H. Paul Grice (1913-1988) was among a group of philosophers active at Oxford from the late 1940s through mid-1960s who are often grouped under the label “ordinary language philosophy.” Elizabeth Anscombe was among this group, but others—such as Gilbert Ryle (1900-1976), J. L. Austin (1911-1960), and P. F. Strawson (1919-2006)—were like Grice in having been educated at Oxford and thus not having been in direct contact with Wittgentein, who taught at Cambridge. Nonetheless their work is easily associated with ideas in Wittgenstein, whether they were influenced by him indirectly (his later views were known in the 1930s even though his work of this period was not published) or developed similar views independently.

In this paper, Grice develops an account of what he calls “nonnatural” meaning (and which he marks by a subsrcipt “nn”). This is the sense of ‘to mean’ that is appropriate for language, but Grice is interested in a broader range of uses. Among these, he distinguishes uses of ‘to mean’ that are tied to particular occasions (as in the simple past ‘meant’) but also ones that are “timeless” (as in many uses of in the simple present ‘means’). These two groups of uses are often now labeled “speaker’s meaning” and “conventional meaning.” The idea of speaker’s meaning became very influential even to people who did not accept the particular account he offered of it. Grice is equally well known for later discussion of a particular sort of speaker’s meaning he called “conversational implicature.” (That idea doesn’t appear in this paper, but some of you encountered it in my logic course.)

The first part of the paper introduces the distinction between a natural and nonnatural senses of ‘to mean’, criticizes what Grice calls a “causal” account of the latter sense, and begins to develop his own account. The assignment for Wed. (pp. 377–382) breaks off just before he finishes giving his account, but he hints at it in the one-sentence paragraph near the bottom of p. 382.

In the latter part of the paper, Grice completes his account of nonnatural meaning (the final version is on p. 385), at the same time extending the range of examples he wishes it to apply to, and then considers some objections. He’d already considered objections to earlier simpler forms of his account, and many people later suggested examples which they took to require further refinements. But these tended to be refinements of Grice’s use of a sort of mutual knowledge or awareness in his account, and that idea has come to be important in connection a number of other philosophical issues.