Linguistic meaning involves two dimensions: conventional meaning (what sentences mean by shared language rules) and speaker meaning (what individual speakers intend to communicate). Neither convention nor intention alone suffices; both are necessary for a complete account of meaning.
From your study of Grice and speaker meaning, you know that when someone communicates, what they mean — speaker meaning — often diverges from what their words literally say. Grice showed that interpretation is an inferential process: listeners use the Cooperative Principle and its maxims to figure out what a speaker intends to convey beyond the literal content. Now the deeper question emerges: what is the relationship between what words mean and what speakers mean? Can meaning be reduced entirely to intention, or does language require something more — convention?
The intentionalist answer, associated with Grice's program, is that meaning bottoms out in intention. Sentence meaning is built up from speaker meaning: a word or sentence means what it does because speakers use it with certain intentions, and those intentions, through use and coordination, become conventionalized. On this picture, convention is derivative — it is the stabilization of successful communicative intentions across a community. Paul Grice's formal analysis of speaker meaning runs: speaker S means something by uttering X if and only if S intends the utterance to produce a belief in an audience, and intends the audience to recognize that intention as the reason for forming the belief. Meaning, on this view, is constitutively intentional.
The opposing view emphasizes that convention does genuine independent work. Lewis argued that linguistic conventions are coordination solutions — ways communities solve the problem of communicating by establishing shared expectations about how expressions are used. The meaning of "bank" (financial institution vs. riverbank) isn't settled by any speaker's intention on any particular occasion; it is fixed by the conventions of English. Kripke and Wittgenstein pressed this further: a speaker cannot fix meaning by private intention alone. Meaning requires a public standard, a community practice, against which individual uses are correct or incorrect. This is the rule-following argument: what makes it the case that by "plus" you mean addition rather than some deviant function that happens to have agreed with addition on all previously computed cases? Only community practice, not any private mental state, can answer this.
The synthesis is that a complete account needs both. Conventional meaning — encoded in the grammar and lexicon of a language — fixes a stable semantic baseline that speakers can manipulate, deviate from, or build on. Speaker meaning is what individual communicators do with that baseline on particular occasions, conveying more or less than the conventional content. Irony, implicature, and metaphor all involve a gap between the two. Understanding this gap — and what bridges it — is what makes Gricean pragmatics and philosophy of language indispensable for anyone trying to understand how communication actually works.
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