the horse" can be considered to be the product of a propositional function . A propositional function is an operation of language that takes an entity (in this case, the horse) as an input and outputs
2790-476: Is put together: syntactic and semantic trees. Syntactic trees draw upon the words of a sentence with the grammar of the sentence in mind; semantic trees focus upon the role of the meaning of the words and how those meanings combine to provide insight onto the genesis of semantic facts. Some of the major issues at the intersection of philosophy of language and philosophy of mind are also dealt with in modern psycholinguistics . Some important questions regard
2883-433: Is reluctant to write down. This supposition is tenable only if he thinks Mr. X is no good at philosophy. This, then, is what he is implicating.) Given that a speaker means a given proposition p by a given utterance, Grice suggests several features which p must possess to count as a conversational implicature. Nondetachability: "The implicature is nondetachable insofar as it is not possible to find another way of saying
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2976-402: Is required, at the stage at which it occurs, by the accepted purpose or direction of the talk exchange in which you are engaged." (Grice 1989: 26). The conversational maxims can be thought of as precisifications of the cooperative principle that deal specifically with communication. Maxim of Quantity: Information Maxim of Quality: Truth (supermaxim: "Try to make your contribution one that
3069-418: Is that the meaning of a word or sentence results from a regularity in what speakers use the word or sentence to mean. Grice would give a much more detailed theory of timeless meaning in his sixth Logic and Conversation lecture. A more influential attempt to expand on this component of intention-based semantics has been given by Stephen Schiffer. Grice's most influential contribution to philosophy and linguistics
3162-401: Is the connection between it and his concept of utterer's meaning. Grice makes it clear that he takes saying to be a kind of meaning, in the sense that doing the former entails doing the latter: "I want to say that (1) "U (utterer) said that p" entails (2) "U did something x by which U meant that p" (87). This condition is controversial, but Grice argues that apparent counterexamples—cases in which
3255-399: Is to define all linguistic notions of meaning in purely mental terms, and to thus shed psychological light on the semantic realm. Grice tries to accomplish the first step by means of the following definition: "A meant NN something by x" is roughly equivalent to "A uttered x with the intention of inducing a belief by means of the recognition of this intention". (In this definition, 'A' is
3348-462: Is to perform a "central" speech act. As others have more commonly put the same distinction, saying is a kind of "direct" speech act whereas implicating is an "indirect" speech act. This latter way of drawing the distinction is an important part of John Searle 's influential theory of speech acts. Although Grice is best known for his theory of conversational implicature , he also introduced the notion of conventional implicature . The difference between
3441-497: Is to what extent language influences thought and vice versa. There have been a number of different perspectives on this issue, each offering a number of insights and suggestions. Linguists Sapir and Whorf suggested that language limited the extent to which members of a "linguistic community" can think about certain subjects (a hypothesis paralleled in George Orwell 's novel Nineteen Eighty-Four ). In other words, language
3534-565: Is true") Maxim of Relation: Relevance Maxim of Manner: Clarity (supermaxim: "Be perspicuous") Grice follows his summary of the maxims by suggesting that "one might need others" (i.e. the list is not necessarily exhaustive), and goes on to say that "There are, of course, all sorts of other maxims (aesthetic, social, or moral in character), such as "Be polite", that are also normally observed by participants in exchanges, and these may also generate nonconventional implicatures." Conversational implicatures are made possible, according to Grice, by
3627-439: Is used in metaphor , metonyms and other figures of speech). A proper suppositio , in turn, can be either formal or material accordingly when it refers to its usual non-linguistic referent (as in "Charles is a man"), or to itself as a linguistic entity (as in " Charles has seven letters"). Such a classification scheme is the precursor of modern distinctions between use and mention , and between language and metalanguage. There
3720-458: Is used socially. Specific interests include the topics of language learning , language creation, and speech acts . Secondly, the question of how language relates to the minds of both the speaker and the interpreter is investigated. Of specific interest is the grounds for successful translation of words and concepts into their equivalents in another language. An important problem which touches both philosophy of language and philosophy of mind
3813-766: The Second World War Grice served in the Royal Navy ; after the war he returned to his Fellowship at St John's, which he held until 1967. In that year, he moved to the United States to take up a professorship at the University of California, Berkeley , where he taught until his death in 1988. He returned to the UK in 1979 to give the John Locke lectures on Aspects of Reason . He reprinted many of his essays and papers in his valedictory book, Studies in
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3906-709: The Vienna Circle , logical positivists , and Willard Van Orman Quine . In the West, inquiry into language stretches back to the 5th century BC with Socrates , Plato , Aristotle , and the Stoics . Linguistic speculation predated systematic descriptions of grammar which emerged c. the 5th century BC in India and c. the 3rd century BC in Greece. In the dialogue Cratylus , Plato considered
