A Further Counter Example To Grice’s Analysis Of Speaker Meaning
Michael Vossen

Paul Grice, in his essay “Meaning”, presents roughly the following criteria for a speaker’s utterance to have meaning. Subject S meant something by uttering x if and only if S uttered x with the intentions that (a) S’s utterance of x produce reaction r in audience A, that (b) A recognize S’s intention to produce r in A, and that (c) A’s recognition of S’s intention to produce r in A shall function as at least part of A’s reason for r. Grice’s criteria for speaker meaning is insufficient, as the following counter example will show.

Suppose that on a certain island, all islanders believe that when a pair finds a certain rare wild flower while walking together, the finding indicates that each member of the pair loves the other member. R and J are islanders, and R loves J but is too shy to tell J this. So, R intends to induce in J the belief that he loves her through an elaborate scheme. R obtains the rare wild flower through a shady transaction, and asks J to go for a walk with him. At some point on the walk, R comes up with an excuse to walk ahead, takes out a spade, and waits for J to catch up. He begins to plant the rare wildflower in the ground. R knows that J is watching him plant the flower, and he further knows that J does not know that he knows J is watching him plant the flower. He knows that J will not take the finding of the flower as a genuine finding of the flower, and hence that J will not take the finding of the flower to mean that he loves her. However, R intends that J will take his planting the evidence as grounds for thinking that he intends to induce in her the belief that he loves her. R knows that J knows that he wouldn’t try to deceive her with the planted wildflower unless it was really true that he loves her, and so her recognition of his intention to get her to believe that he loves her will be grounds for her believing that he loves her. This is just what he planned; R intended that J’s recognition of his intention to induce in her the belief that he loves her by means of allowing her to catch him planting the wild flower function as part of J’s reason for believing that he loves her.

This case meets all of Grice’s criteria, yet is not a case of speaker meaning. The case thus serves as a counterexample to the sufficiency of Grice’s criteria. Condition (a) of Grice’s criteria is met in that the subject R intends that his utterance x, the allowing of himself to be caught planting the flower, produce in the audience J a reaction, namely, belief that R loves J. Condition (b) is met in that J recognizes R’s intention to produce the belief that R loves J. This occurs when J sees R planting the flower, and recognizes that R intends to get her to believe that he loves her through their finding of the flower. Finally, condition (c) is met as J’s recognition of R’s intention to produce in J the belief that R loves J functions as part of J’s reasons for believing that R loves J. This is met when J takes her knowledge that R intends to produce in her the belief that he loves her through the flower deception as a reason for believing that he loves her. Her reasoning is that R wouldn’t go through such an elaborate deception unless he really did love her. Thus, all of Grice’s criteria are met.

This case is not a case of speaker meaning though, for J does not recognize that it is R’s intention to get J to recognize that it is his intention that he loves her. In other words, J does not recognize that R planned his false planting to be seen, so J will not suppose R let her know that he loves her; J might think that she discovered this fact about R, not that R communicated this fact to her. What Grice’s criteria lacks in this case is a clause (b*), such that a case is a case of speaker meaning if and only if S utters x with intention that (b*) A recognize S’s intention for A to recognize S’s intention to produce r in A, and clauses (a-c) hold. Clause (b*) would entail that J must recognize that it is R’s intention to get J to recognize that it is his intention that he loves her for the case to be an example of speaker meaning.

While clause (b*) would eliminate this case as a counterexample, it still seems possible that more complicated cases can be constructed in which a (b**) clause is needed. As such, it would be nice if clause (b) could be generalized such that additional clauses would not be needed. For example, if clause (b) said something like “all intentions given."