Determinations of Meaning

Forthcoming in Oxford Studies in the Philosophy of Language, E. Lepore and D. Sosa and (eds.
Determinations of Meaning
Stephen Neale1
1 INTERPRETATION
The quest for a general or integrated theory, a substantive philosophical account, a science
of interpretation is a fool’s errand. Besides the panoply of linguistic and artistic objects and
events we are said to interpret, there are maps, diagrams, frowns, winks and dreams; bee
dances and the screeches of vervet monkeys; village layouts and archaeological sites;
population dispersals and distributions of tephra, bones and arrowheads; footprints, dowel
holes, chisel marks, and brushstrokes; bends, breaks, cracks, and tears (a subfield of
archaeology, thraumatology, is devoted to these); compositions of soils, lavas and paints;
traces of lipstick, phosphorus and depleted uranium; choices of décor, clothing, partner, or
career; cancellations of flights, meetings, and pay increases; changes in more or less
anything—seismic activity, radiation levels, sea level, air pressure, vegetation, plumage,
posture, interest rates, educational curricula, opening hours, tempo, batting orders, artillery
deployments and church attendance. In short, just about any object, event or process we detect
in nature or culture is something we might interpret.
Not only are the things we are said to interpret heterogeneous, so are the activities,
processes, procedures, methods, or practices to which we apply the word ‘interpretation’.
When focusing on the interpretation of items of a specific kind, we often employ some other
term: ‘explanation’ (of behavior and events), ‘analysis’ (of data and theories), ‘rendition’ (of
sonatas and poems), ‘production’ (of plays and operas); ‘construal’ (of statutes and treaties),
and ‘understanding’, ‘comprehension’, ‘translation’ and ‘paraphrase’ (of speech and
writing). As for what we do when we engage in interpretation, Peter Lamarque summarizes
the situation well:
. . . a poem, a dream, eccentric behavior at a party, a cryptic remark, evidence at a murder
scene, a Rorschach blot, a quattrocento painting, a biblical passage, and a judgment of the
1
Versions of parts of this paper have been presented over the years at the CUNY Graduate Center; New York University;
School of Advanced Study, University of London; University of Texas, Austin; Princeton University; University of
Wisconsin, Milwaukee; University of Wisconsin, Madison; University of Reading; University of Birmingham; University
of Stockholm; University of Oslo; University of Zurich; University of Parma; and a meeting of the Society for Philosophy
and Psychology held at Brown University. I thank Susanne Bobzien, Michael Devitt, Peter Lamarque, Peter Pagin, Colin
Renfrew, Stephen Schiffer, Barry Smith, David Sosa, Dan Sperber, Dennis Stampe, Dag Westerståhl, and Deirdre Wilson
for valuable comments, questions, and advice. The issues are treated in more detail in Neale (forthcoming a) in the broader
context of a discussion of pragmatic, legal, and archaeological interpretation.
STEPHEN NEALE DETERMINATIONS OF MEANING 2
Supreme Court might all be suitable objects of interpretation, but the constraints on how an
interpreter might proceed cannot be assumed to be the same in the different cases (2000: 97).
Literary interpretation is a different practice from philosophical interpretation, which in turn

is different from the interpretation of dreams under psychoanalysis or the interpretation of
conversation according to Gricean conversational implicature or the interpretation of
evidence at a murder scene (2000: 104).
There is no particular activity, process, procedure, method, or practice that constitutes

