Ep. 325: Paul Grice on Meaning and Conversation (Part One)

0:00 Mark: Foreign. You're listening to the Partially Examined Life, a podcast by Some guys were at one point set on doing philosophy for a living, but then thought better of it. Our question for episode 325 is something like what does the word meaning mean? We read some articles by Herbert Paul grice, meaning from 1957 Utterer's Meaning and Intentions from 1969, and logic and conversation from 1975. For more information, please see partiallyexaminelife.com this is Mark Linsenmayer in Madison, Wisconsin. Perhaps intentionally confusing you listeners with this sentence, but not communicating my intention that you should be confused, but the expectation that your recognition of that intention will play a part in your consequently being confused.

0:46 Seth: This is Seth Paskin, desperately trying to connect one of my timeless meanings to my utterance here right now.

0:54 Dylan: This is Dylan Casey realizing the curious fact that merely causal effects of something said have no meaning in Madison, Wisconsin.

1:03 Steve: Our special guest, I'm Steve Gimbel. I am a professor of philosophy at Gettysburg College and delighted to be with you.

1:11 Mark: Thank you so much. This and on two days notice.

1:15 Seth: That is a record for us.

1:17 Mark: Wes decided this would be his vacation and I think the rest of us sort of decided that this is an episode that a guest would be nice on because it's a little technical and I don't know if any of the rest of us care that much about. I mean, just to be. It's not. This is not the thing. I picked this because it was. There was some Grice, probably the meaning paper on my philosophy of language class in undergrad. And it's been long enough that I feel like we should have a whole philosophy of language class under our belts by now. And so this was a missing thing and I did enjoy parts of it. There are lots of fun examples. Steve, what is your, your history with this? You've even included part of this in your book.

1:54 Steve: I absolutely adore Paul Grice. So yes, I will cop to being this kind of nerd. British ordinary language philosophy is just a blast because you can't read it and not in your head have a British accent. It's just the way this stuff works. And this guy was an eccentric. He comes out of Oxford in the 60s. He then moves to Berkeley, which is exactly the time to move to Berkeley, where he looks like your standard British philosopher, but he is just this wacko who just is adored by the entire Berkeley community. So I was lucky enough to do an oral history interview with Judith Baker, who she just passed away, sadly.

She was a longtime philosopher at York University in Canada who was one of his students. And so I got all the great stories about Grice. He's a blast to read, and he was even more fun in person. So, frankly, I just love Grice. So when this opportunity popped up, I thought, hey, this is awesome in the nerdy sense of awesome.

3:01 Dylan: Well, I think it's so cool to hear your enthusiasm. I've never heard of Paul Grice, but that's because of my idiosyncratic background here, not having much formal background at all in analytic philosophy. But the way you talk about him, it does resonate with the way he writes, which is, at least in my experience, idiosyncratic compared to other analytical philosophy, even if it's has this utterer's meaning. It's just so irritating with the symbolism. But there's a way in which it feels like he's almost being playful with some of the conventions of analytic philosophy.

3:40 Steve: He's being very playful. In fact, part of what he's doing. So you got to understand where he was at the time. So he's at Oxford. And there are really, at this point, philosophy of language has just launched itself. And you've got, on the one end, you've got people like Peter Strawson, who is his colleague, who's picking up after Bertrand Russell and taking a very syntactic, structural, formal picture of language. So if you want to understand what language means, we have to break it down into the structure. And the idea is that spoken language, as we normally use it, is really a horrible vehicle for philosophy.

Right? I mean, we have to use language and philosophy. I can't, you know, teach my classes in interpretive dance and expect anything good to come back on the quizzes. But language as we normally speak it is just so slippery and ambiguous and sloppy that it leads us into all sorts of problems. And so you had one school, the really sort of the core part of the early analytic movement that turned into logical empiricism, logical positivism, that saw we needed to replace spoken language with a new language, a perfect language, a rigorous language, and that was logic.

Exactly, exactly. And then you had his other colleague, J.L. austin, who was, you know, the founder of ordinary language philosophy, sort of picking up after Wittgenstein.

5:08 Mark: Right?

5:08 Steve: And you had Wittgenstein, who's this amazing figure who is incredibly evocative but unbelievably vague. So whatever he's writing, dude, that's gotta be deep. But we have no idea what it means. And there are as many interpretations as there are readers. So you have Austin, who picks up on this idea of language as an activity. Language, unlike what Russell and Carnap and the logical positivists are doing, language isn't a thing. Language is a doing. It's not a noun, it's a verb. You language, you have language games. It's something you do. And so Austin has this amazing insight that sometimes we do things with words.