3999-524: The principle of compositionality to explain the relationship between meaningful parts and whole sentences. The principle of compositionality asserts that a sentence can be understood on the basis of the meaning of the parts of the sentence (i.e., words, morphemes) along with an understanding of its structure (i.e., syntax, logic). Further, syntactic propositions are arranged into discourse or narrative structures, which also encode meanings through pragmatics like temporal relations and pronominals. It
4092-410: The Way of Words (1989). Grice married Kathleen Watson in 1942; they had two children. One of Grice's two most influential contributions to the study of language and communication is his theory of meaning , which he began to develop in his article "Meaning", written in 1948 but published only in 1957 at the prodding of his colleague, P. F. Strawson . Grice further developed his theory of meaning in
4185-599: The agents of accidental events as well as did English speakers. Russian speakers, who make an extra distinction between light and dark blue in their language, are better able to visually discriminate shades of blue. The Piraha , a tribe in Brazil , whose language has only terms like few and many instead of numerals, are not able to keep track of exact quantities. In one study German and Spanish speakers were asked to describe objects having opposite gender assignment in those two languages. The descriptions they gave differed in
4278-437: The amount of innate language, if language acquisition is a special faculty in the mind, and what the connection is between thought and language. There are three general perspectives on the issue of language learning. The first is the behaviorist perspective, which dictates that not only is the solid bulk of language learned, but it is learned via conditioning. The second is the hypothesis testing perspective , which understands
4371-462: The basic idea intact. Grice next turns to the second step in his program: explaining the notion of timeless meaning in terms of the notion of utterer's meaning. He does so very tentatively with the following definition: "x means NN (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. The basic idea here
4464-435: The brain when it comes to language. Connectionist models emphasize the idea that a person's lexicon and their thoughts operate in a kind of distributed, associative network. Nativist models assert that there are specialized devices in the brain that are dedicated to language acquisition. Computation models emphasize the notion of a representational language of thought and the logic-like, computational processing that
4557-400: The central figures involved in this development was the German philosopher Gottlob Frege , whose work on philosophical logic and the philosophy of language in the late 19th century influenced the work of 20th-century analytic philosophers Bertrand Russell and Ludwig Wittgenstein . The philosophy of language became so pervasive that for a time, in analytic philosophy circles, philosophy as
4650-401: The child's learning of syntactic rules and meanings to involve the postulation and testing of hypotheses, through the use of the general faculty of intelligence. The final candidate for explanation is the innatist perspective, which states that at least some of the syntactic settings are innate and hardwired, based on certain modules of the mind. There are varying notions of the structure of
4743-433: The common sentence is the lexical word , which is composed of nouns , verbs, and adjectives. A major question in the field – perhaps the single most important question for formalist and structuralist thinkers – is how the meaning of a sentence emerges from its parts. Many aspects of the problem of the composition of sentences are addressed in the field of linguistics of syntax . Philosophical semantics tends to focus on
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#17327657332714836-628: The early 19th century, the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard insisted that language ought to play a larger role in Western philosophy . He argued that philosophy has not sufficiently focused on the role language plays in cognition and that future philosophy ought to proceed with a conscious focus on language: If the claim of philosophers to be unbiased were all it pretends to be, it would also have to take account of language and its whole significance in relation to speculative philosophy ... Language
4929-400: The effects of gendered language. It can also be used to study linguistic transparency (or speaking in an accessible manner), as well as performative utterances and the various tasks that language can perform (called "speech acts"). It also has applications to the study and interpretation of law, and helps give insight to the logical concept of the domain of discourse . Literary theory is
5022-409: The example of "Those spots mean (meant) measles." And describes "non-natural meaning" using the example of "John means that he'll be late" or "'Schnee' means 'snow'". Grice does not define these two senses of the verb 'to mean', and does not offer an explicit theory that separates the ideas they're used to express. Instead, he relies on five differences in ordinary language usage to show that we use
5115-516: The fact that the participants in a conversation always assume each other to behave according to the maxims. So, when a speaker appears to have violated a maxim by saying or making as if to say something that is false, uninformative or too informative, irrelevant, or unclear, the assumption that the speaker is in fact obeying the maxims causes the interpreter to infer a hypothesis about what the speaker really meant. That an interpreter will reliably make such inferences allows speakers to intentionally "flout"
