Abstract

We normally mean what we say, but sometimes we don’t. When I ironically utter “What lovely weather” on a rainy day, or mistakenly utter “Jim is a barn door” instead of “Jim is a darn bore”, I say one thing and mean another.

However, although utterances like these are not uncommon, they are greatly overshadowed by the volume of humdrum utterances of “There is wine in the fridge” or “I really like nachos” where we mean what we say. Since we normally mean what we say, the following simple thesis will be correct in normal situations. 

(N) S meant that p by uttering e iff S said that p by uttering e.

This begs the question of whether (N) can be refined to also cover situations where we don’t mean what we say. In this seminar, I explore whether (N) can be refined modally, by offering an analysis where speaker meaning normally is identified with what is said, and in other situations with what the speaker would have said in certain counterfactual situations. The analysis constitutes a radical, but welcome, break with Gricean orthodoxy, where linguistic meaning, rather than speaker meaning, is ultimately used to explain other semantic notions.