We promise we marry someone, right? We bet. And so we don't just use language to communicate, we actually use language to do things. And that launches a whole movement. Now you've got this guy Grice, who is in the middle of these two. On the one hand, he sees what Austin did, and what he's doing is taking us away from language as syntax, as grammatical structure, which is what people like Bertrand Russell and Peter Strawson are doing. That if I want to understand language, I need to understand the structure of the grammar which encodes the meaning.

And so meaning is purely contained in the language itself. And then on the other hand, you've got Austin, who is taking up the pragmatic side. So we're not going to look at syntax, the structure, semantics, the meaning. We're going to look at it in use. And he sees Austin as sort of going too far. He's got the right step in saying, look, there's a pragmatic element to this stuff, but if we want to understand what it is, we've got to go back and really look at meaning. So Austin throws meaning overboard and just goes into this speech act approach that speech is doing.

It's an action as opposed to it's an object to be decomposed logically. And what he wants to do is sort of split the difference. He wants to say, okay, look, if we want to talk meaning, we need to look at the language. So it's not just doing. We are going to think of language as communicative. You know, what we're trying to do here. But it's got to be something that still includes these pragmatic elements. So the way to think about Grice, he's sort of the Friedrich Nietzsche of philosophy of language. He wants to reinsert the individual. He wants to give agency to the speaker.

So the logical positivists are trying to break down the language to just the language itself, the internal logical structure. What he wants to do is put the speaker back in, and that's where he starts. This paper is trying to reclaim the place of the speaker, of the human in language.

8:07 Mark: Seth, did you have any opening thoughts?

8:11 Seth: So, unlike Dylan, I was quite familiar with Grice. I had a fair amount of exposure to analytic philosophy and the analytic traditions specifically around this. And I'm familiar with this style of writing. I think this style of doing it was very familiar to me and of Grice's very well known name, just like Austin, just like Strawson. And I feel like I might have actually even done some of this in graduate school. I'm not 100% sure, but I'm pretty sure I did. I definitely did it as an undergraduate and I definitely was exposed to it at various times.

Grice is the perfect definition of this type of philosopher. And this paper is the perfect definition of what this kind of paper is. Which is to say I'm going to write something that's like seven to ten pages long with just all of the arrogance and certainty that it's meaningful and important, with none of the historical context, background, citations. And if it's well received, it'll create a couple of careers in academia for the next 15 to 20 years, which is kind of what some of these things did. But I actually was familiar with Grice specifically.

And so I have read these essays at least. I certainly read Meaning and lot. I don't remember if I've read Logic, but I definitely had read Meaning and Utterer's Meaning and Intentions 30 years ago whenever it was we were in graduate school.

9:46 Mark: I had trouble seeing the forest for the trees here that we get very much into, especially the Utterer's Meaning and Intentions, which I understand is sort of the second of maybe three or four papers that he did after the initial meaning paper to try to bolster up the original theory. And it goes deep into the symbolism and stuff that, you know, that is not there in the other two papers that we read, which are sort of introducing a new way of looking at things. This was really like, people have been throwing counterexamples at me for a bunch of years now.

Let me try to systematically deal with those. And it was very difficult to see, like, well, what are we actually trying to get out of a theory of meaning? The fact that we're giving a theory of meaning at all is noteworthy given that this positivist, this behaviorist sort of take that goes from Wittgenstein, Quine, right, saying there's no such thing as definitions, there's no such thing as analyticity, so there can't really be any meaning in that theory at all. And that, you know, these were the dominant voices that he was talking against. Why do you want a theory meaning that looks like that?

10:47 Steve: So this was actually one of the biggest philosophical concerns at the time. You have Your logical positivists who are saying that most of what has historically been done as philosophy is literally meaningless. Think about the adults in the Peanuts cartoons, right? That's what philosophy was. It was just wa, wa, wa, wa, wa. And so the idea was that there were only philosophical questions that were actually meaningful. And so if we wanted to continue philosophy as a discipline, the first thing we needed to do was get the nonsense out. We needed to throw away all of those things that weren't even meaningful and save that which was, and then understand what it actually means and how to go about answering it. And so this question of what meaning is at the time really was an existential question, not for the existentialist, but the very existence of the discipline as a whole.