interpretation; and nothing that could possibly qualify as a unified and substantive account
of the full range.2
This double heterogeneity sinks any chance of finding a unified topic worthy of serious
intellectual investigation. Only in a very superficial sense is there anything for a general
theory or philosophical account of interpretation to be about. This is not exceptional. There
is nothing for a general theory or philosophical account of doing to be about either. The
problem is not that the word ‘do’ is equivocal; it’s that the things we do are so heterogeneous.
Similarly, the reason there is nothing for a general theory of interpretation to be about is
not that the words ‘interpret’ and ‘interpretation’ are equivocal; it’s that the activities,
processes, procedures, methods or practices to which we apply the words are no less
heterogeneous than the kinds of things that are the objects of interpretation. Interpreting
may not be as all-encompassing as doing; but it is sufficiently heterogeneous to render quite
hopeless the idea of any theory of interpretation that is both general and substantive.3
Unsurprisingly, grand theories of interpretation in the humanities and social sciences,
and the grand theories of signs upon which some of them are founded, range from quaint
taxonomies, to harmless collections of superficial generalizations, to vague or ambiguous
pronouncements that, when rendered clear enough to have content, bristle with specious
generalizations, strained analogies, patent falsehoods, or platitudes dressed up in
terminology that might create the illusion of philosophical substance. The terminology used
2
Since writing this paper I have had the pleasure of reading, and now heartlily recommend, a more recent discussion by
Lamarque (2019).
3
Sperber and Wilson (1986) make a similar point about a theory of locomotion intended to cover walking, cycling, plane
flight, and so on. A physiological model should account for walking, an engineering model plane flight, and a combination
cycling. All forms of locomotion fall under the laws of physics, of course, but the laws of physics are too general to constitute
a theory of locomotion. So locomotion is either “too general or not general enough to be the object of an integrated theory”
(1986: 1-20). In connection with texts, people, artifacts, and evolved organisms, Dennett claims “…there is really just one
exercise of interpretation . . . Interpreting people, texts, and other artefacts are the same project directed at different objects…
The canons of interpretation are the same, the problems are the same, and the illusions that beset both practitioners and
their critics are the same (1990: 177). According to his “design stance” picture of “artefact hermeneutics”, an artefact is
categorized by its function, which is determined not by original (or any other) intent, but by optimality considerations. An
item’s function is established from what it is good for, which in turn can often form the basis for establishing, finally, its
designer’s or user’s intentions. There are important ambiguities in this statement. One concerns whether ‘determine’ is to
be read constitutively or epistemically. (See below.) Another, discussed by Vaesen and van Amerongen (2008), concerns
whether the thesis is meant to be descriptive or normative. Dennett advances his position by way of examples from the
interpretive practices of literary theorists, engineers, archaeologists, and historians. But what he sees as a fully general notion
of interpretation turns out to be no more than categorization, the thinnest, most elementary kind of interpretation, an activity
that, as Lamarque (2000) stresses, in many realms takes place before serious interpretation can begin.
to dress up such platitudes and disguise the specious, strained, or patently false often comes
from semiotics, where such words as ‘meaning’, ‘language’, ‘grammar’, ‘text’, and ‘code’ are
used too loosely or too broadly to be useful. But sometimes it is casually lifted from analytic
philosophy of language or generative linguistics with tiresome and cavalier references to
Austin, Chomsky, Davidson, Grice, and Wittgenstein, the blurring of vital distinctions and
the mangling or botched deployment of concepts or tools that have been shaped by
painstaking philosophical and empirical work on language, thought, and communication.
Primarily, I shall be concerned here with unruly or confused invocations of theories of
meaning and utterance interpretation in the Gricean, intentional-inferential tradition.
These theories can no more provide the foundation of a general theory of interpretation
than semiotic theory can.4 And the theories themselves do little to illuminate the nature of
legal, literary, artistic, and archaeological interpretation, even where the relevant activities
involve forming hypotheses about intent, as is sometimes the case. The producers and users
of cultural entities—tools, pots, weapons, jewellery, clothing, shelter, cave paintings, laws,
and ceremonies, for example—doubtless had all sorts of intentions when producing or
using them. Around a dozen types of intentions that are worth separating fit into several
complex hierarchies (most notably ontogenetic, phylogenetic, and epistemic).5 But (i) only
those at the apex have anything like the structure of Gricean meaning intentions; (ii) if
current thinking on utterance interpretation in pragmatics and cognitive archaeology is
correct, in the ordinary course of things an evolved, dedicated, efficient, automatic, largely
nonconscious cognitive mechanism is responsible for serving up conclusions about the
contents of those intentions;6 and (iii) there is no reason to think interpreting cultural
entities always involves forming conclusions about the intentions with which they were
produced or used. So the idea that theories of meaning and utterance interpretation in the
intentional-inferential tradition can provide the foundations of a general theory of the
interpretation of cultural entities is immediately suspect.
But work in the intentional-inferential tradition can provide three things that are useful
in examining not only hierarchies of intentions but also constitutive questions about the
determination of meaning, and the extent to which semantic theory must ultimately be
hostage to a theory of pragmatic interpretation: (i) a back-catalogue of attempts to separate
and analyse various kinds of intentions (including those that have come to be called
informative intentions, communicative intentions, and meaning intentions), (ii) a tight nexus
of distinct notions of meaning, and (iii) a collection of sharp tools that, when properly
deployed, provide clear ways of forestalling certain kinds of practical and intellectual
mistakes that are made not only in the fields just mentioned but also in the philosophy of
4
“The recent history of semiotics has been one of simultaneous institutional success and intellectual bankruptcy” (Sperber
and Wilson 1986: 9).
5
See Neale (forthcoming b).
6
Sperber and Wilson (1986, 2015), Wilson (2005), Scott-Philipps (2015).
language and semantic theory, particularly in separable debates about the “determination”
of meaning.
2 MEANING
Attempts to provide a general theory of interpretation tend to culminate in hifalutin
restatements of a familiar platitude: to interpret something is to make sense of it, or to
understand it. This can seem more interesting if talk of sense is elevated to talk of meaning:
to interpret something is to determine its meaning (or to assign it a meaning). While this
might be fine for informal discussions or general orientation, in the absence of substantive
ideas about meaning and determining this is hardly philosophical progress. A naïve
elaboration of this “improved” platitude will occur immediately to anyone familiar with
Grice’s (1957, 1982) distinction between natural and nonnatural meaning, or von Wright’s
(1971, 1976) distinction between causal explanations of natural phenomena and
intentional explanations of human actions and artifacts: “scientific” interpretation is the
assignment of natural meaning to natural phenomena, whereas “cultural” interpretation is
the assignment of nonnatural meaning to cultural phenomena.7 Dressing up the improved
platitude in this way might seem like progress, particularly when combined with Gricean
promises (i) to treat nonnatural meaning as an emergent property of certain kinds of
patterned natural phenomena, (ii) to define speaker meaning in terms of higher-order
interpreter-directed intentions, and (iii) to define all notions of conventional meaning
(including word meaning and sentence meaning) in terms of speaker meaning. But thinking
Grice’s work supplies the tools and concepts needed to motivate or prop up a general theory
of interpretation involves some basic misunderstandings and unacceptable conceptual
sloppiness.
Sentence (1) below is a specification of natural meaning (henceforth Nmeaning), while
(2) and (3) are specifications of nonnatural meaning (henceforth NNmeaning):8
(1) The presence of those spots on Ann’s face Nmeant that Ann had measles.
(2) By uttering the sentence ‘she has measles’, Sam NNmeant that Ann had measles.9
(3) As used on that occasion, the sentence ‘she has measles’, NNmeant that Ann had
measles.
(4) As used on that occasion, the word ‘she’, NNmeant Ann.
7
I do not mean to be saddling Grice himself with this position. The distinctions Grice and von Wright draw belong to a
tradition of dichotomies (or trichotomies) engendered by perceived differences between natural and cultural phenomena
including natural v. conventional signs (Augustine, Ockham, Hobbes, Stevenson); natural v. customary and stipulated signs
(John of St Thomas); natural v. accidental and instituted signs (Condillac, Reid); indexical v. iconic and symbolic signs
(Peirce); original v. surrogate signs (C. I. Lewis); facts v. artifacts as meaning-bearers (Watts Cunningham). See Neale
(forthcoming a, b).
8
I have prefixed Grice’s subscripts to facilitate a fully general abbreviatory nomenclature that respects word-order. So in
addition to using ‘NNmeaning’ (rather than Grice’s (1957, 1989) ‘meaningNN’) for ‘nonnatural meaning’, I will use
‘Smeaning’ (rather than Schiffer’s (1972) ‘S-meaning’) for ‘speaker meaning’, and ‘Xmeaning’ for ‘expression meaning’.
9
Of course, there can be other occasions on which Sam utters ‘she has measles’ and means something more, or something
different, if only because of conversational implicature. See §5.
Sentence (1) seems to specify what a certain fact meant (or what the existence or obtaining of
a certain state of affairs meant), specifically the fact that those spots were present on Ann’s
face. Sentence (2) specifies what a certain speaker meant on a given occasion by doing
something. And sentences (3) and (4) specify what a given sentence and a given word meant
(as used on a given occasion).
Although sentence (2) specifies what a certain speaker meant by uttering a particular
sentence of English on a given occasion, there is no assumption in Gricean theories that all
acts of speaker meaning involve speaking, in the ordinary sense, or even the use of language.
Just as something can be speech in the legal sense (in the United States) without involving
anyone speaking (in the ordinary sense), so too someone can perform an act of speaker
meaning without speaking (or signing or writing). Any piece of behavior by the
performance of which someone means something involves speaker meaning in the relevant
theoretical sense.10
Grice’s intuitive reason for lumping together sentences (2)-(4) is that they specify cases
of meaning that are “specially connected with communication” (1969: 147), or dependent
upon “a framework provided by a linguistic, or at least communication-engaged
community” (1989: 292), even though there can be individual cases of speaker meaning
that do not involve the use of language. But he also provides a logico-semantic justification.
The complement of ‘means’ is identical in (1)-(3): the phrase ‘that Ann has measles’. But
(2) and (3) fail to exhibit factivity (1957: 377-8; 1989: 349); they can be true even if Ann
does not have measles; but sentence (1) cannot.11
This combination of complement-sameness and factivity-difference is often regarded—
though not by Grice—as evidence that the verb ‘mean’ is equivocal, bearing one lexical
meaning in (1) and a different one in (2) and (3). The thinking here seems to be based on
something like the following analogy. (a) The verbs in the following sentences have the
same complement (and the same subject noun phrase):
(5) Sam knows that Ann has measles
(6) Sam believes than Ann has measles.
But there’s a factivity difference: (6) can be true even if Ann does not have measles; but (5)
cannot. This difference must be attributable to some aspect of the meaning of ‘know’ (as it
occurs in (5)) that is not shared by the meaning of ‘believe’ (as it occurs in (6)), an aspect
that reflects a difference between knowledge and belief. (b) Since the verb ‘mean’ has same
complement in (1)-(3), the factivity difference between (1) and (2)/(3) must be explained
10
The label is due to Schiffer (1972). Grice (1968, 1969) calls it utterer’s meaning or, more fully, utterer’s occasion-meaning,
but Schiffer’s label has become standard and is later adopted by Grice (1989). (The possessive variant speaker’s meaning is
sometimes used, particularly when talking about a specific instance of speaker meaning—the speaker’s meaning, his meaning,
or her meaning.) Sperber and Wilson (1986, 2015), work with a slightly broader intentional notion which they see as the
proper domain of a theory of utterance interpretation.
11
It is common to generalize, with Grice, by saying that ‘mean’ is factive in specifications of Nmeaning.
in more or less the same way as the factivity difference between (5) and (6): there is an aspect
of the meaning of ‘mean’ (as it occurs in (1)) that is not shared by the meaning of ‘mean’
(as it occurs in (2)/(3)), an aspect reflecting a difference between natural and nonnatural
meaning. The force of the analogy can be challenged in various ways,12 but my point for
now is that anyone claiming that ‘mean’ has the same meaning as it occurs in (1) and (2)/(3)
needs to either explain or deny the factivity difference. This applies equally to (i) those
advocating naturalistic attempts to drain the distinction between Nmeaning and NNmeaning
of all explanatory value (either by abandoning talk of the latter altogether or else by
subsuming it under the former), and (ii) those who, with Grice (1969, 1986, 1989),
explicitly deny that ‘mean’ is equivocal but nonetheless see the distinction between natural
and nonnatural meaning as theoretically significant by virtue of marking endpoints of a
continuum upon which there are theoretically significant intermediate points.
The reverence accorded anything billed as meaning doubtless helps sustain the illusion
that interpretation per se constitutes a topic of serious intellectual inquiry. But the naïve
elaboration of the “improved” platitude cannot be called a philosophical thesis, still less a
general theory, or a substantive philosophical account of interpretation. At best, it’s a vague
first thought about how to bifurcate a vast terrain, a thought that raises more questions than
it answers. At a bare minimum, anyone claiming to see empirical significance in the
elaboration needs to answer the following questions:
(i) What are natural and nonnatural meanings?13
(ii) What does determining the meaning of something (or assigning it a meaning)
consist in?
(iii) What is to be said about the meanings of animal signals, which do not appear to
satisfy Grice’s criteria for possessing either Nmeaning or NNmeaning?14
(iv) Are there things for which interpretation consists in the determination of
separable “layers” of Nmeaning and NNmeaning?
(v) What is to be said about cases of cultural meaning that do not involve the intricate
intertwining of intention and reason characteristic of the most basic kind of
NNmeaning, which for Grice is speaker meaning? Is it really plausible to identify
12
See Neale (forthcoming a).
13
For Grice (1989), these are states of affairs and (roughly) representations of states of affairs, respectively. See Neale
(forthcoming a).
14
In the philosophy and ethology literature, it is common to distinguish natural signals from all other natural signs, though
the line gets drawn in different ways by different people, and terminological differences are legion. (See Hauser 1996,
Maynard Smith and Harper 2003, Millikan 1984, 2004, Skyrms 2010.) For Grice, the meanings of natural signals are
“special cases of natural meaning”. The non-voluntary productions of such signals “mean, or normally mean” [emphasis
added] that the producing creature is in this or that state (1982: 232). The place of animal signals in what Grices sees as a
continuum between natural and nonnatural meaning corresponds to signalling states being “flexibly factive”, which is to say
“factive in a special way which is divorced from full predictability” where the “general or normal, or standard truth” of p is
required for the truth of ‘x naturally means that p’; the truth of p is “not guaranteed” but “may be presumed . . . in the absence
of known interference-factors” (1986: 32). These needs to be understood against the background of natural and nonnatural
meaning (and all intermediate notions) involving what Grice (1989) sees as a consequence relation. See Neale (forthcoming
a) for discussion.
the interpretation of cultural phenomena not discussed by Grice (e.g. poems,

