ABSTRACT
H. P. Grice maintained that a linguistic expression has meaning only because it is an expression-not because it “expresses” a proposition, but because it more genuinely and literally expresses some concrete idea or intention of the person who uses it. Grice introduced the idea of “speaker-meaning”: roughly what the speaker in uttering a given sentence on a particular occasion intends to convey to a hearer. Since speakers do not always mean what their sentences standardly mean in the language, Grice distinguished this speaker-meaning from the sentence’s own standard meaning. He offered an elaborate analysis of speaker-meaning in terms of speakers’ intentions, beliefs, and other psychological states, and refined that analysis in the light of many objections. It is generally agreed that some version of the analysis must be right.