11:46 Dylan: What I love about the meaning paper, and I was casually familiar with the history that you've described, what I loved about the first paper, the meaning paper, is Grice going into things that in a very ordinary way, we would say and understand. And then to me, this tries to get to what Mark's talking about. I think, Mark, you asked the right question. How the hell are we talking about meaning here? And how do we get to the end where we feel like, okay, now I understand what meaning means. And what I really liked about Grice, I found that a bit slippery.

But to me, it's mostly him enunciating in a very articulate way, at least some threads about meaning that on the one hand, utterly conventional. I mean, utterly. Like, I completely get what you're talking about. And when you start unpacking it, I see, yes, of course, we interact this way and we talk about. Anybody on the street would recognize as that's what you mean. But now you're unpacking it in a way that reveals that this existence of meaning holds a real challenge for a very, very formal understanding of what meaning is. And as he points out in his language and conversation paper, he wants to sort of go up against both camps.

But this one camp in particular, that you can extract formal meaning on its own terms, a mathematization of language will fail miserably. That's why he invents this new logic of conversation as a way to categorize and unpack meaning. But even in the first paper, I found that super elucidating, at least about the complication of meaning. But seeing that we really do mean more than something formal, I'd like to

13:35 Seth: pause there before we get too far gone on this. And I don't think it's any scratch on Grice just to be Clear. We're not talking about meaning writ large, because all the things that Austin talks about, about how we make promises and do these sorts of things, Grice is not talking about that. What he's talking about really is when we say so and so meant something by saying or gesturing in this way. In essence, how do we ascribe meaning to a performative act or a speech utterance or something like that? It's weird because I think he goes back and forth across the line of I'm only talking about cases where people are trying to convey information to each other to counter examples that kind of get more into the promising, judging, deceiving kind of thing.

And I think he probably would have been better off if he just stuck with talking about conversation where information was intended to be imparted. But anyway, I think there's an area that we're not talking about how language works broadly construed. We're not talking about how we create meaning broadly construed, although he will throw in a poetic reference here or there. But he's not trying necessarily to examine every single instance of the way that people intend to convey information or to impact others. We'll get into me what some of those things are, but I just wanted to highlight that.

15:05 Steve: And that's exactly right. He's not looking at meaning as in the meaning of life. He's not looking at meaning as the semantic content of a particular word. Anyone who's ever had a romantic relationship has had an evening ruined by this question. What do you mean by that? How do I look? Oh, you look nice. What do you mean, I look nice? And now that question is the question that Grice is interested in. When somebody says something, what do they mean? Well, who knows what they mean? There's one person who knows exactly what they meant, and that's the person who spoke.

But the problem is, in order to get that, you've got to be inside the person's head, and we can't get there. So meaning speaker's meaning is opaque. But the fascinating phenomenon that launches him is we get it right almost all the time. We only ask people, what do you mean by that? Occasionally, rarely. So somehow, speakers meaning what? I mean when I say something to you, you get it. How is it that something that you don't have access to, you still somehow managed to figure out. That's a weird phenomenon, isn't it? And that's what he wants to figure out.

How does that work?

16:20 Dylan: And when you're wrong, you have handles on how to figure out why you're wrong. And that question that you just asked Steve, I think the one I would contrast it with is all the ways in which we would have a conversation of the cat is on the mat. And what do you mean by the cat is on the mat? Those kinds of analyses. To me, there's something sort of that explodes when you pose the question that you did, which is similar to the one Grice. Grice uses.1 like those spots mean measles.

16:54 Mark: Right.

16:54 Dylan: Which is another great example of how you would understand meaning in this kind of triadic form. Right. That it involves me understanding you and you understanding me about some third thing that isn't true about the cat is on the mat.

17:11 Mark: Yeah.

17:11 Steve: Although I will say I've always hated the way he starts this paper because he leads us completely in the wrong direction only to go, no, that's not what I'm talking about. Turn around.

17:22 Dylan: He starts with the natural senses and moves to the. To the non natural ones.

17:26 Seth: Yes.

17:26 Mark: I was finding the natural way more interesting. I wanted to hear more about that.

17:29 Seth: Yeah, I'm not a fan of that terminology.

17:31 Dylan: Yeah, I guess. I guess the non natural one that he starts out with is those three rings on the bell of the bus mean that the bus is full.