sonatas, religious symbols and ceremonies, burial practices, hairstyles, jewelry,
tattoos) with determining one of the forms of NNmeaning that he distinguishes?
Without answers to these questions, nothing of any substance can be derived from the naïve
“Gricean” elaboration of the improved platitude. Given (a) the sheer range of things we are
said to interpret, (b) the important differences and links between several theoretically
significant varieties of NNmeaning needed even to provide anything worth calling a theory
of utterance interpretation (see below), (c) the constraints that the logical grammar of the
word ‘mean’ places on its semantics, and (d) the differences between constitutive, causal,
stipulative, and epistemic notions of determination—providing an explanatory set of
answers is a daunting task.15
To say all this is not to deny that there are substantive notions of interpretation within
specific fields of investigation. I now turn to one that has attracted considerable attention
in the philosophy of language and elsewhere: pragmatic interpretation, understood as
utterance interpretation or the interpretation of speech. As the philosophical and cognitive
foundations of pragmatics have become clearer and firmer, it has become increasingly clear
just why work on interpretation more generally is so facile when it is based on deploying
tools and concepts from the philosophy of language, most notably those lifted from Grice’s
work on speaker meaning, and why a substantive theory of utterance interpretation is
inherently incapable of providing the basis of a more general theory of the interpretation of
cultural products.
3 PRAGMATIC INTERPRETATION
For several decades, philosophers of language, theoretical linguists, and cognitive scientists
have been engaged in attempts to articulate increasingly refined models of the structure, the
operations, and the ontology of the complex cognitive system that enables us to draw
(largely reliable) conclusions about what people are trying to communicate with their
actions (or the products of their actions), particularly when these involve the use of natural
language.16 (Substantive questions about the kinds of cognitive mechanisms, states, and
processes, the sources and kinds of information are accessed, and the principles of
information retrieval and cross-channel informational integration at work cannot be
addressed piecemeal or in the service of narrow disciplinary concerns, any more than they
can be answered wholesale by grand theories of interpretation or grand theories of signs.)
In the spirit of work spearheaded by Sperber and Wilson, we can call a model of this sort a
pragmatic theory. Getting clear about the questions a pragmatic theory must address
requires getting clear about theoretical uses of ‘communication’, ‘language’, and ‘meaning’.
15
16
See in particular the work of Sperber and Wilson (1995), Wilson and Sperber (2012), and Carston (2002). On the general
status of models of this sort, see Godfrey Smith (2008).
Communication. The principal subject matter is not communication per se. Many
animals communicate with one another, and we are increasingly accustomed to saying that
bacteria and electronic devices do so too. Things that communicate do so by way of
producing signals, and it has become common to talk about their senders and receivers (or
producers and consumers), about the former changing the environments of the latter, and
about signals containing information.17 There is doubtless some level of analysis at which
such talk covers the kind of communication that is the lifeblood of pragmatics, and to the
extent that such communication is regarded as qualitatively different from all other forms,
an account is needed of the key differences (which, following Grice, and Sperber and
Wilson are usually taken to involve higher-order intentions to induce cognitive rather than
behavioral responses, reduced reliance on coding, increased reliance on inference, and
increased potential for cooperation, imitation, and deception).18
Language. It will not be enough just to append the qualifier ‘linguistic’ to
‘communication’. For one thing, other animals have communication systems that are often
called languages, so an account would be needed of the key differences between human and
other languages (which are usually taken to concern recursion, syntactic complexity and
flexibility). For another, the cognitive operations involved in producing and interpreting
acts of nonlinguistic communication might be crucially involved in producing and
interpreting acts of linguistic communication; and some communicative acts have both
linguistic and nonlinguistic dimensions, for example those in which a nonverbal gesture
obviates the need to complete a sentence. A further complication arises from the fact that
the link between human communication and natural language also breaks down in the
other direction. Not only can there be communication that does not involve the use of
language, there can be perfectly good uses of language that do not involve communication
in any ordinary sense, for example when people use language to sharpen or hone ideas in
the absence of any audience. It ought to be possible to describe the subject matter of
pragmatics without getting into the weeds of debates about the function of language,
communicative intentions involving future stages of oneself, homunculi, and worse.
Meaning. For similar reasons, it will not do to simply assert that the principal subject
matter is NNmeaning or some favoured variety of NNmeaning. The justification for repeated
appeals to any precise, theoretical notion of meaning—whether billed as a kind of word
meaning, sentence meaning, speaker meaning, or what have you—must flow from the role
the notion plays in an explanatory theory. And the relevant theory’s ambition is to provide
17
Lewis (1968), Millikan (2004), For a brief, lucid overview of the terrain and a philosophically nuanced picture of the
relevance of such work to classical work in semantics, see Godfrey Smith (2013).
18
Sperber and Wilson (1986, 1995, 2015) take the subject matter to be what they call ostensive-inferential communication.
Acts of ostensive-inferential communication properly include Gricean acts of speaker meaning. (Specifically, the intention
required to perform an act of ostensive-inferential communication is weaker than the one needed to perform an act of
speaker meaning.) Sperber and Wilson’s position is elegantly motivated, particularly in their 2015 article, but for present
purposes I shall not dwell on the possible advantages of adopting it. See Neale (forthcoming a, b) for discussion.
a comprehensive answer to a question we can state without using the word ‘meaning’, a
master question that implicitly provides a clear specification of what philosophers of
language, theoretical linguists and cognitive scientists have been drawn together to study:
What general facts about (1) our cognitive states and processes, (2) the physical
circumstances and social relations in which we find ourselves, (3) certain kinds of noises,
bodily movements and marks we are capable of producing, and (4) our acts of overtly
producing (or displaying) those things, explain the fact that by overtly producing (or
displaying) them we manage to communicate information about the external world and
about our mental states—beliefs, desires, plans, hopes, fears, feelings, etc.—express or
sharpen our thoughts, and create and discharge obligations, and do all of these things (and
more) so efficiently (i.e. so quickly, systematically, and consistently)?19
We sometimes communicate with one another in ways that do not involve anything
usefully called a language—which we might, as a first shot, equate with a special system of
noises, marks, or gestures—and we cannot assume without argument that the cognitive
operations central to non-linguistic communication are not central to linguistic
communication. Of course, it is our possession of natural language that accounts for much
of the efficiency the master question mentions, and we look to work in phonology, syntax,
and semantics for theoretical descriptions of particular languages and general principles
underlying them. But it’s the desire to answer the master question that sustains all
substantive work in these fields for there is nothing for their proposed theories to be about
if they cannot be construed as parts of an answer.
Spelling out the relation between pragmatic interpretation and other kinds of
interpretation, requires spelling out the relation between pragmatics and semantics, which
requires separating various theoretical notions of meaning and various kinds of meaning
determination.
4 THEORETICAL NOTIONS OF MEANING
Although the words ‘mean’ and ‘meaning’ do not occur in the master question, a
comprehensive answer will inevitably appeal to notions of meaning. Among the distinctions
Grice (1952, 1957, 1968, 1969, 1975) drew or developed in the course of sketching his
theory of NNmeaning, three are relevant here:
(A) A distinction (within the realm of NNmeaning) between speaker meaning and
expression meaning (henceforth Smeaning and Xmeaning ).
(B) A distinction (within the realm of Xmeaning) between timeless (standing, stable)
meaning and occasion meaning, where the latter is understood as the kind of
meaning an expression has only relative to a particular occasion of use.20
19
See Neale (2016).
20
Timeless meaning and occasion meaning are Grice’s (1968, 1969) terms; standing meaning is Stampe’s (1977) term for
timeless meaning. Kaplan’s (1989a) influential character-content distinction is a theoretical version of this distinction, at least
for certain types of expressions. Superimposed on any distinction of this sort is a distinction between expressions whose
meanings are constitutively determined by semantic composition from the meanings of their proper parts (e.g. sentences)
(C) A distinction (within the realm of Smeaning) between direct meaning (e.g. what
the speaker says) and indirect meaning (e.g. what the speaker conversationally
implicates).
None of these distinctions is entirely original with Grice.21 But he defined the separated
notions clearly within a nexus of defined theoretical notions grounded in intention and
reason, giving substance simultaneously to a number of traditional ideas: (i) that Smeaning
is more basic than Xmeaning, (ii) that Smeaning involves an intention to affect the mental
states of others, (iii) that suggesting or implying something is quite different from saying it,
and (iv) that at least some words have two kinds of meaning that must be properly related
in a theory of Xmeaning.22
The efficiency mentioned in the master question is largely due to our possession of
