Misdirected Intuitions About Meaning

Kent Bach

Grice developed a rightfully celebrated strategy for making progress on various philosophical problems by relegating certain seemingly semantic phenomena to pragmatics. However, he regarded it "as a sort of paradox [that] if we, as speakers, have the requisite knowledge of the conventional meaning of sentences we employ, ... how can we, as theorists, have difficulty ... in deciding where conventional meaning ends and implicature begins?" Grice's paradox may seem especially troubling if it is supposed, as it often is, that accounting for our ordinary judgments about the semantic contents of sentences (or about "what is said") is the central aim of semantics.

This worry is unfounded. It is the central aim of semantics to account for semantic facts, not intuitions. People's spontaneous judgments or "intuitions" provide data for semantics, but it is an open question to what extent they reveal semantic facts and should therefore be explained rather than explained away. Since they are often responsive to non-semantic information, to what is implicit in what is said but not part of it, they should be treated cautiously. They should certainly not be given the respect accorded to them by François Recanati's "Availability Principle," which prescribes that intuitions about what is said be "preserved" in our theorizing. Nor should they be taken as seriously as they are by two psycholinguists, Gibbs and Moise, who mistakenly suppose that data about what people say about what is said "lend support to theories of utterance interpretation [according to which] pragmatics strongly influences people's understanding of what speakers say [as well as what they] communicate."

Not only are such intuitions not what semantics aims to explain, they don't play a significant role in ordinary communication. In the course of speaking and listening to one another, we generally do not reflect on the semantic contents of the sentences we hear or on what is said in their utterance. We are focused on what we are communicating and on what is being communicated to us, not on what is said. Moreover, we don't have to be able to make accurate judgments about what information is semantic and what is not in order to be sensitive to both. What worried Grice was not a real paradox.