17:39 Steve: Exactly. So the idea is we use the word meaning multiple ways. Right. So he gives an example. Those spots mean measles. The idea is, okay, look, you got spots on your face. Why is that? Oh, that means you have measles. That's one sense of meaning. We use that as inferential or as evidence or proof of something. And he makes it perfectly clear. And then he goes, that's not what I'm talking about. What I'm talking about is meaning in terms of utterances, what somebody means when they say something.

18:12 Mark: Right. And he throws out as a side comment, I'll also as a case of natural meaning, like, I meant to do this. I meant to go to the store today, which makes it seem like maybe there's some sort of continuum. Spots mean measles leaving the house. If you observe me leaving the house and getting in my car with my shopping list, that indicates that means that I'm going to the store. So I'm sort of like the measles. I'm is this my activity is a symptom of this thing that's happening. But then I could intentionally do something. I could wave the shopping list at you as I get in the car. And therefore I have with that gesture, I mean, that I'm going to the store. It's no Longer just natural mean.

18:56 Seth: I mean, he says it pretty explicitly right there in the beginning of the essay about what natural meaning is and then why, you know, he's basically not going to talk about it. But natural meaning is if you say X meant that P or X means that P that it entails P. So it's, I don't want to say causal. Maybe that's not the right term. It's basically like you can use the word meant in a way that turns out what X in this case into a signal or a sign. Not a sign necessarily. I don't want to use the word sign because that's too loaded, but a signal for P. So if you see X, that means that P obtains or held or holds or what have you. And then any other form of meaning, any other form of using the term meant or means or whatever is if it doesn't entail, if it doesn't have entailment, then it's non natural, as he calls it.

19:55 Dylan: It gets to this whole category of communication that is in this realm of, you said non entails or non referential. The best you can do, I think, at the beginning is say, well, there are many ways we communicate that involve multiple meanings, but we have ways of sorting that out.

20:13 Steve: That's right. And not only do we have ways of sorting that out, what's interesting is natural meaning requires a sort of inference. This infers that. And the first thing he does is say, that's not the sort of meaning I'm talking about. We're not talking about inferences. Now, if you put that on the table, the irony is that when he goes through these two papers, then in 75 he has the big paper, where does he ultimately end up? Inference. And so the thing he starts by denying we're going to see at the very end, he has to end up embracing.

20:47 Dylan: Yeah, I was just going to say that. I mean, this distinction between natural and non natural in the end is going to disappear because the specialness of the natural meaning cases isn't so special.

20:59 Mark: I like the fact, Steve, that you've connected the latter paper to the early attempt, that the sort of example that you're giving, how do I look? You look fine. Is the kind of thing that he would discuss in the latter, in the Logic and conversation paper. In the 1975 paper, according to the 1957 paper, the response that one would give to what did you mean by you look fine? Well, I meant to produce in you the belief that you look fine, or at least that I believe that you look fine. I also intended that you to recognize that that's what I meant when I said, you look fine.

And I wanted you to gain this belief that this is what I meant based on your recognition that that's what I meant. And that last one seems like it's redundant. But, you know, then he's. The rest of this paper is giving, you know, why am I splitting this this way? And the additional paper, the 1969 paper, is maybe we need to add number five, number six. Because let's come up with more examples of. Just to throw one out. Someone left a handkerchief at a murder scene. And that's supposed to indicate, you know, it has someone's initials on.

22:05 Steve: It's.

22:06 Mark: Maybe it's someone else, but you're trying to frame them. And so I am trying to induce a belief in the policeman's mind that, you know, such and such was the killer. But I don't intend him to recognize that I did that intentionally, that anyone did that intentionally. So actually, that second criterion is not fulfilled. So, you know, he goes through examples like this to establish the three criteria and then test them further.

22:29 Seth: That's exactly the point at which I was like, if I were him, I would have just said, cases of deception are not included. Because as more and more counterexamples are introduced, and let's face it, that was the history of philosophy for about 50 years, was introducing counter examples to theories like this and everything getting progressively more complicated until you realize that maybe that wasn't the right approach, was to try to. Because ultimately you're still trying to create a set of rules that can be formalized. He doesn't want to side with the camp that says natural language is hopelessly useless and obtuse and take.

But also he doesn't want to side with the group of folks who say natural language is impoverished and we need to just get to a formal language. He wanted to say, no, natural language, and this is to Steve's point early on, is we do this really well. It's not by accident that human beings are able to communicate and understand each other's meanings in an exceptionally complex world. It can't possibly be just happenstance. Like, and it's not just all, what's the word I'm looking for? Like, ad hoc, abstract, kind of like training that we've all just happened to learn that everything's idiomatic and we just know how to roll with the punches.

