When examining Grice’s account of speaker meaning one sees that little weight is placed on the role of the actual words used by the speaker. This is because a speaker may utter something that’s meaning is different from what someone may think is meant by the actual words that the speaker used. According to Grice’s reflexive-intention account, there are a certain three intentions that a speaker must have to mean something by an utterance. Strawson offers a revision to this by adding a fourth speaker intention. There are many objections to Grice’s account of speaker meaning, one being Searle’s objection regarding the captured soldier case, which involves having the right intention without speaker meaning and another being that speaker meaning …show more content…
Searle believes that it takes more than just intention to have meaning, but also convention. Do to this example Searle suggests an additional clause to Grice’s account for meaning, adding that the speaker intends to respect the conventional linguistic meaning for the sentence he utters. Grice responds to Searle’s objection and also refuses to accept Searle’s suggestion for the additional clause to his account of speaker meaning. Grice’s reason for this is because his account of speaker meaning states that conventional meaning is supposed to be analyzed using speaker meaning, whereas Searle’s addition suggests the opposite. If Grice was to accept this addition then his account of speaker meaning would become …show more content…
Two examples to this would be soliloquies and talking to yourself. One suggestion in this case would be that the speaker and the audience are the same. The problem with this is that it does not seem plausible that a speaker would intend to produce a belief in themselves. Grice’s response to this objection is based on hypothetical intentions. This means that Grice’s account of speaker meaning includes: that the speaker utters x intending that if there were an audience, they audience would form the belief that P. That the speaker further intended that if there was an audience they would recognize the speaker’s original intention (for the audience to form the belief that P.) And that the speaker still further intended that if there was an audience they would believe that P at least partly on the basis of recognizing that original intention of the
William Lycan's response as a functionalist seems to be one of the most interesting responses to Searle's paper. However, it also appears to be one of the most empty. Lycan's reaction as a functionalist appears to be very similar to the systems reply. In response to Searle's paper, both the systems reply and Lycan's functionalist response claim that while the individual person locked in the room does not understand the story, the system as a whole does understand the story. Lycan basically writes a logical response to Searle's paper with empty arguments. He also fails to back up his claim that a system other than a human brain is capable of understanding.
reader creates “supplementary meaning” to the text by unconsciously setting up tension, also called binary opposition. Culler describes this process in his statement “The process of thematic interpretation requires us to move from facts towards values, so we can develop each thematic complex, retaining the opposition between them” (294). Though supplementary meaning created within the text can take many forms, within V...
Searle's claim is that any installation of a program is an operation. The lack of meaning, he states, means that the computer program does not have true understanding and is not truly thinking, it is simply computing and processing symbols. He presents this argument by using his famous Chinese room. Searle begins by ta...
Pratt defines autoethnography as people describing themselves in a way that engages with representations others have made of them. (319) However, examples of this vary in many ways. In
So by "talking to him/her own self" in this manner, he is writing it down and
Welty's honest tone draws readers more closely to her emotions regarding literature through phrases like "the feeling that resides in the printed word, reaches me through the reader-voice" and "whether I'm right to trust so far I don't know". Welty uses words like "truth" and "trust" in order to express her abstract emotions in a way that the reader can understand, but that is also representative of her actual feelings. She writes, "the sound of what falls on the page begins the process of testing it for truth" and "I have always trusted this voice". When people write, the words tend to resound inside their own heads as they go. By "truth", Welty means how "right" or "correct" the words sound together. This not only refers to grammar, but also
He would say that it is still impossible for a computer to derive semantic information from merely syntax because the two things, according to him, are mutually exclusive when separate. It is impossible to gain any semantic information from syntax alone, which would mean that even if a robot was interacting with the world, the computer inside the robot is only getting syntactical information and processes it in syntactical terms only. It is also important to note, in the words of Searle, that a computer’s “operations have to be defined syntactically, whereas consciousness, thoughts, feelings, emotions, and all the rest of it involve more than syntax.” (Searle, p.681) Therefore, even though a robot would be able to simulate being a human, it cannot actually be a human. I then believe, with that evidence, Searle would conclude that the Robot reply would not satisfy the conditions needed for a computer to be able to
“1.The reader response is what counts. We can’t know for sure what an author intended, and the text itself is meaningless unless a reader responds.