natural language, so it is not surprising that word meaning and sentence meaning—or,
more precisely, atomic and composed forms of Xmeaning—are widely seen as the notions
of meaning that will be key in any plausible answer, or that many semanticists operate on
the assumption that a compositional semantics can be constructed without worrying about
speaker meaning, except in so far as it might need to be invoked occasionally to mop up
recalcitrant data. A compositional semantic, so the story goes, is a formally tractable object
that purports to provide a systematic explanation of an indefinitely large number of precise
facts about the way in which we can use language to say things (make statements, express
propositions) that are true or false. A pragmatic theory is very different, the story continues:
it concerns a kind of meaning, speaker meaning, that is a function of facts about sentence
meaning and a morass of facts about rational interaction, shared assumptions, beliefs,
desires, intentions, perceptions, memories, salience, inferential abilities, and social relations.
If the conclusions interpreters reach about what speakers mean are the outputs of central
cognitive processes that access all manner of information from all manner of sources, they
are aetiologically very different from the outputs of perceptual channels or cognitive
modules, in Fodor’s (1983) sense. So in the absence of a principled delimitation of the
information that might be used by an interpreter in reaching a conclusion about what a
speaker means, the story continues, the quest for a theory of pragmatic interpretation is
and those whose meanings are not (typical words). Whether we are talking about timeless meaning or occasion meaning, in
principle, two different distinctions can lurk in talk of word meaning and sentence meaning being distinct notions of
Xmeaning. One common distinction concerns the constitutive determination of those meanings, the latter being determined
compositionally. Another concerns end products: in some theories, the meaning of a typical word is itself an atomic entity
whereas the meaning of a sentence is a complex entity, effectively precluding a sentence sharing a meaning with a typical
word.
21
All three, as well as the distinction between Nmeaning and NNmeaning can be found in embryonic form in Stevenson
(1944), the sole work Grice (1957) cites. On the relationship between the work of Grice and Stevenson, see Neale
(forthcoming b).
22
The idea that Smeaning is basic, goes back at least to Diodorus Cronus (Frag 111. Döring) who, if Sedley is right, claimed
there is no meaning but Smeaning (1977: 103). The other ideas I called traditional are associated with Aristotle, Locke,
Marty, Gardiner, Stevenson, Austin, Strawson, Bar-Hillel, and others. See Neale (forthcoming a).
tantamount to a quest for a complete theory of belief fixation.23 And work on Xmeaning can
proceed without this.
Philosophers of a Gricean persuasion take a different view. Although the master question
does not contain the words ‘mean’ and ‘meaning’, it mentions two reciprocal activities that
we can describe using ‘mean’:
(i) Someone, S, meaning something by doing something, x, on a particular occasion
(ii) Someone reaching a conclusion about what S meant by doing x on that occasion.
So before we reach theories about systems of noises, marks, or gestures that have meaning,
we reach the idea of a person meaning something by doing something, and a distinction
between a theory of what constitutes an act of Smeaning and a theory of what constitutes
interpreting an act of Smeaning. And Smeaning, according to the Gricean, is the basic notion
of NNmeaning—the notion in terms of which all significant notions of Smeaning are to be
defined—and is rooted in a special kind of intentional action, the systematic interpretation
of which can yield, and sustain the existence of, human artifacts that are conventional, or at
least communal, bearers of meaning, right up to the abstract artifacts we call words and
sentences. So notions of word meaning and sentence meaning are only as robust as the roles
they play in the production and interpretation of acts of speaker meaning (see below). And
for the Gricean what a speaker S means on a given occasion by uttering something is wholly
constituted by the contents of certain interpreter-directed intentions with which S produced
the utterance. For present purposes, the following definition will suffice:
[I] In uttering u on a given occasion, S meant p iff for some person A and property
j, S intended it to be common ground between S and A that u has j and at least
partly on that basis that S uttered u on that occasion intending it to result in A’s
actively believing p.24
For the Gricean, it is no requirement that j be u’s meaning, or even that u have a meaning.
But the Gricean (a) recognizes that typically when S means something in uttering u, u is a
sentence and j is its meaning, and (b) takes this to be a consequence of the fact that when
S means something by uttering a sentence u, it is u’s having a particular meaning that makes
uttering u standardly an optimal way for S to make known to an interpreter the meaning
intentions with which S uttered u.
In ordinary conversation and many other situations in daily life that involve the use of
language, it is almost always speaker meaning that interests us. That is, typically, we care
more about what people mean than about what their words mean, and for good reason: we
have been engineered by evolution to reflexively reach conclusions about what people intend
23
See Chomsky (2000) and Fodor (1983, 2001).
24
Following Stalnaker (2002), a proposition p is common ground between two people iff they mutually believe p (or
mutually assume p for immediate purposes); and two people mutually believe p iff both believe p, both believe that both
believe p, both believe that both believe that both believe p, and so on. See e.g. Lewis (1969, 1975) and Schiffer (1972).
to achieve by their actions, linguistic or otherwise (see §8). To say this is not to deny that
there are times when the exact words are important—when we read statutes, constitutions,
and contracts, for example; when listening to trial testimony; when reading novels and
(especially) poetry, where imagery or feelings may be connected to uses of particular words
or strings of words (often in ways we have difficulty explaining prosaically). Nor is it to deny
the obvious fact that we are prone to attribute or assign meaning when we encounter
inscriptions of words and have no idea who produced them, inscriptions (or pixel
formations) that we know have been generated by a computer, or seeming inscriptions of
words in the sand and suspect they were formed by nothing more than the waves and the
wind. But in much of daily life words are means to ends and, importantly, so are their
meanings. Only in special cases are we interested in word meanings per se. Canonically, when
we encounter utterances, signings, and inscriptions of expressions, the largely non-conscious
cognitive operations that serve up hypotheses about what people mean involve registering (if
only subdoxastically) the meanings of the words used. But it is striking that much of the
time we do not retain the exact forms of words speakers, signers, and writers use, even when
we remember what we took those people to mean. Making all of this transparent requires
separating two “levels” of Smeaning and two “levels” of Xmeaning, and explaining how they
are related.25
5 TWO LEVELS OF SPEAKER MEANING
Sentence (2) is a specification of direct Smeaning, while sentence (2′) is a specification of
indirect Smeaning:
(2) By uttering, ‘she has measles’, Sam NNmeant that Ann had measles.
(2′) By uttering, ‘Oh dear, no school for you tomorrow’, the doctor NNmeant that Ann
had measles.
Both sentences describe cases involving the use of expressions whose meanings the speaker
expected to play roles in the audience’s identifying what the speaker meant. This makes
them specifications of special cases of direct and indirect Smeaning: in Grice’s terminology,
sentence (2) describes a speaker saying that Ann has measles, whereas (2′) describes a speaker
conversationally implicating it. But direct and indirect Smeaning do not always involve the
use of language. At midnight, I might want you to leave my house but not want to be direct
about it, so I say to you, ‘I’m tired’. In doing this, I mean two things—it’s my example, so
I get to stipulate this. I directly mean that I’m tired and indirectly mean that you should leave
now. But there is a nonlinguistic counterpart. Rather than saying ‘I’m tired,’ I yawn
ostentatiously. In so doing, I directly mean (but do not say, in Grice’s sense) that I’m tired,
and I indirectly mean (but do not, strictly speaking, conversationally implicate) that you
25
For the Gricean, Xmeaning is standardly defined in terms of self-perpetuating regularities over acts of Smeaning. It is
perfectly possible to accept Grice’s account of Smeaning while rejecting any attempt to define Xmeaning in terms of it, though
much of the original interest in Grice’s programme was the promise it held for defining Xmeaning in terms of the
psychological states required for performing acts of Smeaning.
should leave. Rather than exploiting expression meaning, as in the first case, in the second I
exploit natural meaning (in the form of a natural connection between yawning and
tiredness) in order to directly mean something, expecting you to recognize that I have
produced an overtly non-natural (voluntary, intentional) imitation of a natural yawn.
Within the picture I am painting, Grice’s distinction between saying and implicating is a
specific form of the broader distinction between direct and indirect Smeaning, and for
present purposes it is the broader classes that are important.26 So on Grice’s technical uses
of ‘say’ and ‘implicate’, if S said or conversationally implicated that p, then S meant that p.27
I noted a moment ago that much of the time we do not retain the exact forms of words
speakers, signers, and writers use, even when we remember what we took those people to
mean. But it is striking that much of the time we do nonetheless remember whether the
speaker said that such-and-such or conversationally implicated it, no doubt because there is
a sense of accountability associated with saying something that is imposed by the
conventions of expression meaning, which are regarded as sufficiently constrained to sustain
such things as the rights and obligations we enshrine in laws and promises.28
6 TWO LEVELS OF EXPRESSION MEANING
Strawson distinguishes the meaning of a “singular referring expression” and “the object it is