It's like, language does have rules, and those rules.

23:44 Steve: So here he draws another important distinction between that which is conventional and that which is conversational. So conventional is where there are absolute rules that are not context dependent. The phenomenon is even more amazing in that we do it on the fly with a potentially unlimited number of possible utterances in context we couldn't have envisioned or been taught to work in. And yet somehow here are four of us talking back and forth and understanding each other. You know what I mean when I say that? Yeah, we know what you mean, Steve. How does that happen? That's really a sort of amazing thing if we want to move beyond a strictly formal approach. And so that question really is. It's one of those things that we don't stop to realize how amazing just a simple conversation is.

24:36 Dylan: But you pointing to that conventional meaning, it seems like that class, the conventional meaning would be the ones that are most amenable to a formalist approach. And that it's really the presence of the conversational meaning and the richness of that which you see sort of structured in the logic and conversation paper that reveals sort of a whole class, articulable class of ways of communicating that are sort of demonstrably not amenable to the formalist structure.

25:10 Steve: Exactly. So there's sometimes when we say things and what we mean is not what we say. So take aphorisms, boys will be boys. Well, that's actually a tautology. It shouldn't mean anything. And yet it does mean something. Right? It means that young males aren't responsible for their actions because that's their nature.

25:30 Seth: Right.

25:30 Steve: And so that's a non tautological proposition.

25:34 Seth: Right.

25:34 Steve: That's a, you know, a biological or a sociological claim, which may or may not be true, but we cast it in terms of a sentence that doesn't actually mean that. And yet we all know what, what it means, because we've been trained in our linguistic community to know, okay, this means this, it doesn't say this, but it means this. So there's a convention that will take us from here to there. But what Grice is pointing out is there are some things that aren't even conventional. You have no idea what that means in a vacuum, but yet in the flow of the conversation, you perfectly picked up what that person intended.

And so how does that happen? So we've got two different minds. What the formalists do is just look at the proposition itself. Let's take the words, let's write them down, let's parse them out logically. What Grice is saying is, no, no, no, no, you got to put the mouth back in this that spoke those Words. And that mouth is connected to a mind. And we somehow have to figure out what's going on in that mind. And then we've got the mind of the audience.

26:42 Seth: It's not strictly an intentionalist account, precisely because there's an audience. So he's talking about. And that's where, getting back to what Mark was talking about, the intention not only to convey something, but to create a belief or create some sort of activity in the mind of the audience. And by the way, it may not be a present audience, it may not be an audience that you know about. So he talks about putting signs like no trespassing signs or something like that, where you're trying to convey, like, how could we talk about a no trespassing sign as an utterance?

27:17 Steve: Exactly. And so think of it in terms of an argument you're having with your romantic partner.

27:22 Seth: Right?

27:22 Steve: No, no, no. You're not understanding what I mean. I want you to hear me. I want you to get what I mean. And so what's important for Grice is that the speaker's meaning be understood as the meaning that was intended by the audience. But what's interesting is sometimes we don't say what we mean. So how do we distinguish, then between those cases? Or sometimes we're misunderstood. And so what he's setting out in these three conditions, as Mark points out, is both that the utterance occurs, that the speaker has an intention, that the listener understands what the speaker meant, and that the audience responds appropriately as the speaker intended, given that they knew what it was that the speaker was trying to convey.

And so you've got this interesting reflectivity right between the audience and the speaker, that both of them are necessary. And so what you're dealing with here is something that the formalists can't handle, which is a relationship, people in the world. And you've got a lived context because I'm talking to you with a background. I'm talking to you in a particular place at a particular time with a particular history. And so those contextual factors are ones that Russell and the positivists try to sort of exclude. They're trying to talk about what he calls the timeless meanings of an utterance as opposed to the purely contextual utterance.

28:58 Mark: One of the fourth things, at least according to some of the secondary literature I was looking up, that he convincingly argued for, I guess, is that these timeless meanings of sentences are all derived from individual usages, intentions that were in somebody's head, as if these things built up, which seems obvious when you put it that way. But I guess the sort of behaviorist reason against that, it's sort of like Wittgenstein's private language argument and other things, is that what is the intention that you have before you put it into a sentence, before you can articulate it?