Sometimes we avoid reality, we deny the truth, and we fool ourselves. In some cases we may see the world the way we want to, and not the way it is. Self deception raises basic questions about the nature of belief and the relation of belief to thought, desire, and will. Everything about the concept of self deception is controversial among philosophers and psychologists. When philosophers and psychologists discuss self deception, they usually focus on unconscious
Gottlob Frege (1) asserts that, in addition to the denotation of a sign (2), there is also a meaning attached. (3) The denotation is the specific thing that a sign refers to. The meaning, however, is the actual intention behind using the sign. It follows from this distinction that signs may be identical, but have different functions in a proposition. When it comes to meanings, it is not necessarily the case that the respective denotations of the same sign are equivalent. In fact, Frege argues, there may well be meaning without any denotation whatsoever. As an example, he uses 'the celestial body most distant from the Earth'. While this expression most likely has meaning, it is doubtful that it denotes anything. Frege concludes, "In grasping a (meaning), one is not certainly assured of (denoting) anything". (4) Yet, Frege admits, we must presuppose that there is, indeed a denotation, in order to grasp the meaning. He admits that while we may be mistaken in our assumption, the importance lies in the intention of the speaker, not in the existence of the denotation.
This paper will explain the process we, as humans usually follow to understand a certain text or utterance. This explanation would be achieved through the analysis of two journal articles from semantics and pragmatics perspective, taking into account a range of techniques associated with each of the two concepts including:
Pragmatics focuses on language use within a given social environment, analysing how people interpret the various meanings language conveys. Yet, miscommunication arises due to situational contexts and thus, pragmatists “focus on what is not explicitly stated”, instead emphasising “what is communicated by the manner and style of utterance” (Finch, 2000). Consider a sign saying “Garage sale.” Naturally, without further information, we understand that there is a sale within an individual’s garage, rather than actual garages being sold. The example highlights how pragmatics furthers the understanding of an interpretation that is found past the words. This deep-seated meaning is transparent not by the reason of the semantics of the words themselves, but due to the contextual knowledge that is widely known. Ultimately pragmatics is the study of the ambiguity of language, as it examines the multiple meanings each sentence may have, which may lead to confusion, conflict and ambiguity. Therefore a sound understanding of pragmatics, may lead to a reduction in conflicts betw...
Meaning can be studied in two ways: semantically and pragmatically. Semantics is the study of the meaning of words, phrases and sentences of what the speaker says. The focus is on what the words and sentences conventionally mean. For example, semantic studies are concerned with topics such as metonymy, prototypes and synonyms. However, pragmatics deals with what the writer or speaker of certain words or sentences intends to convey. Leech (1983) defines pragmatics as the study of meanings according to speech situations. Yule (1996) states that pragmatics is the study of what a speaker means of uttering a sentence .In uttering...
In their essay, ‘The Intentional Fallacy’ (1946), William K. Wimsatt Jr. and Monroe C. Beardsley, two of the most eminent figures of the New Criticism school of thought of Literary Criticism, argue that the ‘intention’ of the author is not a necessary factor in the reading of a text.
He argues that one may be able to note the intentionality but he/she may not be able to know the intention, and this makes it important to differentiate between text and discourse. Discourse is responsible for finding the intention of the text by relating its content to the extralinguistic reality. The process of relating the text to the extralinguistic reality, which is the discourse, results in the text. Widdowson thus defines discourse as “the pragmatic process of meaning negotiation” and the text as “its product” (p.8). Other scholars who distinguish between text and discourse in terms of product and process are Brown and Yule (1983). They state that “the discourse analyst treats his data as the record (text) of a dynamic process in which language was used as an instrument of communication in a context by a speaker/ writer to express meanings and achieve intentions (discourse)’ (Brown and Yule, 1983:26). It can be noted that Brown and Yule’s description of text and discourse is similar to that of