| 5280 | Language co-exists with consciousness, and makes it social [Marx/Engels] |
| Full Idea: Language is as old as consciousness, language is practical consciousness that exists also for other men. | |
| From: K Marx / F Engels (The German Ideology [1846], §1.A) | |
| A reaction: Dennett takes a similar view - that consciousness is more-or-less a consequence of the development of consciousness. This is understandable if you make intentional rather than phenomenal consciousness central. Otherwise ants may well have it. |
| 13977 | When I utter a sentence, listeners grasp both my meaning and my state of mind [Ryle] |
| Full Idea: If I have uttered my sentence aloud, a listener can both understand what I say or grasp my meaning, and also infer to my state of mind. | |
| From: Gilbert Ryle (Are there propositions? [1930], I) | |
| A reaction: This simple observations seems rather important. If we shake written words onto the floor, they might add up to a proper sentence, but half of the point of a sentence is missing. Irony trades on the gap between meaning and state of mind. |
| 7751 | Meaning needs an intention to induce a belief, and a recognition that this is the speaker's intention [Grice] |
| Full Idea: For a statement to have (non-naturally) meant something, not merely must it have been 'uttered' with the intention of inducing a certain belief, but also the utterer must have intended an 'audience' to recognise the intention behind the utterance. | |
| From: H. Paul Grice (Meaning [1957], p.43) | |
| A reaction: This is Grice's famous and distinctive theory of meaning. I am struck by the problem of a password, which seems to have a quite different intention from its literal meaning. Also a speaker with two different audiences and opposite intentions. |
| 7752 | Only the utterer's primary intention is relevant to the meaning [Grice] |
| Full Idea: Only what I may call the primary intention of an utterer is relevant to the (non-natural) meaning of an utterance. | |
| From: H. Paul Grice (Meaning [1957], p.47) | |
| A reaction: This sounds okay for simple statements, but gets really tricky with complex statements, such as very ironic remarks delivered to an audience of diverse people. |
| 7753 | We judge linguistic intentions rather as we judge non-linguistic intentions, so they are alike [Grice] |
| Full Idea: To show that the criteria for judging linguistic intentions are very like the criteria for judging non-linguistic intentions is to show that linguistic intentions are very like non-linguistic intentions. | |
| From: H. Paul Grice (Meaning [1957], p.48) | |
| A reaction: This hint at the end of his paper is one of the key attractions of Grice's view. It offers an account of language that fits it into the world of animal communication and evolution. It never seems to quite capture the way meaning goes beyond intentions. |
| 15668 | Meaning is not fixed by a relation to the external world, but a relation to other speakers [Habermas, by Finlayson] |
| 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. | |
| From: report of Jürgen Habermas (The Theory of Communicative Action [1981]) by James Gordon Finlayson - Habermas Ch.3:38 | |
| 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! |
| 2482 | It seems unlikely that meaning can be reduced to communicative intentions, or any mental states [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: Nobody now thinks that the reduction of the meaning of English sentences to facts about the communicative intentions of English speakers - or to any facts about mental states - is likely to go through. | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (In a Critical Condition [2000], Ch. 6) | |
| A reaction: Most attempts at 'reduction' of meaning seem to go rather badly. I assume it would be very difficult to characterise 'intentions' without implicit reference to meaning. |
| 2998 | Grice thinks meaning is inherited from the propositional attitudes which sentences express [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: According to Gricean theories of meaning, the meaning of a sentence is inherited from the propositional attitudes that the sentence is conventionally used to express. | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (Psychosemantics [1987], p. 50) | |
| A reaction: Since the propositional attitudes contain propositions, this seems like a very plausible idea. If an indexical like 'I' is involved, the meaning of the sentence is not the same as its 'conventional' use. |
| 4690 | If meaning is speaker's intentions, it can be reduced to propositional attitudes, and philosophy of mind [McGinn] |
| 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. | |
| From: Colin McGinn (The Making of a Philosopher [2002], Ch. 5) | |
| 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? |