You know, this is why we argue. Oh, you know, we were just arguing. Animals that don't have language, they can't actually think because, well. Well, what are you thinking? In particular, how many times do we actually, before we do something, formulate an explicit plan in our head, oh, I have this intention, this mental entity that's sitting there and now will come out and no, we just talk. And what we say has certainly some relationship to the thing we're trying to do. But you can't say that the intention is prior to the utterance. Utterances and intentions are things that come together.

Until you are a language creature, you don't even truly have intentions, according to this Quinean Wittgensteinian way of going about things.

30:10 Steve: And what someone like Grice is going to say is, well, that intention is not something that happens in a vacuum. It happens socially.

30:18 Seth: Right.

30:19 Steve: And this is where Grice is Wittgensteinian. That is, language is an activity. Language is something that's done in community. We don't just have our own private language. Language is used to convey. But that notion of conveyance is much more intricate than we would think. So even if you have a pet, somehow you're able to communicate with it. It knows what you're meaning, even if it doesn't speak the language itself. And so the question is, where does that understanding come from? How do I know what you mean if I can't get inside your head? And if it isn't just conventional, if it isn't just, okay, these words mean this because language is ambiguous.

There can be multiple natural meanings for any given proposition. So sorry, timeless meanings. So the timeless meaning of oh, that looks nice could mean it looks minimally acceptable. It could mean, ah, that's exactly what I wanted. It could mean noise that looks amazing. All of those are meanings of that looks nice. But the question is, when you just said it in this lived conversational context with me, when I asked you this particular question on this day at this time, what did you mean by it? And that question puts the agency back in language in a way that ought to seemingly make language almost impossible, and yet it's so mundane that we don't even think about it.

31:50 Seth: I see how that is a response to the formalists. And this is not an Interview Steve. So don't feel like you have to answer this, but how is this a response to Austin? What is it about that school of thought that this thinks it's trying to address or can't address that Austin and his folks can't?

32:09 Mark: And to clarify, we read how to Do Things with Words.

32:11 Steve: A lot of what Austin is doing, you see it sort of popping up in little places here where what he's trying to say is Austin has really lost the thread in just glomming onto this one cool insight he had. And he's sort of throwing the baby out with the bathwater by not really putting meaning and communication at the heart of the linguistic project. And so what he's trying to do is be able to say, and this is what he's doing a lot in the second paper, which you're right, I think Mark mentioned earlier that it looks very Austinian, and it is, because what he's trying to say is this approach can do what Austin did.

But. So I can account for all of that doing. I can account for shut the door. I can account for non declarative sentences, but I still do it by keeping meaning communication as the heart of the linguistic project. So I don't have to completely remove the sort of common sense picture of language that the formalists have and go all the way over what he thinks is too extreme. I can still keep meaning and communication at the heart of the linguistic project and see these Austin like cases as sort of the exceptions that can be explained instead of as the rule that governs this big old pot over here.

33:31 Mark: But let me just throw out a few more details of that for folks that did not listen to the Austin episode or haven't for five years, just that we normally think of sentences paradigmatically as declarative, as descriptive. And actually, even in the first paper we are concerned with both those and commands. But I think by the beginning of the second paper, he wants to combine those in a certain way by saying, well, what I'm really telling you, when I command you close the door, I'm not actually trying to get you to close the door. I'm trying to get you to have the intention to close the door.

So I'm still trying to do something to your mental state as opposed to just purely so really they're not that different. I'm trying to get you, in one case, you can also go the other way, like by saying the cat is on the mat. I'm trying to get you to do something, to think the thought the cat is on the mat to know that I believe that at least if I'm staking it in a normal declarative context. And probably I'm trying to get you to believe it as well, you know, so I'm, I'm command. They're all commands, right?

34:33 Steve: And Austin Call, you know, says these utterances have the term he uses as perlocutionary power, that is the ability to bring about some change in the world. And what he's doing in the second paper and he does it, you know, what he throws in these moods and he uses the Greek letter psi. Everybody looks at it and goes, is he's trying to, you know, sort of use his theory to now usurp everything that Austin was doing and saying, well, see, I can do it too, but I can do it from a place that seems much more common sense that what do we do with language?

We talk to each other and we hear each other and we understand each other. That communication really is the heart of all of this. And so once I have this theory of meaning of speakers, meaning of the ability to communicate between us, I can now cover all of these cases, both from the formalist and from the ordinary language people. I've got the one that works, right?