used, on a particular occasion, to refer to” (1950: 327). The distinction is clearest with
indexical and demonstratives expressions such as ‘I’, ‘he’, ‘this’, and ‘my handkerchief’. To
specify the meaning of such a word is, he says, to specify “general instructions for its use to
refer to some object or person” or “rules, habits, conventions governing its correct use, on
all occasions, to refer”. In short, the meaning of ‘I’ is something like a rule, whereas the
reference of a particular use of ‘I’ is (standardly) a person.
In a similar vein, Kaplan (1989a) distinguishes the rule-like character of ‘I’ from its
context-relative content. Quite generally, he models the character of an indexical α with a
function that maps every context c for which it is defined onto the content of α relative to c,
where a context is an ordered n-tuple of all those things (other than character) that
determine the contents of demonstratives and indexicals, most notably a speaker, a time,
and a place (to determine the contents of ‘I’, ‘here’, and ‘now’). For example, the character
of ‘I’ is a function that maps every context onto the speaker in that context. Viewed coarsely,
26
Sperber and Wilson’s (1986) distinction between explicit and implicit content is not quite a version because Smeaning is
a narrower notion than ostensive-inferential communication.
27
Grice (1961: 130; 1967: V 13-14; 1978: 120; 1989: 49 & 86-88). See also the discussions by Bach (1994, 2001), Bach
and Harnish (1979), Harnish (1976), Levinson (1983), Loar (1981), Neale (1992, 2004), Schiffer (1972), Stalnaker (1989,
2006), and Strawson (1990). It is sometimes claimed, erroneously, that Grice’s theories of meaning and conversational
implicature are unrelated, that they cannot be reconciled, that what a speaker says need not be meant, and that what is
conversationally implicated need not be meant. Such claims are based on a failure to appreciate that Grice’s inferential theory
of conversation concerns how speakers expect interpreters to reason and thereby illuminates the entire edifice of the theory
of meaning of which it is avowedly a component. See Neale (forthcoming a).
28
See Neale (forthcoming a and ms.).
the character of ‘I’ “reacts” to all contexts in the same way: it maps them to contents. Viewed
finely, it can “react” differently to different contexts: it maps some onto me, others onto
you, still others onto Joan Baez. So we can say the character of ‘I’ is context-sensitive, whereas
the content of ‘I’ is context-dependent (or context-relative). Without a context, ‘I’ doesn’t
have a content; both the existence and the identity of an expression’s content are context-
dependent.29 So a character, on Kaplan’s account, is a nonrelativized meaning-property, a
property an expression has independently of any particular context, whereas a content is a
relativized meaning-property, a property an expression has only relative to a context.30 I
noted earlier that superimposed on a distinction of this sort is a further distinction between
expressions whose meanings (or meaning-properties) are constitutively determined by
semantic composition from the meanings of their proper parts (e.g. sentences) and those
whose meanings are not (e.g. typical words), which prompts the question whether
characters or contents are the objects of semantic composition. Although there are dissenters
in the Kaplanian ranks, the usual story is that far as the construction of a semantic theory is
concerned, the objects of semantic composition are contents.31
In his brief discussion of indexicals, Grice (1952) credits Strawson with impressing upon
him the need to make a meaning-reference distinction but later strives for a fully general
distinction between nonrelativized and nonrelativized notions of expression meaning that
he calls timeless meaning and occasion meaning, respectively (1968, 1969a).32 Just as an
indexical has a content (for Kaplan) only relative to a context, so an indexical has an occasion
meaning (for Grice) only relative to an occasion of use.33 For present purposes, I’ll assume
(i) the timeless meaning of an expression α is the fixed condition something must satisfy in
order to be α’s occasion meaning (on a given occasion of use, of course);34 (ii) the occasion
29
Kaplan’s (1989) distinction is central to his intensional logic, which captures validities in formal languages containing
indexical expressions. In the formal theory, contents are modelled by intensions, which are functions from possible worlds
(or, in Kaplan’s preferred setup, world-time pairs) to extensions.
30
It is a mistake to claim that Kaplan (1989) takes contents to be a property of “word-types” and characters to be properties
of “word-tokens”. The correct view is that (i) expressions have characters), (ii) derivatively, expressions have characters relative
to occurrences, and (iii) expressions also have contents relative to occurrences and contexts. See Kaplan (1990) for scepticism
about a type-token distinction for words.
31
See King and Stanley (2005), who give reasons for thinking character is construed as a useful property only of atomic
expressions. As Westerståhl (2012) demonstrates, from a purely formal point of view, intelligible talk about the
compositionality of content is parasitic on the intelligibility of more straightforward talk about the compositionality of
character; but it does not follow that King and Stanley are wrong to think that it is in the mechanics of content composition
that we find the explanatory power of a semantic theory.
32
I use ‘Grice (1952)’ to refer to lecture notes on Peirce’s theory of signs transcribed and published by Pietarinen and Bellucci
(2016) from a copy of Grice’s handwritten notes held by the Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley. I
believe the notes were written in stages between 1948 (when Grice completed ‘Meaning’) and 1952; Pietarinen and Bellucci
incline to a slightly later date, perhaps 1952 to 1957.
33
It is a mistake to claim that Grice (1969) takes occasion meanings to be a properties of “word-types” and timeless meanings
to be a properties of “word-tokens”. Grice assiduously avoids talking about “the meaning of an utterance token”, and rails
against “the facile acceptance of such popular but dubiously well founded hypotheses about language as the alleged type-
token distinction” (1989: 366). In this, Grice and Kaplan appear to be united.
34
If words are individuated finely in terms of form, grammatical class, and a timeless meaning, obviously no word has more
than one timeless meaning. If words are individuated purely in virtue of form, or in terms of just form and grammatical
meaning a declarative sentence on a given occasion of use is a proposition; (iii) the occasion
meaning of a part α of a sentence u(α) on a given occasion is α’s contribution to the
determination of the occasion meaning of u(α) on that occasion, and (iv) the occasion
meaning of a demonstrative or indexical referring expression on a particular occasion of use
is its referent on that occasion (just as the content of such an expression (relative to a context)
for Kaplan is its referent (relative to that context). So (v) the timeless meaning of a
demonstrative or indexical referring expression α is the fixed condition that something must
satisfy in order to be α’s referent (on an occasion of use), a condition that can be specified
with an instance of the following schema, which appeals to a prior notion of speaker
reference:
[II] x is the referent of α on an occasion of use o iff
(1) Cx
(2) the speaker refers to x with α on o.
A difference in the timeless meanings of two demonstrative or indexical referring
expressions, on this account, is just a difference in the condition Cx. For example, if α = ‘I’,
the condition is x’s being the speaker; if α = ‘she’, the condition is x’s being female; if α = ‘this’
or ‘that’, the condition is (arguably) null, which is not to say that a speaker cannot facilitate
interpretation by using one rather than the other.35 It would be a serious mistake to suppose
(as some popular theories do) that the timeless meaning of ‘he’, ‘she’, ‘this’, ‘that’, ‘here’ and
‘there’ includes, mentions, or invokes a notion of salience, relevance, prominence or
perception. The mistake—often found in legal and literary theory—would involve
overlooking an important fact about the nature of intentions generally and meaning
intentions in particular, a fact that is frequently overlooked. As Donnellan puts it,
“Intentions…are essentially connected with expectations” (1968: 212). In Grice’s words,
for a rational agent, “it is in general true that one cannot have intentions to achieve results
which one sees no chance of achieving” (1969: 158).36 And a rational speaker knows that
“success [in having one’s meaning intentions recognized] requires those to whom
class, we can certainly make sense of the idea of some words having more than one timeless meaning. Given his aims, Grice
(1969) has to leave open this possibility and calls the timeless meaning of a word that is operative on a given occasion its
applied timeless meaning on that occasion. An example he talks about in several places is ‘vice’. If, on a particular occasion,
I utter ‘vice’ intending to be using it with its implement timeless meaning, then that is the word’s applied timeless meaning
(on this occasion). It is important not to confuse applied timeless meaning and occasion meaning.
35
For replies to objections to this proposal, see Neale and Schiffer (forthcoming).
36
Numerous weaker or stronger versions of this constraint have been proposed. According to Schiffer, “In general, one
cannot do an act x with the intention of bringing about a certain result if one knows or believes that one will not thereby
bring about that result” (1972: 69). Grice came to think that S’s intending to f requires S’s “having no doubt” or “being
sure” that S will f. (1971: 266). Grice (1974) rejects the suggestion (once made by Donald Davidson) that someone who
says that S intends to ϕ only conversationally implicates that S is sure S will ϕ. (Michael Devitt has recently suggested to me
a version of the implicature account.) Audi (1973) suggests that intending to f amounts to believing one will f while having
one’s actions guided by a desire to f. (Grice appears to see a problem with this idea as he floats the alternative that intending
to f amounts to believing that one will f on the grounds that one desires to f (1971: 278–9). Bratman (1987: 19-20) objects
to this on the grounds that the epistemic component is inert.) See also Pears (1985) and Davidson (1985).
communications or near communications are addressed to be capable in the circumstances

