Knowledge of meaning and knowledge of facts
4.2 Interpersonal context: speaker’s intention and hearer’s inference
The utterance of a statement, just like the performance of an illocution- ary act like promising, thus involves both speaker and hearer in a network of commitments and consequences which imply certain things about their current states and beliefs, and commit them to certain future actions. If, for example, I utter the words Rat soup and leather belts were eaten on the Long March, then, in many types of situation, I will be understood to have made a factual statement which I have some evidence or justifi cation for making, and to which I can be expected to be held. The uttering of this statement commits me, as a matter of convention, to certain other propo- sitions, the statement’s entailments and presuppositions (see Chapter 6), such as the proposition that the Long March took place, that leather belts were available, and that there were rats in China at the time. If I subse- quently denied any one of these propositions, or the original statement itself, I could incur sanctions from the other members of the exchange: I could be accused, for example, of inconsistency. These sorts of conditions and commitments can be seen as essentially of the same order as those involved in other types of utterance, such as promises. Just as the act of making a statement suggests I have evidence or justifi cation for what I say, the act of making a promise suggests I have the intention to fulfi l what I say I will do. And just as the statement commits me to assent to its entail- ments and presuppositions, a promise commits me to follow through on the promised act. In both cases, then, the utterance of a linguistic expres- sion can be seen as occupying a place in a structure of past and future actions and mental states, maintained and enforced by social conven- tion.
The use of language is thus not the disembodied exercise of human reason asserting neutral facts about the world. It is a situated, contextual act in a network of social roles and responsibilities. This is always the case, regardless of whether the utterance in question seems essentially constat- ive (factual) or performative. As Austin says (1962: 145–147), the difference between constatives and performatives can be seen principally as one of emphasis. Thus, constative utterances (statements, descriptions) abstract away from the illocutionary aspects of the utterance act in order to focus on its locutionary aspects, and the extent to which the utterance corre- sponds with facts. Performative utterances, contrastingly, focus on the illocutionary aspects, abstracting away from the locutionary dimension.
4.2 Interpersonal context: speaker’s intention
state what the convention behind any given speech act might be. Thus, the conventions governing statements mentioned above seem inadequate:
we often state things for which we do not have evidence (e.g. You’re not going to go bald), which it is obvious that the hearer knows already (You have lost a bit of hair, though), and which we do not believe anyway (But it’s nothing to worry about). Similarly, the putative conventions governing the making of requests may also be violated, without detracting from the nature of the utterance as a request. For example, imagine that S feels obliged to invite H to dinner, but does not want her to come. S may thus invite H to come at a time at which they know H is unavailable. In a case like this, the request Do come and have dinner with us tomorrow is made with S not want- ing H to come (condition (iv) in (1) above), and knowing that H is unable to do so (condition (ii)). The utterance is none the less, however, a request (see Strawson 1971: 153–154 for further examples).
The general problem with convention-based approaches to illocution- ary force is that they ignore the role of the appreciation of speakers’ inten- tions in our understanding of meaning. The importance of intention in meaning was fi rst emphasized by the British philosopher H. P. Grice, a col- laborator of Austin’s in the 1940s and 1950s. For Grice, ‘the meaning (in general) of a sign needs to be explained in terms of what the users of the sign do (or should) mean by it on particular occasions’ (1989: 217). If I understand that a certain utterance is a statement, a request, or a warn- ing, on Grice’s theory, it is because I attribute to the speaker a certain type of intention: the intention to state, to request, or to warn. It is because I attribute these intentions to the speaker that I am able to interpret the utterance in the right way; if I had credited the speaker with a different intention, I would have taken the utterance differently.
The importance of speaker’s intention applies to both the illocutionary and the locutionary aspects of utterances. On the illocutionary side, the hearer’s interpretation of the speech act performed by the speaker will depend, as we have just seen, on their interpretation of S’s intentions. S’s utterance of the words It’s easy to fall over in the dark may function as a request for H to turn on the lights, a warning to H to be careful, or a metaphorical observation about the dangers of ignorance, uttered with- out the intention of provoking any particular immediate action on the part of H. In reacting to the utterance, H has to infer which of these pos- sibilities was the one S intended. This is not to say, of course, that S intended only a single one of them: it is quite possible that S had several intentions in uttering those words. Perhaps, indeed, S didn’t even know what their intention was; they just uttered the words. Nevertheless the hearer is obliged to make inferences about S’s overall intentions in order to respond appropriately.
On the locutionary side, it is by making inferences about the speaker’s intentions that the hearer selects the relevant aspects of the encyclopae- dic knowledge called up by a linguistic expression: the encyclopaedic information relevant to the interpretation of an utterance is the informa- tion which the speaker intended to convey, and the hearer must decide which of the potentially infi nite elements of encyclopaedic knowledge the
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speaker had in mind. Thus, if I use the word frog in reference to a French person in the phrase He may be a Frog, but no princess is kissing him (see (19) in the previous chapter), it is because I am considering certain facts and not others as relevant in this context: the fact that there is a fairy story in which a princess kisses a frog, and the fact that French people may be referred to as frogs. In order to understand (19) correctly, any hearer will have to appreciate my intent to convey this information. But the role of intentions is not limited to the selection of the appropriate encyclopaedic facts about a word. We also need to understand the speaker’s intention in order to disambiguate words and assign referents, both basic aspects of the determination of the locutionary act of what is actually said. If I hear the sentence There was a mouse here this morning, my choice between the interpretations there was a small rodent in the house this morning and there was a computer accessory on this table this morning will be made on the basis of my beliefs about the speaker’s intentions: did the speaker intend me to under- stand her to be making a comment about the presence of wildlife some- where in the house or about a computer part that should have been on the table?
So inferring the speaker’s intention is, on this view, a fundamental aspect of the process of meaning-creation and understanding in language.
Linguistic communication is an intentional-inferential process, in which hearers try to infer speakers’ intentions on the basis of the ‘clues’ pro- vided by language. It is, as described by Sperber and Wilson (2002: 3),
‘essentially an exercise in metapsychology, in which the hearer infers the speaker’s intended meaning from evidence she has provided for this pur- pose’. The viability of an analysis of meaning in terms of intentions has not infrequently been called into question by philosophers of language, and it does indeed seem, for reasons that there is not space to go into here, as though the details of this analysis are rather problematic (see e.g.
Schiffer 1987: 242–249). Nevertheless, Grice’s programme of intentional- inferential semantics is assumed by many linguists and has proven to be a fruitful way of understanding language use.
Grice called the type of intention-dependent meaning characteristic of human language non-natural meaning (meaningNN). The label ‘non-natural’
is intended to contrast with natural types of meaningfulness which are not mediated by a speaker’s intentions, such as when we say those spots mean measles: here, the link between the spots and their ‘meaning’ (mea- sles) is causal, direct and independent of any human agency, whereas the meaning of an utterance in human language depends on the intention of the utterer. In general, for Grice, the notion of what a word means is only explicable in terms of what speakers mean by using the word. What is important in communicating is thus what speakers intend by their use of language, what speakers use words to mean, and it is only derivatively, in light of these intentions, that we may speak of words themselves meaning anything (Grice 1989: 214–221).
QUESTION Consider involuntary exclamations of pain like ouch or ow.
Are these instances of meaningNN? If so, why? If not, why not?