5208-454: The fifth and sixth of his William James lectures on "Logic and Conversation", delivered at Harvard in 1967. These two lectures were initially published as "Utterer's Meaning and Intentions" in 1969 and "Utterer's Meaning, Sentence Meaning, and Word Meaning" in 1968, and were later collected with the other lectures as the first section of Studies in the Way of Words in 1989. In the 1957 article "Meaning", Grice describes "natural meaning" using
5301-613: The first serious proposals for codifying a mental language. The scholastics of the high medieval period, such as Ockham and John Duns Scotus , considered logic to be a scientia sermocinalis (science of language). The result of their studies was the elaboration of linguistic-philosophical notions whose complexity and subtlety has only recently come to be appreciated. Many of the most interesting problems of modern philosophy of language were anticipated by medieval thinkers. The phenomena of vagueness and ambiguity were analyzed intensely, and this led to an increasing interest in problems related to
5394-555: The following conditions: Philosopher of language Philosophy of language investigates the nature of language and the relations between language, language users, and the world. Investigations may include inquiry into the nature of meaning , intentionality , reference , the constitution of sentences, concepts, learning , and thought . Gottlob Frege and Bertrand Russell were pivotal figures in analytic philosophy's " linguistic turn ". These writers were followed by Ludwig Wittgenstein ( Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus ),
5487-405: The form of words would simply not carry the implicature." Non-Conventionality: "...conversational implicata are not part of the meaning of the expressions to the employment of which they attach." Calculability: "The presence of a conversational implicature must be capable of being worked out; for even if it can in fact be intuitively grasped, unless the intuition is replaceable by an argument,
5580-419: The former but not with the latter. In uttering the sentence ' She was poor but she was honest ', for example, we say merely that she was poor and she was honest, but we implicate that poverty contrasts with honesty (or that her poverty contrasts with her honesty). Grice makes it clear that what a speaker conventionally implicates by uttering a sentence is part of what the speaker means in uttering it, and that it
5673-409: The friendly aliens were called "leebish" and the hostile ones "grecious", while another quarter were told the opposite. For the rest, the aliens remained nameless. It was found that participants who were given names for the aliens learned to categorize the aliens far more quickly, reaching 80 per cent accuracy in less than half the time taken by those not told the names. By the end of the test, those told
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#17327657332715766-497: The gradual discovery of Chinese characters and Egyptian hieroglyphs ( Hieroglyphica ). This thought parallels the idea that there might be a universal language of music. European scholarship began to absorb the Indian linguistic tradition only from the mid-18th century, pioneered by Jean François Pons and Henry Thomas Colebrooke (the editio princeps of Varadarāja , a 17th-century Sanskrit grammarian, dating to 1849). In
5859-401: The implicature (if present at all) will not count as a conversational implicature; it will be a conventional implicature." Grice also distinguishes between generalised and particularised conversational implicature. Grice says that particularised conversational implicatures (such as in the reference letter case quoted above) arise in "cases in which an implicature is carried by saying that p on
5952-413: The maxims—i.e., create the appearance of breaking the maxims in a way that is obvious to both speaker and interpreter—to get their implicatures across. Perhaps Grice's best-known example of conversational implicature is the case of the reference letter, a "quantity implicature" (i.e., because it involves flouting the first maxim of Quantity): A is writing a testimonial about a pupil who is a candidate for
6045-462: The meanings of mental contents and states directly. Another tradition of philosophers has attempted to show that language and thought are coextensive – that there is no way of explaining one without the other. Donald Davidson, in his essay "Thought and Talk", argued that the notion of belief could only arise as a product of public linguistic interaction. Daniel Dennett holds a similar interpretationist view of propositional attitudes . To an extent,
6138-424: The mind performs over them. Emergentist models focus on the notion that natural faculties are a complex system that emerge from simpler biological parts. Reductionist models attempt to explain higher-level mental processes in terms of the basic low-level neurophysiological activity. Firstly, this field of study seeks to better understand what speakers and listeners do with language in communication , and how it
6231-619: The mind. The main argument in favor of such a view is that the structure of thoughts and the structure of language seem to share a compositional, systematic character. Another argument is that it is difficult to explain how signs and symbols on paper can represent anything meaningful unless some sort of meaning is infused into them by the contents of the mind. One of the main arguments against is that such levels of language can lead to an infinite regress. In any case, many philosophers of mind and language, such as Ruth Millikan , Fred Dretske and Fodor, have recently turned their attention to explaining
6324-619: The most precise statement that he endorses is the following one: In the sense in which I am using the word say, I intend what someone has said to be closely related to the conventional meaning of the words (the sentence) he has uttered. Grice never spelled out what he meant by the phrase "closely related" in this passage, and philosophers of language continue to debate over its best interpretation. In 'The Causal Theory of Perception', Grice contrasts saying (which he there also calls "stating") with "implying", but in Logic and Conversation he introduces