35:33 Mark: As opposed to an Austin case with this ring I thee wed. That's probably not informing the woman, hey, I'm, I'm wedding you. Right now. It's taking place in a ritual context. And those are something that Grace tries to then deal with. He has a little section in the second paper on confessions that if you say you ate the cookies, didn't you, and you want the kid to say, yeah, I ate the cookies. Well, it's not because the kid is then informing you that they ate the cookies. You already know that they ate cookies. It's. You're trying to get them to show that they're not going to lie about it. You know, they're doing some other move in a language game that's not straight ahead information.

36:12 Steve: Exactly. The one I loved was the oral exam when I asked you this question, what is it that I'm actually doing? Right? When was the Battle of Waterloo? Now, the question here is, what is that sort of conversational interaction? So it could be an authentic one or an inauthentic one. But the idea is the student is trying to spit back the answer that the examiner wants. So does that in any way, and this is where it gets into a complication for Grice, does that in any way involve a belief on either side? So normally when I Communicate, my name is Steve. I believe that. I want you to believe that when you hear me say it, if you think I'm being honest, you think, okay, he believes his name is Steve, I will believe it too. And that way I'll call him Steve when we meet. So that's normal communication. But what's happening in an oral exam?

37:11 Dylan: When I had my oral exam for physics for my PhD, it was following my written exam. And the written exam you chose from a whole bunch of problems, which ones to do. And all the problems were written by faculty members who then were part of the oral exam. And so when I walked into my oral exam, one of the professors said, well, you didn't answer any of the questions that I wrote, so why don't we start with those? So he was saying that I, among the other things, at least he was saying, I had some of the most interesting questions and you didn't answer any of them. And then there's all kinds of interesting judgments about that going on. That's my example of the multiple things being communicated.

37:58 Steve: Exactly. And so in this lived context, the way you normally would interpret what somebody is saying is completely changed because of

38:09 Dylan: the context for that example. Right. It was not merely a statement of

38:13 Steve: fact, even though if you look at the sentence, it simply is.

38:17 Dylan: It's a statement of fact. Simply a statement of fact.

38:19 Steve: But when we talk, that's not really how communication actually works.

38:23 Dylan: In Grice's first paper in meaning, he spends the first after he goes through saying, well, I'm going to talk about non natural meaning. He talks about examples of non natural meaning. And he spends the beginning of that discussion on what he calls informative non natural meaning. And then he moves on to non informative cases. So he, you know, at the point at page 383, he sort of gives a summary. We can sum up what is necessary for a to mean something by x, A must intend to induce by x a belief in an audience. A must intend to induce by x a belief in an audience. He must also intend his utterance to be recognized as so intended. Maybe we could talk a little bit about the difference between informative and non informative cases. We've been alluding to it, but Grice makes a big distinction between those imperative

39:22 Mark: being the other ones he brings up.

39:23 Steve: Right.

39:23 Dylan: Commands imperative or quasi imperatives.

39:26 Steve: Yeah, and here's where you're right. He's bringing in Austin. Right. This is, I think, what we had been chatting about a little bit ago is that on the one hand, one common use probably the most common use of language is I believe something, I put it into words, I tell you, you realize I believe it, and so you think, well, maybe you should believe it too. But then we use language for other purposes. And one of the primary ones is to get people to do things right, stand up, sit down, do the hokey pokey. And the question is, how does that work? Because that's not giving you a belief I have, but it's trying to.

And here's where we're bringing in the Austin that's trying to get you to do something, that's trying to get you to make a change in the world, that you're trying to actually accomplish something. But I'm trying to get you to want to accomplish what I want you to accomplish. So you have to know what I mean when I said close the door. Well, there are three doors in here, Steve. Which door?

40:29 Dylan: So at this section I agree, but there's something, maybe I'm wrong about this. So he gives this funny example of an imperative or quasi imperative. I have a very avaricious man in my room and I want him to go, so I throw a pound note out the window. Is there any utterance with a meaning that's not natural? There's no. Because behaving as I did, I did not intend his recognition of my purpose to be in any way effective in getting him to go. So here's the challenge here, right? Is you induced, you made an imperative, right? But you did not. He's saying you didn't have any meaning to that.

41:08 Steve: It's not that you had an utterance. He's going to say, that's not an utterance, that's just creating a world in which there would be a non natural cause, a non natural meaning, a cause that would lead this greedy person to go. Now if I give him a shove out the door as he's going, that's an utterance.

