Against the Gricean Account of Speaker’s Meaning

The Gricean program is an intention-based theory of meaning that seeks to reduce semantic properties to mental states, such as intentions and beliefs. It aims to explain the notion of linguistic meaning in terms of speaker’s meaning without relying on semantic notions, and to account for the notion of speaker’s meaning in terms of speaker’s communicative intentions without relying on semantic notions. This paper argues that the Gricean program fails to adequately define the notion of speaker’s meaning and presents three reasons to support this claim: First, existing definitions of speaker’s meaning, proposed according to the Gricean program, struggle to eliminate certain types of counterexamples. Second, these counterexamples can be eliminated by incorporating a semantic notion into a definition of speaker’s meaning. Third, there is a plausible alternative definition of speaker’s meaning, which avoids these counterexamples and involves the semantic notion, i.e., the notion of what is (literally) said that is understood independently of the speaker’s communicative intentions.