of having certain thoughts and drawing certain conclusions” (1969: 158). So if (1) what S
means by uttering u on a given occasion is determined by the meaning intentions S has in
uttering u on that occasion and if (2) S is a rational, cooperative speaker who assumes the
intended interpreter A is rational, then (3) S means that p in uttering u only if S thinks A is
capable in the circumstances of construing S as meaning that p in uttering u (i.e. only if S
thinks A is capable in the circumstances of recognising that S intends A to think that p at
least partly on the basis of recognising that S uttered u intending A to think that p.37
Donnellan puts the point well in his response to the claim that intention-based accounts of
meaning and reference succumb to Humpty-Dumptyism:
whether [the speaker] can form [an intention involving recognition on the part of his
audience of his intention] may depend upon what expectations he has about his audience
and their ability to grasp his intention. It does not follow, then, from this analysis that
speakers might, out of the blue, mean anything at all by any utterance. And the existence of
an established practice may be usually required for speakers to have the right expectations
(Donnellan, 1968: 212)
The relevance of all this to the timeless and occasion meanings of indexical and
demonstrative referring expressions is clear if speaker reference is just object-dependent
speaker meaning.38 For present purposes, the basic notion of speaker reference can be
characterized as in [III] and the more specific notion of referring to something with
something (such as a singular term) characterized as in [IV]:39
[III] In uttering u, S referred to x iff in uttering u, S meant an x-dependent proposition
(a proposition that is individuated partly in terms of x and that would not exist if
x didn’t).
[IV] In uttering u, S referred to x with α, relative to its i-th occurrence in u, iff for
some person A and property j, S intended it to be common ground between S
and A that the i-th occurrence of e in u has j and, at least partly on that basis,
that S referred to x in uttering u.
A rational speaker S can’t do just anything intending thereby to refer to a particular thing x
unless S thinks the interpreter is likely to recognize that it’s x to which S is referring. As
Schiffer puts it, “the expectation of such recognition itself entails that the speaker takes the
referent to have an appropriate salience” (2005: 1141); consequently, unless S takes it to be
common ground between S and A that x is uniquely relevantly salient in a certain way, S
cannot reasonably expect A to recognize that it’s x to which S is referring.40 To suppose
salience must be mentioned in specifying the meaning of any demonstrative or indexical is
37
Essentially this point is made by Donnellan (1968: 212), Schiffer (1972: 69; 2003: 122), Neale (1992: 552; 2005: 181);
and Neale and Schiffer (forthcoming).
38
Schiffer (1982, 2016), Neale (2016), Neale and Schiffer (forthcoming).
39
For more refined characterizations, see Schiffer (1982) and Neale and Schiffer (forthcoming).
40
See also Schiffer (1995: 115), Schiffer (2003: 122), and Neale (2016: 272-73, 301-02).
to conflate something that plays an epistemic role in identifying content with something
that plays a role in constituting content (to conflate determining in the sense of ascertaining
or identifying with determining in the sense of constituting).41 This matter is discussed in §7.
If sentences (2)-(4) are all true and a semantic theory composes occasion meanings, then
the theory should explain the dependence of the truth expressed by (3) on the truth of (4):
(2) By uttering the sentence ‘she has measles’, Sam NNmeant that Ann had measles.
(3) As used on that occasion, the sentence ‘she has measles’, NNmeant that Ann had
measles.
(4) As used on that occasion, the word ‘she’, NNmeant Ann.
Since the occasion meaning of ‘she’ on that occasion is just its referent on that occasion (just
as the content of ‘she’ is its referent in Kaplan’s semantics), (4) will be true iff Ann satisfies
the condition for being the referent of ‘she’ on that occasion. And Ann will satisfy that
condition iff Ann is female and Sam referred to Ann with ‘she’ on that occasion. And she
will satisfy that condition iff for some person A and property j, Sam intended it to be
common ground between himself and A that the occurrence of ‘she’ in ‘she has measles’ has
j and, at least partly on that basis, that Sam referred to Ann in uttering ‘she has measles.’
And Sam referred to Ann in uttering ‘she has measles’ iff in uttering ‘she has measles’, Sam
meant an Ann-dependent proposition. And in uttering ‘she has measles’, Sam meant the
Ann-dependent property that Ann had measles iff for some person A and property j, Sam
intended it to be common ground between himself and A that ‘she has measles’ has j and
at least partly on that basis that Sam uttered ‘she has measles’ on that occasion intending it
to result in A’s actively believing Ann had measles.
7 CONSTITUTIVE AND EPISTEMIC DETERMINATION
It is vital to separate the following constitutive, epistemic and prognostic questions about
Smeaning:
CQ What are the facts in virtue of which a speaker meant whatever he or she meant
by uttering something on a given occasion?
EQ What kinds of information, what principles, and what kinds of cognitive states
and processes are (standardly) involved in the (typically spontaneous) arrival in
the mind of an interpreter of a (typically resilient) conclusion about what a
speaker means by uttering something on a given occasion?
PQ What kinds of information, what principles, and what kinds of cognitive states
and processes are (standardly) involved in a speaker S reaching a satisfactory
position on the likelihood of an interpreter recognizing what S means by
producing an imminent utterance of a projected form (i.e. involved in the
formation of the meaning intentions with which a speaker utters something on a
given occasion).
41
For further discussion, see Neale (2007: 359n7), Neale (2016: 269-73), Neale and Schiffer (forthcoming).
These questions are very different. 42 CQ is a question in metaphysics about the nature of
something, a question about the constitutive determination (or constitution) of the content
of an act of Smeaning. EQ and PQ are questions in cognitive psychology, and their answers
are the two dovetailed components of a theory of human communication, a pragmatic
theory and a formatic theory, respectively
A theory of Smeaning of the sort Grice provides, such as [I] above, is a possible answer
to CQ: the content of what someone S means by uttering something u on a given occasion
is wholly determined by the meaning intentions S had in uttering u. This answer makes no
mention of an addressee’s interpretive abilities, and no mention of such things as context,
common ground, background information, the topic of conversation, discourse structure,
salience, relevance, conversational maxims, pragmatic inference, social conventions, norms,
practices, community standards, expert opinions, divisions of linguistic labor, and causal
chains. It doesn’t even mention the meaning of x (if it has one).
If u is a sentence and what a speaker S means on a given occasion by uttering u is wholly
determined by S’s meaning intentions, where does the meaning of u come into the picture?
The answer lies in the fact that S exploits u’s meaning to make known his meaning
intentions: the interpreter is intended to exploit her grasp of u’s meaning a in order to infer
what S meant in uttering u. The psychological processes involved in the formation of a
meaning intention with which S utters u, and in A’s reaching a conclusion about the content
of that intention are constrained by what S and A take to be u’s meaning (if it has one) and
(in the absence of indication to the contrary) by general principles governing cooperative
behavior that S and A mutually assume S is observing in uttering u. So although Xmeaning
does not figure in an answer to CQ, it is a key element of answers to both EQ and PQ,
which are questions in cognitive psychology not metaphysics. To find this puzzling is to
make one of three slips. The first is to confuse what is needed to answer CQ, which concerns
Smeaning simpliciter, with what is needed to answer a narrower question that concerns the
principal kind of Smeaning we find in cases involving the use of natural language, viz. saying.
As Grice (1967, 1989) points out, an account of saying will explicitly invoke Xmeaning, as
in the following rough approximation of one of his preliminary definitions:
42
I first tried to bring this out in a review of Grice’s Studies in the Way of Words, emphasizing the distinction between “[i]
accounts of what S said and what S meant by uttering u and [ii] accounts of how hearers recover what S said and what S
meant by uttering u”, the fact that “the formation of genuine communicative intentions by S is constrained by S’s
expectations”, the fact that “S’s conceptions of such things as the context of utterance, the topic of conversation, background
information, and A’s ability to work out what S is up to may all play rôles in the formation of S’s intentions” and the fact that
“this does not undermine the view that what determines what S means are S’s communicative intentions.” (Neale, 1992:
552-3). The distinction between (CQ) and (EQ) is also emphasized by Bach (1997: 39; 1999: 72; 2000: 271; 2001: 29-
30; 2005: 43), Devitt (1981: 32-36), and Fodor and Lepore (2005: 8-9). See also Neale (2004: 76; 2005: 180; 2007a: 359
n 7; 2016: 272-73, 301-02), Schiffer (1995: 115; 2003: 122; 2005: 1141), and Neale and Schiffer (forthcoming).
[V] In uttering u on occasion o, S said p iff (1) in uttering u on o, S meant p and (2)
p satisfies the fixed condition specified by a timeless meaning of u for being an
occasion meaning u can have on o.43
Notice that [V] assumes a compositional theory timeless meaning.
The second and third slip are simply confusing what is needed to answer CQ with what
is needed to answer EQ nor PQ.
The situation is similar with context. If what a speaker S means on a given occasion by
uttering a sentence x is wholly determined by S’s meaning intentions, where does context
come into the picture? The answer should sound familiar. S exploits facts about the context
of utterance to make known his meaning intentions: the interpreter is intended to exploit
facts about the context in order to infer what S meant in uttering u. So although context is
no part of the answer to CQ, it is a key element of the answers to both EQ and PQ, which
are questions in cognitive psychology not metaphysics.
One can certainly question the correctness of the Gricean answer to CQ. But it is a
mistake to complain that the answer smuggles in facts about Xmeaning, context, common
ground, background information, the topic of conversation, discourse structure, salience,
relevance, conversational maxims, social conventions, norms, practices, community
standards, expert opinions, causal chains, or facts about the audience. Of course, if some
form of externalism is true, then such things as community standards, expert opinions,
causal chains, and divisions of linguistic labor bear on the contents of mental states,
including the contents of meaning intentions that speakers have; but that would have no
bearing on the correctness of the Gricean answer to CQ.
When theorists talk about context, common ground, discourse structure, salience,
relevance, prominence, conversational maxims, pragmatic inference or “pragmatic factors”
of any sort “determining” parts of the content of what S means (including parts of what S
says) in uttering something u on a given occasion, we need to call out such nonsense. Such
notions can play roles in the epistemic determination of the content of what S means in
uttering u, roles in a pragmatic theory; but this does not mean they also play roles in the
constitutive determination of what S means in uttering u. Although CQ and EQ are very
different kinds of questions, carelessness with the verb ‘determine’ can lead to their
conflation. The following might initially seem like an interesting question: How is what S
means in uttering u on a given occasion determined? But this form of words can be used to
ask either of two questions: (i) What (constitutively) determines what S means in uttering u on
a given occasion? Or (ii) What is involved in an interpreter’s (epistemically) determining what S
means in uttering u on a given occasion? But these are just casual ways of asking CQ and EQ,
respectively.
43
Here again I ignore the complication introduced by conventional implicature. If [V] were acceptable, one might then be
tempted to add that in uttering u on occasion o, S conversationally implicated p iff (1) in uttering u on o, S meant p but did
not say p. The definition Grice (1975) floated was quite different.
When (i) relevance theorists claim that some aspect of what a speaker S said in uttering
something u on a given occasion is determined pragmatically and (ii) semantic
contextualists, apparently disagreeing, claim the aspect in question is determined (or
“provided” or “supplied”) by some specific feature of extralinguistic context to which the
meaning of a specific expression in u is sensitive, usually there is no genuine disagreement:
(i) The relevance theorists are saying something they believe to be true, and which
in fact is true, about the epistemic determination of some aspect of what S said;
(ii) The contextualists are saying something they believe to be true, but which is in
fact false, about the constitutive determination of that aspect of what S said.
If the relevance theorists were saying something they believed to be true about the
constitutive determination of that aspect of what S said, then they would be mistaken. But
my dealings with relevance theorists who have been sucked into such arguments—Sperber,
Wilson, and Carston—is that they have always taken themselves to be talking about the
epistemic determination of content because that’s what pragmatic interpretation is about, and
the background constitutive story is an intentional one. Unlike the semantic contextualist,
the relevance theorist cannot be chastised for the philosophical error of conflating epistemic
and constitutive determination; they can be chastised only for occasional sloppiness with
the beastly verb ‘determine’, sloppiness that appears to have suggested to some semanticists
that they were making claims (which would have been false) about constitutive
determination.
8 PRAGMATICS AND FORMATICS
We reflexively generate hypotheses about the things we perceive—objects, situations,
events, actions, phenomena. This includes especially the behavior of other people, which
often enough we take to be backed by reasons. To interpret an action is to form a hypothesis
about the intentions behind it, the intentions that explain it.44 So interpreting behavior is a
form of mindreading, construed as the capacity to non-demonstratively infer the mental
states of others (e.g. their beliefs, desires, and intentions) from their behavior. The behavior
in question will be compatible with all sorts of different hypotheses about the intentions
behind it—a standard case of an empirical hypothesis being underdetermined by the
available evidence. Forming hypotheses about the intentions behind communicative
behavior is a special case of this. A hypothesis about what a person meant by performing
some action is a hypothesis about the meaning intention with which the person performed
it. And communicative behavior, like any other, is compatible with all sorts of different
hypotheses about the intentions behind it. To this extent, there is no guarantee the
interpretation an audience comes up with will capture what the performer of the act meant.
As Sperber and Wilson (1986) stress, interpretation always involves a risk, and to that extent
so does attempting to communicate.
44
Sperber and Wilson (1986, 1995), Wilson (2005), Wilson and Sperber (2012).
There is no feature of communicative behavior involving the use of language that

