Defining meaning

Defining meaning via conceptual analysis

Like Lewis (1975), Grice (1957) is engaged in conceptual analysis, but of the English word ‘meaning’. To help pump our intuitions about the distinct ways this word is used, he provides examples analogous to the following:

  1. This rainy weather means we’ll probably be taxiing for a while.

  2. Jo’s gesture means that she wants you to walk over.

  3. “Bo devoured the beans” means that Bo ate the beans aggressively.

The differences among the uses of mean in (1-3) may not be obvious at a single glance, but Grice introduces a number of tests that seem to tease these uses apart.

We’ll go through these again now, starting with what I’ll call the contraction test.

The contradiction test

This test coordinates the original sentence with a sentence that contradicts the clause selected by mean in the original.

  1. #This rainy weather means we’ll probably be taxiing for a while, but in fact, we won’t be taxiing for a while.

  2. Jo’s gesture means that she wants you to walk over, but in fact, she doesn’t want you to walk over.

  3. “Bo devoured the beans” means that Bo ate the beans aggressively, but in fact, Bo didn’t eat the beans aggressively.

I’ve marked (1) with a ‘#’ in order to indicate that it is perceived as odd; in particular, it appears to be a contradiction: the use of mean seems to imply the truth of the clause that it selects (we’ll probably be taxiing for a while), while the coordinated clause contradicts it. Meanwhile, (2) and (3) don’t coincide with similar oddness, which suggests that the coordinated clause does not result in a contradiction. (You might feel that the second sentence of (2) is unexpected, but this is likely due to the fact that it describes an odd state of affairs—one in which Jo made the gesture accidentally or as a form of trickery—rather than because it is an odd sentence.)

The passive test

What I’ll call the passive test involves passivizing the verb mean from the original sentences. The verb is also placed inside the subject of a pseudo-cleft construction, though other tests that involve passivizing and pseud-clefting on their own would suggest that it is really the passive that distinguishes the different uses of mean.1

  1. #What is meant by this rainy weather is that we’ll be taxiing for a while.

  2. What is meant by Jo’s gesture is that she wants you to walk over.

  3. What is meant by “Bo devoured the beans” is that Bo ate the beans aggressively.

Here again, (1) pulls apart from (2) and (3).

The agentivity test

Last, but not least, is what I’ll call the agentivity test. This test modifies the original sentences by combining mean with an agentive subject (and putting the original subject into a by-phrase).

  1. #Someone meant by this rainy weather that we’ll probably be taxiing for a while.

  2. Jo meant by her gesture that she wants you to walk over.

  3. Someone meant by “Bo devoured the beans” that Bo ate the beans aggressively.

Hey check it out! (1) again pulls apart from (2) and (3).

So what?

Grice (1957) takes these tests seriously as providing a diagnostic of what kind of relation between one thing and another mean picks out in each case. In (1), mean seems to describe something like a consequence relation: what is implied by (1) is that the rainy weather somehow causes us to taxi for a while—the rain makes the runway slippery so that the plane can’t take off; meanwhile, the only viable alternative is taxiing. Grice calls this relation natural meaning (or meaning\(_{N}\)).

In (2) and (3), mean seems to describe some other relation, whose character Grice spends most of the paper investigating. He calls this relation non-natural meaning (or meaning\(_{NN}\)). Ultimately, he comes to the definition of this relation in (4).2

  1. Someone—the author of some utterance \(X\)—means\(_{NN}\) that \(p\) by \(X\) if they intend that:
  • their audience comes to believe \(p\) (in part) because of \(X\),
  • their audience recognizes the author’s intention, and
  • their audience comes to believe that \(p\) specifically because they have recognized the author’s intention.

Thus for example, the original (2) might be true in a situation in which Jo wants her gesture to create the belief in the person she is gesturing toward that she wants that person to walk over; but crucially, she also wants that person to recognize that that is how she is using the gesture—she’s signaling at them.

The original (3), on the other hand, seems to characterize something more timeless: it is a claim about the linguistic community of English speakers. Perhaps, then, we can say that (3) is true because it is a convention—in the sense of Lewis (1975)—for users of English to use the sentence Jo devoured the beans in order to mean—in the sense of (4)—that Jo ate the beans aggressively.

References

Grice, H. P. 1957. “Meaning.” The Philosophical Review 66 (3): 377–88. https://doi.org/10.2307/2182440.
Lewis, David K. 1975. “Languages and Language.” In Arguing about Language, edited by Darragh Byrne and Max Kölbel. Arguing about Philosophy. New York: Routledge.

Footnotes

  1. Pseudo-cleft constructions are phrases like what Jo bought was apples (an identificational pseudo-cleft) or what Jo bought was tasty (a predicational pseudo-cleft). They generally have the form ‘free relative clause + copula + post-copular phrase’. ↩︎

  2. Though, see the paper—this is my attempt to paraphrase Grice’s definition.↩︎