41:27 Dylan: And that's the example that he follows it up with. And this gets to my opening statement, which my opening little thingamadoodle, which is causal utterances aren't meaningful. So if I do something, so in this case, I do something, I throw a pound out the window. He's going to say, well, that's not an utterance, which might not be so crazy to say it's not an utterance, that's an action, right? And therefore as an action, it has a causal intention, but it does not have any meaning in the way in which we're talking about meaning here in terms of an utterance. But there would be things that are more conventionally spoken things that would also be merely causal, I suppose, and therefore not have meaning.

42:12 Mark: Let me just add, I think you've clarified that utterance, even though it sounds like you're uttering something with your mouth, does not have to actually be saying of words at all. It could be grunting, it could be pushing someone, giving them a look, any number of gestural kind of things.

42:25 Steve: Yeah.

42:26 Dylan: So in fact the counter example to the throwing the pound note out the window is another non verbal utterance which is I'm putting my hand on your shoulder and walking you towards the door. That is me telling you to go, okay. And that is an utterance in Grice's structure. But I'm also supposing that in a less broad understanding of, to say just a very, very conventional of it's words I spoke with my mouth, that there would be merely causal utterances.

43:01 Steve: Right. Which would then have no meaning. And so the idea is, you're right, that we can use language to cause things.

43:08 Dylan: Is that all. All the ways in which I talk to an animal, you know, whenever I say sit, those are all causal utterances, non meaningful. They don't mean anything. They are just causal utterances. They don't mean anything. And in fact this would get towards our whole discussion with Thomas Sallow that that is not language. Animals don't understand language. And this would be completely consistent with that is that you are causing an action. It's not meaningful. And in so not being meaningful, it's not language.

43:40 Mark: I think on Grice's account, saying sit, or doing even the gesture for sit or whatever clearly is a communication. You have a communicative intent. You're trying to get the dog to of course also take the action. But this is just an issue with commands more generally imperatives that even when I say to you, yeah, shut the door, I'm trying to get you to shut the door, but I'm trying to get you to have the intention to shut the door. So the other type of if you just yell at an animal to scare it away, you're not trying to communicate. Well, what do you think of this?

Because now they say, oh, if you see a bear, you should go, ah, you should wave your arms around and try to scare it away. Well, are you then trying to communicate to the bear, hey bear, I'm a threat. Are you trying to actually convey that? Or are you just trying to bring about causally the bear running away? I don't know how to answer in these kind of Animal cases.

44:28 Dylan: Well, I think the same thing applies for sitting. Right. Because if it's communication, then you are trying to induce in the animal the understanding of sitting, which is different than them sitting. But maybe to your point, it's hard to understand because hard to get your hand around it. And I don't mean to derail us, but I'm most interested in this. I was articulating a little bit more about what it would mean to have a merely causal utterance.

44:56 Steve: What about the. You're a good dog. Yes, you are. That does seem to generate an understanding in the dog. That is something that might be propositional. Right.

45:09 Dylan: I just think it makes them understand that you approve of them. Because I could say you're a really bad dog. And as long as I use the same kind of tone of voice, it's like speaking curse words in French to somebody that you love, is that it can sound like you're trying to woo them. And actually you're calling them terrible things

45:27 Mark: and actually you mean to woo them. According to Grice, that's one of the examples he gives that if you're the shop owner who an Arabic shop owner, he says, and the tourists are around and you say, oh, you won your piece of crap American, come in and give me all your money, you dumb son of a bitch. But you're saying it in Arabic. So what you actually mean to say to them is come in the store. And that's how they're going to interpret it. And you've successfully communicated using a non conventional use of those words.

45:55 Steve: Right. What you mean isn't what your utterance

45:58 Dylan: means, what you're saying.

46:00 Seth: Right.

46:00 Dylan: In the conventional form of saying.

46:02 Steve: Exactly. And those are, you know, for Grice, he's got a theory that accounts for the easy case, the common case. And now, and this is where, as you pointed out earlier, analytic philosophy gets fun is okay. Now let's look at these unusual cases. Let's look at these boundary cases. How do these requirements work when we're not in the the comfy confines of normal language?

46:28 Mark: Well, that sounds like a good spot to stop part one here. Come back next week for part two or become a partially examined life citizen. Partiallyexaminelife.com support and get it right now. Thanks so much, Steve. We'll see you in a few minutes.