6417-401: The names could correctly categorize 88 per cent of aliens, compared to just 80 per cent for the rest. It was concluded that naming objects helps us categorize and memorize them. In another series of experiments, a group of people was asked to view furniture from an IKEA catalog. Half the time they were asked to label the object – whether it was a chair or lamp, for example – while the rest of
6510-479: The nature of synonymy , the origins of meaning itself, our apprehension of meaning, and the nature of composition (the question of how meaningful units of language are composed of smaller meaningful parts, and how the meaning of the whole is derived from the meaning of its parts). There have been several distinctive explanations of what a linguistic "meaning" is. Each has been associated with its own body of literature. Investigations into how language interacts with
6603-469: The notion of saying he has in mind, though related to a colloquial sense of the word, is somewhat technical, referring to it as "a favored notion of 'saying' that must be further elucidated". Nonetheless, Grice never settled on a full elucidation or definition of his favoured notion of saying, and the interpretation of this notion has become a contentious issue in the philosophy of language. One point of controversy surrounding Grice's favoured notion of saying
6696-592: The only directly referential expressions are what he called "logically proper names". Logically proper names are such terms as I , now , here and other indexicals . He viewed proper names of the sort described above as "abbreviated definite descriptions " (see Theory of descriptions ). Hence Joseph R. Biden may be an abbreviation for "the current President of the United States and husband of Jill Biden". Definite descriptions are denoting phrases (see " On Denoting ") which are analyzed by Russell into existentially quantified logical constructions. Such phrases denote in
6789-400: The particular words that people use to achieve the proper emotional and rational effect in the listener, be it to persuade, provoke, endear, or teach. Some relevant applications of the field include the examination of propaganda and didacticism , the examination of the purposes of swearing and pejoratives (especially how it influences the behaviors of others, and defines relationships), or
6882-407: The philosopher of language. For instance, one of the major fields of sociology, symbolic interactionism , is based on the insight that human social organization is based almost entirely on the use of meanings. In consequence, any explanation of a social structure (like an institution ) would need to account for the shared meanings which create and sustain the structure. Rhetoric is the study of
6975-552: The philosophical study of semantics . Born and raised in Harborne (now a suburb of Birmingham), in the United Kingdom, he was educated at Clifton College and then at Corpus Christi College, Oxford . After a brief period teaching at Rossall School , he went back to Oxford, firstly as a graduate student at Merton College from 1936 to 1938, and then as a Lecturer, Fellow and Tutor from 1938 at St John's College . During
7068-423: The question of whether the names of things were determined by convention or by nature. He criticized conventionalism because it led to the bizarre consequence that anything can be conventionally denominated by any name. Hence, it cannot account for the correct or incorrect application of a name. He claimed that there was a natural correctness to names. To do this, he pointed out that compound words and phrases have
7161-411: The same thing (or approximately the same thing) which simply lacks the implicature." Cancelability: "...a putative conversational implicature is explicitly cancelable if, to the form of words the utterance of which putatively implicates that p , it is admissible to add but not p , or I do not mean to imply that p , and it is contextually cancelable if one can find situations in which the utterance of
7254-404: The sense that there is an object that satisfies the description. However, such objects are not to be considered meaningful on their own, but have meaning only in the proposition expressed by the sentences of which they are a part. Hence, they are not directly referential in the same way as logically proper names, for Russell. On Frege's account, any referring expression has a sense as well as
7347-504: The sign itself and the thing to which it refers. This lektón was the meaning or sense of every term. The complete lektón of a sentence is what we would now call its proposition . Only propositions were considered truth-bearing —meaning they could be considered true or false—while sentences were simply their vehicles of expression. Different lektá could also express things besides propositions, such as commands, questions and exclamations. Medieval philosophers were greatly interested in
7440-519: The social conditions that give rise to, or are associated with, meanings and languages. Etymology (the study of the origins of words) and stylistics (philosophical argumentation over what makes "good grammar", relative to a particular language) are two other examples of fields that are taken to be metasemantic. Many separate (but related) fields have investigated the topic of linguistic convention within their own research paradigms. The presumptions that prop up each theoretical view are of interest to
7533-584: The study of meaning at all. Noam Chomsky proposed that the study of language could be done in terms of the I-Language, or internal language of persons. If this is so, then it undermines the pursuit of explanations in terms of conventions, and relegates such explanations to the domain of metasemantics . Metasemantics is a term used by philosopher of language Robert Stainton to describe all those fields that attempt to explain how semantic facts arise. One fruitful source of research involves investigation into
