Difference Between In Defense Of Public Language And Grice

While both Millikan in her “In Defense of Public Language” and Grice in his ‘Meaning” both approach the concept of meaning in a pragmatic way, Millikan focuses on meaning coming from the reproduction of conventions and Grice focuses on meaning stemming from a speaker's intention. Millikan asserts that language is formed out of conventions and the meaning of these conventions can be derived from their historical lineage of their use and reproduction. Grice argues that there are two different types of meaning but the meaning that is involved in meaning in language, “non-natural” meaning, is determined by the intention of the speaker as well as the recognition of the audience that the speaker wants the audience to recognize his intentions. For
In “natural” meaning when one says that “x means that p” they mean that “x means that p and entails p.” In the case of “natural” meaning the meaning is built into the statement and the meaning is not implied. Grice’s example of this is the utterance “Those spots mean measles.” The idea that “those spots” mean “measles” is entailed in the sentence and the utterer could not possibly mean that “those spots” do not mean “measles.” In “non-natural” meaning when one says that “x means that p” they are saying that “x means that p but does not entail p.” With “non-natural” meaning the meaning of the statement is implied based on the intention of the speaker. Grice’s example for “non-natural” meaning is the utterance, “Those three rings on the bus mean that the bus is full.” This sentence would be false if the bus driver accidentally rang the bell and the bus was not full. In order to determine whether or not the three rings mean that the bus is full one would have to look at the intention of the one who rang the bells. Grice says that something means something in a “non-natural” way if it “uttered x with the intention of inducing a belief by means of the recognition of this intention.” This means that in order for an audience to recognize the meaning of an utterance the audience must recognize the utterer’s intentions and the audience must also recognize
The coordinating functions of language were reproduced and became conventional because the interactions between the speaker and the hearer allowed for the successful transmission of meaning. According to Millikan, in order for S to express some idea p to a hearer H, S must create a sentence using known conventions to express the idea p. H, following the same conventions, then must translate the sentence into the thought p. This communication fails if either H or S are not interested in gaining or transmitting information respectively or if p is not true. Grice’s utterer-audience model is similar to Millikan’s speaker-hearer model in that the utterer, in order to express some idea P, must do or say something and the audience must somehow decipher what is done or said in order to establish meaning. The difference however, is that Millikan uses the concept of conventions to remove the meaning from the utterer’s intentions and replace it with decision based meaning that is derived conventionally from past successful communications. While Millikan’s speaker/hearer still has to think about intentions when speaking/hearing, the