ABSTRACT
H. P. 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. He offered an elaborate analysis of speaker-meaning in terms of speakers' intentions, 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. The chapter focuses on Grice's reductive project, the explication of sentence meaning in psychological terms. It proceeds in two importantly different stages. In the first stage, Grice attempts to reduce sentence meaning to speaker-meaning. In the second, he tries to reduce speaker-meaning to a complex of psychological states centering on a type of intention. For Grice, a sentence's meaning is a function of individual speaker-meanings. Grice concentrated his energies on the second stage of the reduction. That speaker-meaning should be explicated in terms of mental states is even more plausible than the first stage.