exempts it from all of this. The interpreter’s goal—what he or she appears to be built to
do—is the same whether interpreting linguistic or non-linguistic communicative behavior:
identifying what the performer meant by engaging in it. But interpreting an utterance of a
sentence belonging to a language one knows is nonetheless a special case of the aforementioned
special case of mindreading. The interpreter’s largely tacit grasp of the phonology, syntax,
and semantics of the language used will play a major role in the utterance interpretation
process, just as it will play a major role in the utterance formation process, but it brings with
it no guarantee the interpretation an interpreter comes up with will capture what the speaker
meant. Sometimes interpreters simply fail to identify what the speaker means.
A pragmatic theory will specify the general component of an explanation of how
interpreters reach the conclusions they do about what speakers mean, whilst
accommodating the fact that, in any given case, there will be much that is not general or
systematic but local or specific. So pragmatics concerns itself with the kinds of information,
the principles, and types of cognitive states and processes involved in reaching conclusions
about speaker meaning, conclusions that are typically resilient and formed spontaneously
as the outputs of cognitive mechanisms that are quite likely tailored to the recovery of
speaker meaning. In connection with a particular utterance of a sentence u, one would
expect an explanation of what goes on to mention at least the following:
(i) The meaning of u, as constitutively determined by the conventions of the
language to which u belongs.
(ii) The contents of the interpreter’s perceptual states and memory.
(iii) The interpreter’s beliefs and expectations (including especially beliefs about the
speaker.
(iv) Cognitive processes and principles governing the identification, evaluation and
integration of information arriving from various channels and sources (including
especially information deriving from (i)-(iii)).
There is no obvious delimitation of the mental states whose informational contents are
alluded to in (iii). In principle, in any particular case, all sorts of information might be used
by an interpreter A in reaching a conclusion about what a speaker S means, including (but
certainly not restricted to) information flowing from A’s assessment of S’s fluency in the
language to which u belongs, the extent to which S can be assumed to be operating in
accordance with various norms, conventions, practices, maxims, canons, and community
standards, the topic of conversation, the extent to which S can be assumed to believe that S
and A share specialized knowledge of what is being discussed, the salience of objects in the
shared environment, the extent to which S is a stickler for accurate or careful wording the
relevance to S of certain types of information, prior conversations with S or people who
know S, S’s general knowledge; S’s general intelligence; the extent to which S can be
presumed to be a rational, cooperative speaker, power relations involving S and A, the extent
to which S’s choice of language (in general, or given the topic at hand) can be presumed to
be affected by emotional, cultural, social, or political considerations, and a great deal more.
Where a pragmatic theory will specify the general component of an explanation of
how interpreters reach the conclusions they do about what speakers mean by uttering what
they utter, a formatic theory will specify the fully general component of an explanation of
how speakers reach satisfactory conclusions on the likelihood of interpreters recognizing
what they mean by producing imminent utterances of projected forms (i.e. explanations of
how speakers come to form the meaning intentions they have in uttering what they utter),
whilst accommodating the fact that, in any given case, there will be much that is not general
or systematic but local or specific. The relation between formatics and pragmatics is as
straightforward as the relation between speakers and their interpreters. Speakers and
interpreters are intentional agents with reciprocal goals: interpreters seek to understand and
speakers seek to be understood. Moreover, both sides operate in accordance with this tacit
assumption unless there is good reason not to, and in accordance with the tacit assumption
that their respective ways of operating are mutually sustaining. Answers to EQ, and PQ will
be dovetailed because of the reciprocal nature of the goals speakers and interpreters have in
communicative situations and the cognitive asymmetry of their situations with respect to
speakers’ meaning intentions.45 This means there is no prospect of explaining an
interpreter’s capacity to interpret a speaker without explaining a speaker’s capacity to exploit
the interpreter’s capacity to interpret, and vice versa, and an answer to (PQ) will mention
the speaker-side counterparts of (i)-(iv) above.46
Although what S means by uttering u on a given occasion is constitutively determined
by S’s meaning intentions in uttering u, the fact that S had those particular meaning
intentions in uttering u is partly a function of what S might expected to impinge upon A’s
effort to identify those intentions.47
45
This comes out particularly clearly in Grice’s discussion of conversational implicature, which greatly illuminates his
account of speaker meaning.
46
When things go well, (i) what S meant by uttering u (on a given occasion) coincides with (ii) what S’s audience A took S
to mean by uttering u (on that occasion). But no philosophical puzzle results when (i) and (ii) fail to coincide. If S means p,
but A takes S to mean p′, it does not follow that there is some third thing—some participant-transcendent speaker meaning—
for which the proposition that p and the proposition that p′ are competing candidates. Perhaps S or A, or both, could have
done better in the circumstances. Perhaps S could have chosen slightly better words, and if he’d uttered u′ (instead of u),
perhaps A would have taken him to mean that p (rather than p′). Perhaps A wasn’t listening as carefully as he should have
been, and if he had been, he would have taken S to mean that p (rather than p′). There is some third thing theorists can talk
about, but it is not something for which (i) and (ii) are candidates: (iii) what a reasonable, attentive, informed interpreter
would take S to have meant by uttering u (on that occasion). When we construct pragmatic theories we cannot help thinking
in terms of (iii). But that’s because a pragmatic theory is an idealized theory of the epistemic determination of what speakers
mean, not a theory of its constitutive determination. Similarly, when we construct formatic theories we cannot help but think
in terms of (iv) what a reasonable, attentive, informed speaker would have meant by uttering u (on that occasion). And that’s
because a formatic theory is an idealized theory of the formation of the meaning intentions with which speakers produce
their utterances.
47
I am not claiming that a speaker begins with a propositional content and then mentally searches for words that he believes
will, if uttered in the present circumstances, have the best chance of communicating it. More plausibly (in many cases at
least), S has a general idea of what he wants to communicate, and this gets sharpened as different forms of words are
9 THE PHILOSOPHY OF LANGUAGE AND ITS LIMITS

