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Full Idea
On Habermas's view, meanings are not determined by the speaker's relation to the external world, but by his relation to his interlocutors; meaning is essentially intersubjective.
Gist of Idea
Meaning is not fixed by a relation to the external world, but a relation to other speakers
Source
report of Jürgen Habermas (The Theory of Communicative Action [1981]) by James Gordon Finlayson - Habermas Ch.3:38
Book Ref
Finlayson,James G.: 'Habermas' [OUP 2005], p.38
A Reaction
This view is not the same as Grice's, but it is clearly much closer to Grice than to (say) the Frege/Davidson emphasis on truth-conditions. I'm not sure if I would know how to begin arbitrating between the two views!
| 5280 | Language co-exists with consciousness, and makes it social [Marx/Engels] |
| 13977 | When I utter a sentence, listeners grasp both my meaning and my state of mind [Ryle] |
| 7751 | Meaning needs an intention to induce a belief, and a recognition that this is the speaker's intention [Grice] |
| 7752 | Only the utterer's primary intention is relevant to the meaning [Grice] |
| 7753 | We judge linguistic intentions rather as we judge non-linguistic intentions, so they are alike [Grice] |
| 15668 | Meaning is not fixed by a relation to the external world, but a relation to other speakers [Habermas, by Finlayson] |
| 2482 | It seems unlikely that meaning can be reduced to communicative intentions, or any mental states [Fodor] |
| 2998 | Grice thinks meaning is inherited from the propositional attitudes which sentences express [Fodor] |
| 4690 | If meaning is speaker's intentions, it can be reduced to propositional attitudes, and philosophy of mind [McGinn] |