7626-428: The subtleties of language and its usage. For many scholastics , this interest was provoked by the necessity of translating Greek texts into Latin . There were several noteworthy philosophers of language in the medieval period. According to Peter J. King, (although this has been disputed), Peter Abelard anticipated the modern theories of reference . Also, William of Ockham 's Summa Logicae brought forward one of
7719-409: The technical term "implicature" and its cognates "to implicate" and "implicatum" (i.e., that which is implicated). Grice justifies this neologism by saying that "'Implicature' is a blanket word to avoid having to make choices between words like 'imply', 'suggest', 'indicate', and 'mean'". Grice sums up these notions by suggesting that to implicate is to perform a "non-central" speech act, whereas to say
7812-493: The theoretical underpinnings to cognitive semantics (including the notion of semantic framing ) suggest the influence of language upon thought. However, the same tradition views meaning and grammar as a function of conceptualization, making it difficult to assess in any straightforward way. Some thinkers, like the ancient sophist Gorgias , have questioned whether or not language was capable of capturing thought at all. ...speech can never exactly represent perceptibles, since it
7905-571: The thought that its embedding sentence expresses. Senses determine reference and are also the modes of presentation of the objects to which expressions refer. Referents are the objects in the world that words pick out. The senses of sentences are thoughts, while their referents are truth values (true or false). The referents of sentences embedded in propositional attitude ascriptions and other opaque contexts are their usual senses. Bertrand Russell , in his later writings and for reasons related to his theory of acquaintance in epistemology , held that
7998-507: The time they had to say whether or not they liked it. It was found that when asked to label items, people were later less likely to recall the specific details of products, such as whether a chair had arms or not. It was concluded that labeling objects helps our minds build a prototype of the typical object in the group at the expense of individual features. A common claim is that language is governed by social conventions. Questions inevitably arise on surrounding topics. One question regards what
8091-492: The two lies in the fact that what a speaker conventionally implicates by uttering a sentence is tied in some way to the timeless meaning of part of the sentence, whereas what a speaker conversationally implicates is not directly connected with timeless meaning. Grice's best-known example of conventional implicature involves the word 'but', which, he argues, differs in meaning from the word 'and' only in that we typically conventionally implicate something over and above what we say with
8184-418: The use of syncategorematic words such as and , or , not , if , and every . The study of categorematic words (or terms ) and their properties was also developed greatly. One of the major developments of the scholastics in this area was the doctrine of the suppositio . The suppositio of a term is the interpretation that is given of it in a specific context. It can be proper or improper (as when it
8277-516: The vase" even for accidents. However, Spanish or Japanese speakers would be more likely to say "the vase broke itself". In studies conducted by Caitlin Fausey at Stanford University speakers of English, Spanish and Japanese watched videos of two people popping balloons, breaking eggs and spilling drinks either intentionally or accidentally. Later everyone was asked whether they could remember who did what. Spanish and Japanese speakers did not remember
8370-481: The word in (at least) two different ways. For the rest of "Meaning", and in his discussions of meaning in "Logic and Conversation", Grice deals exclusively with non-natural meaning. His overall approach to the study of non-natural meaning later came to be called "intention-based semantics" because it attempts to explain non-natural meaning based on the idea of speakers' intentions. To do this, Grice distinguishes two kinds of non-natural meaning: Utterer's meaning : What
8463-418: The world are called theories of reference . Gottlob Frege was an advocate of a mediated reference theory . Frege divided the semantic content of every expression, including sentences, into two components: sense and reference . The sense of a sentence is the thought that it expresses. Such a thought is abstract, universal and objective. The sense of any sub-sentential expression consists in its contribution to
8556-636: Was analytically prior to thought. Philosopher Michael Dummett is also a proponent of the "language-first" viewpoint. The stark opposite to the Sapir–Whorf position is the notion that thought (or, more broadly, mental content) has priority over language. The "knowledge-first" position can be found, for instance, in the work of Paul Grice . Further, this view is closely associated with Jerry Fodor and his language of thought hypothesis. According to his argument, spoken and written language derive their intentionality and meaning from an internal language encoded in
8649-475: Was criticized in Saul Kripke 's Naming and Necessity . Kripke put forth what has come to be known as "the modal argument" (or "argument from rigidity"). Consider the name Aristotle and the descriptions "the greatest student of Plato", "the founder of logic" and "the teacher of Alexander". Aristotle obviously satisfies all of the descriptions (and many of the others we commonly associate with him), but it
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