We have been engineered by evolution to reflexively interpret the behavior of others, which
we often take to be backed by reasons. To interpret an action is to reach a conclusion about
the intentions behind it, more fully the beliefs, desires and intentions that explain it. And as
Schiffer (1972) and Sperber and Wilson (1986) have emphasized, where the behavior is an
act of Smeaning (an utterance), this is intended to be evidence for the intentions behind its
own production: the interpreter is intended to infer the speaker’s meaning on the basis of
evidence the speaker has presented for precisely that purpose. An utterance of a sentence is a
special kind of such evidence—“linguistically-coded” evidence, as Sperber and Wilson put
it—so the interpretive process that results in a conclusion about speaker meaning standardly
involves conventional decoding as well as inference. Given the centrality and sheer power
of linguistic communication, the complexity of the higher-order intentions with which
utterances are produced, the richness and complexity of natural languages (understood as
systems for linguistically encoding evidence), and the fact that we reach conclusions about
what speakers mean spontaneously—pragmatic interpretation is fast, mandatory, and largely
nonconscious—the idea that pragmatic interpretation amounts to no more than the
exercise of general mind-reading abilities to utterances is highly implausible. More plausible
is Sperber and Wilson’s (2002) suggestion that pragmatic interpretation is domain-specific,
its deliverances the output of an efficient, dedicated inference system, “a sub-module of the
mind-reading module, with its own special-purpose principles and mechanisms” Wilson
(2005: 1129), a module that quite likely evolved as a specialisation of the more general
module. On the plausible assumption that selection pressures behind the emergence of
cognitive systems will tend to make them more efficient over time, it is plausible to suppose
that dedicated mechanisms will tend to emerge, resulting in some cognitive abilities
becoming modular. Given the spontaneity of utterance interpretation, the complexity of
natural language and the meaning intentions for which it encodes evidence, and the
centrality and selectional advantages of linguistic communication, it would be quite
remarkable if the conclusions we reach about Smeaning were not the outputs of a modular
system with dedicated inferential mechanisms and a proprietary capacity to exploit
linguistic meaning in the course of its operations.48
There is no more reason to think a pragmatic theory (or an understanding of the
cognitive states and processes and the information structures involved in utterance
interpretation) can provide the basis of a general theory of interpretation than there is to
think a grand theory of signs can. Where semiotic and structuralist theories are broad and
shallow, a pragmatic theory is, of necessity, narrow and deep, and consequently an
inappropriate model for many other kinds of interpretation, even those for which central
considered. (This is certainly the case for much writing.) Furthermore, the idea that there is some specific proposition that
is the content of the speaker’s meaning intention must be seen as an idealization.
48
For discussion, see Wilson and Sperber (2012), Tomasello (2008) and Scott-Philipps (2015).
goals plausibly include the recognizing the intentions of the producers or users of cultural
artifacts, as some theories of legal, literary, artistic, and archaeological interpretation
maintain. We should not be misled by the obvious fact that humans have evolved to be
intention seekers. People have produced and used of cultural entities—from the simplest
tools, to clothing and shelter, to jewellery and painting, to the most complex laws and
ceremonies with all sorts of intentions, and there is much to be said about ontogenetic.
phylogenetic and epistemic-evidential hierarchies of kinds of intentions.49 The fast,
mandatory, nonconscious, and predominantly reliable cognitive processes that yield
conclusions about the contents of higher-order intentions of those communicating with us
in our daily lives contrast markedly with the typically slow, non-automatic, largely
conscious processes that yield frequently less reliable conclusions about the intentions of
legislators, writers, and artists, or the intentions of ancestors with whom our contact is
exhausted by our contact with their material culture.
Similarly, although tools, concepts, and distinctions developed in the philosophy of
language can be used to expose foundational and empirical problems elsewhere, they cannot
provide the basis of a general theory of interpretation or provide answers to key questions
in other domains in which uses of language figure prominently, for example questions about
the meanings of statutes, contracts, poetry, incantations, and ritual chants. A grasp of the
differences between constitutive, causal, epistemic, and (in law) stipulative determination,
the ability to recognize the half a dozen different notions of NNmeaning needed to answer
the master question, understanding the difference between the structure of full-blown
Gricean meaning intentions and various other kinds of complex intentions with which
people perform actions, can certainly be helpful in clarifying what is at stake in debates
about the interpretation of things other than utterances, but they cannot answer the
principal questions that various specialized disciplines have emerged to address. And of
course none of the notions of NNmeaning examined here (or in Grice’s work) is apposite in
talk of novels, paintings, symphonies, rituals, jewellery, fashions, or dreams having
meaning, a fact that puts paid to the idea that “cultural” interpretation is just the assignment
of NNmeaning to cultural phenomena and thereby any remotely substantive rendering of
the claim that interpretation is the determination of meaning.50
Law, literary criticism and theory, aesthetics, architecture, and archaeology are well-
known battlegrounds over the relevance of intention-recognition to accounts of
interpretation, though the connections between theories of intentionalism about even
“textual meaning” and Grice’s intention-based theory of meaning are often tenuous at best.
Where law is concerned, this can have serious consequences. In debates between textualists
and intentionalists about the goal of statutory interpretation and the methods of achieving
it, questions about the facts determining the legal contents of statutes slide easily into
49
See Neale (forthcoming b).
50
questions about the evidence interpreters (e.g. judges) are permitted to marshal in
determining legal content (or, more frequently, in justifying the attribution of particular
legal contents), resulting in predictable muddles about where such tools as context,
dictionaries, floor debates, canons of construction, and general principles of law come into
play. (Judges on a court may disagree about the content of a given provision, but if a
majority agrees on one reading the court may rule in its favor, stipulatively determining its
content in what amounts to a causal fashion and thereby effectively answering a question
about the constitutive determination of the provision’s content unless or until the ruling is
overturned.) Such problems are readily compounded when appeals are made to fluid
notions of “plain meaning” or “ordinary meaning” that vacillate between appeals to timeless
meaning, occasion meaning, speaker meaning and unidentifiable notions of meaning that
may at bottom be unintelligible. Much legal argumentation could be cleaned up if different
kinds of intentions were separated, if the constraints on the possession of genuine meaning
intentions were respected, if different forms of NNmeaning were regularly separated, if the
the saying-implicating distinction were invoked more consistently, and if the extent of the
underdetermination of anything plausibly regarded as legal content by timeless meaning
were more widely appreciated. For there is a coherent position into which a plausible form
of textualism and a plausible form of intentionalism collapse, a textualism with intent, that
capitalizes on cleaning up Scalia’s somewhat Gricean talk of looking for “‘objectified’
intent—the intent that a reasonable person would gather from the text of the law, placed
alongside the remainder of the corpus juris” (1997: 17), of the meaning we are “authorized
to understand the legislature intended”, and of taking “what the text would reasonably be
understood to mean” and “what it was intended to mean” as “two concepts [that] chase
one another back and forth to some extent, since the import of language depends upon its
context, which includes the occasion for, and hence the evident purpose of, its utterance”
(1997b: 144). There is much to clean up, of course—not least of which is an invocation of
context that is neither clearly constitutive nor clearly epistemic—and much elsewhere in
Scalia’s writings that a good dose of Grice would have improved or forestalled. But no
amount of philosophy of language or pragmatic theory can answer either the question of
the precise factors bearing on the constitutive determination of legal content or the pressing
practical question of what constraints, if any, should be imposed on methods of ascertaining
or justifying particular attributions of legal content, questions whose answers must be
determined by the nature of law (which is itself debated, of course).51
People might disagree about what they might call the interpretation or the meaning of
a poem, novel, or play; or a painting, dance, or sonata. But why think there is anything of
significance in talk of the meaning or the correct interpretation of such an entity? There are
countless interesting questions one can ask about a literary text or (some segment of it), and
engaging with them is among most challenging and rewarding of human pursuits. What
51
See Neale (forthcoming a, b).
led the author to compose the work? What feeling or ideas did the author intend convey?
What feelings or ideas most readily come to interpreters? Do more interesting ones emerge
for interpreters who are ignorant of, or are able to screen out, biographical facts about the
author? Does seeing the work through the lens of class, race or gender help interpreters see
the world differently? Are there conventions of genre or grammar or morality the author is
intentionally flouting? Which meaning of an ambiguous word or phrase in this part of the
text did the author have in mind? Which conjures up the most powerful images in the mind
of the reader? Which produces the most politically challenging thoughts? For a given work,
attempts to provide detailed answers to such questions will be “interpretations”, and they
may be evaluated on any number of dimensions. The idea that there is a correct method of
interpretation and a specific goal in engaging in it (beyond intellectual stimulation) makes
no sense.
There are obvious points of contact between work in cognitive science on pragmatic
interpretation and work in palaeoanthropology, cognitive ethology, and cognitive
archaeology on the emergence of higher-order mental states, cooperation, symbolic
behavior, and language. The fact that archaeological inference may involve the attribution
of intentions on the basis of archaeological remains should not encourage the facile idea
that work in the philosophy of language and pragmatic theory provides tools or methods
needed to make sense of archaeological interpretation—except in the obvious special cases
of epigraphy and palaeography. Archaeology aims to describe and understand the human
past, a past of material objects and events, of human artifacts and activity, of cognition and
social relations. In that respect, it is indistinguishable from history. But where history draws
on written evidence, archaeology draws on the archaeological record, the material remains
of our past. These remains have assumed their present form by way of “formation
processes”—the totality of physical, chemical, biological, mechanical, and behavioral
processes that have affected a specific archaeological location from the time an artefact was
produced or deposited there to the time at which its remains are discovered and studied.
These remains are evidence of something. Archaeology aims to tell us what they are evidence
of — material facts, social facts, cognitive facts. What did this thing look like when whole?
How was it used? Who made it? Who used it and for how long? What were those who
made or used it like? How did they subsist? What technologies did they have? How did
they organize themselves? How did they dispose of their dead? Did they have speech? How
did they think? The intentional activity of humans is one of the things that makes
interpreting the archaeological record importantly different from interpreting the fossil
record or the geological record, but it does not follow, contrary to what some “processual”
or “interpretive” archaeology has maintained, that textual studies provide the right model,
that a site or a context or an artifact is a “text” or a “textual record” that can be “read”, that
it has a “syntax”, a “vocabulary” or a “semantics”, or that “pragmatics” is brought to bear in
archaeological interpretation in a quest to identify “speech acts” or determine “speaker
meaning” in the archaeological record. This is just philosophy by metaphor, as Schiffer calls
it.52 Except in the special cases of epigraphy and palaeography, the idea that archaeology
looks for (evidence of) speech acts or speaker meaning in the archaeological record is as absurd
as the idea that it looks for sentence meaning or word meaning there. In short, even if, as
postprocessualists maintain, palaeontological interpretation is not the right model for
archaeological interpretation, there is no reason to think the right model will be found
through immersion (or dabbling) in linguistics, semiotics, the philosophy of language, or
literary theory.53 That any of the ideas just mentioned could gain intellectual traction is a
testament to the power that metaphors of “text”, “syntax”, “semantics” and “speaker” can
exercise on the minds of those viewing their subject matter at a level of resolution well below
that needed for serious analysis. Of course, good metaphors have their place—talk of
“making those mute stones speak” and “reading the past” might inspire—but they should
not be confused with substantive advice.
Not only do linguistics, semiotics, pragmatics, and the philosophy of language not
provide tools for characterizing interpretation in general, they provide nothing of special
significance to understanding the nature of legal, literary, aesthetic or archaeological
interpretation; at best, they provide well-honed classificatory tools and schemes that jurists,
epigraphists or anyone else who can read might use to distinguish different kinds of
meaning and different kinds, orders, and hierarchies of intentions people have in producing
texts.
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Forthcoming in Oxford Studies in the Philosophy of Language, E. Lepore and D. Sosa and (eds.

Literary interpretation is a different practice from philosophical interpretation, which in turn

There is no particular activity, process, procedure, method, or practice that constitutes

the interpretation of cultural phenomena not discussed by Grice (e.g. poems,

communications or near communications are addressed to be capable in the circumstances

There is no feature of communicative behavior involving the use of language that

9 THE PHILOSOPHY OF LANGUAGE AND ITS LIMITS

Svendsen, L. 2006. Fashion: A Philosophy. London: Reaktion Books

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