more from this thinker | more from this text
Full Idea
The importance of Grice's analysis of speaker meaning is that it offers the prospect of analysing the whole phenomenon of linguistic meaning in terms of propositional attitudes… thus turning semantics into a department of the philosophy of mind.
Gist of Idea
If meaning is speaker's intentions, it can be reduced to propositional attitudes, and philosophy of mind
Source
Colin McGinn (The Making of a Philosopher [2002], Ch. 5)
Book Ref
McGinn,Colin: 'The Making of a Philosopher' [Scribner 2003], p.138
A Reaction
Although meaning being truth conditions is the most cited theory, the reduction of semantics to an aspect of mind also seems almost orthodox now. But how do the symbols 'represent' the attitudes?
| 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] |