Hearer’s Meaning: A Case Against the Gricean Program

초록

The Gricean program formulates a notion of speaker’s meaning in terms of the speaker’s communicative, audience-directed intentions and attempts to explain all other notions of linguistic meaning in terms of speaker’s meaning. This paper argues against the Gricean program by showing that there is a kind of linguistic meaning that does not derive even in part from the speaker’s communicative intentions and hence from speaker’s meaning. To that end it introduces a notion of ‘hearer’s meaning’ and argues that the pragmatic phenomenon of hearer’s meaning arises because of certain features and circumstances of utterances that are independent of the speaker’s communicative intentions. © 2025 Australasian Association of Philosophy.

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