Abstract
Gricean communication is communication between utterers and their audiences, where the utterer means something and the audience understands what is meant. The weak transmission idea is that, whenever such communication takes place, there is something which is transmitted from utterer to audience; the strong transmission idea adds that what is transmitted is nothing else than what is communicated. We try to salvage these ideas from a seemingly forceful attack by Wayne Davis. Davis attaches too much significance to the surface structure of sentences of the type ‘S communicates the belief (desire …) that p to A’ by assuming that the communicated entity is denoted by the grammatical object following ‘communicates’. On our proposal, what is communicated in all Gricean cases is a thought. And since S communicates the thought that p to A only if S means that p and A understands what S means, the thought that p will be transmitted from S to A.
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Notes
We leave aside Davis’s further constraint that S does not covertly simulate an unintentional indication of M because it is irrelevant to our argumentation. Siebel (2003) is concerned with the question whether Davis’s account of attitude expression provides a basis for analysing illocutionary acts.
We do not claim thereby that the given context is extensional, i.e., that the phrase filling in the blank can be replaced by a co-extensional expression without a change in truth-value.
At first glance, ‘S communicates that he has M’ does not imply ‘S communicates M’ because, after visiting a psychoanalyst, John may communicate that he has an unconscious desire without communicating any unconscious desire. But remember that ‘M’ is an individual variable ranging over mental states, i.e., a placeholder for singular terms referring to such states (cf. Davis 2003, 94). This entails that ‘John communicates that he has an unconscious desire’ does not instantiate ‘S communicates that he has M’. Rather, it has the form ‘S communicates that (∃x)(x is an unconscious desire & he has x)’.
There might also be a sense in which a novelist who writes ‘New York was nuked’, while communicating the thought that New York was attacked with nuclear weapons, does not communicate that New York was attacked with nuclear weapons (cf. Davis 2003, p. 93f.). In this sense, ‘S communicates that p’ is not equivalent to ‘S communicates the thought that p’ because the former amounts to ‘S communicates the belief that p’. In the weaker sense we allude to, however, communicating that p just means expressing and being understood as expressing the thought that p.
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Acknowledgements
We would like to thank Wayne Davis, Udo Klein and an anonymous reviewer for their valuable comments.
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Doerge, F.C., Siebel, M. Gricean Communication and Transmission of Thoughts. Erkenn 69, 55–67 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-007-9099-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-007-9099-1