Language Use Is Rational Action

Persons use language to communicate with one another, that is, to express their thoughts and to convey and request information. The question for the theorist is how persons are able to achieve so much by uttering sounds and inscribing marks. Part of the answer must be that members of a linguistic

community share conventions, specifically rules that ascribe meaning to particular words and that settle how words may be combined to form grammatical sentences. These rules—semantics and syntax—are somewhat arbitrary, varying widely amongst natural languages.48 Bach argues that ‘[s]emantics is the part of grammar that pairs forms with meanings’ and that ‘the meaning of a

sentence is determined compositionally by the meaning of its constituents as a function of its syntactic structure’.49 The literal meaning or meanings of a sentence is or are settled by semantics (in which I include syntax) and is or are thus transparent to any competent language user.

A person may convey information to another without language use. For example, one may light a flare to indicate one’s presence and need for rescue, or wave a weapon and roar loudly to warn an intruder to depart. Success in these cases turns on making clear to the other person why one is acting. The possibility of this form of interaction is interesting: the way in which it proceeds suggests that one conveys information by making one’s intention known. However, this is not language use because the person does not employ or exploit linguistic conventions. A person uses language when he

employs sentences, with semantic content, to convey what he means to another.

The complexity, stability, and importance of linguistic conventions may mislead the theorist who aims to explain language use. It is possible to isolate sentences and their semantic properties and to study them in relative abstraction from their use by particular persons. This study may yield insights into semantics or, possibly, formal logic. However, the abstraction is a technical stipulation, adopted to advance certain kinds of scholarly work, and does not entail that the meaning of particular

instances of language use is or may be settled by convention. Perhaps Raz and Schauer are right and convention exhausts what a person may rationally mean in uttering a certain sentence. The truth of that conclusion turns on its capacity to explain rational language use. Therefore, a theory of language use and meaning should focus on what it is that a rational speaker (or author) does when he uses language and how his hearer (or reader) understands what it is that he does.

I argue that the use of language is an act, which means that it is undertaken for reasons. What defines the communicative act is a certain type of intention, namely the speaker’s intention to convey something—that is, some more or less particular meaning—to his audience by means of the

recognition of that very intention with its particular meaning-content. The intention is thus reflexive. For the communication to succeed, the audience must identify and understand the speaker’s intention including its highly particular meaning-content, which the speaker intends the audience to identify.

It is quite clear that a speaker may intend to convey something other than what he says. One way in which this might happen, Grice argued, was when a speaker says one thing, but intends thereby to communicate something different or additional. This phenomenon he termed conversational

implicature.50 Imagine that a philosophy professor writing a reference for a student applying for an academic position in philosophy utters the following sentence (which is the one evaluative statement in the letter):51

(3) John is polite and speaks excellent English.

What he has said is that John is polite and speaks excellent English, but he has implicated that John is not a good philosopher. The semantic content of (3) does not state the latter proposition, which is instead conveyed by the author’s act of uttering it. What the professor intends to convey in uttering (3) is that John is not a good philosopher.52 He acts on an intention to convey this proposition, but does not assert it directly. Instead, the proposition is implicated by what he has done; his intention in uttering (3) is to make it clear without having to state it. The implication succeeds, and the professor conveys what he means, if the reader grasps his intention to this effect. It is not irrational for the

professor to form this intention because the reader is likely to think that he must have meant something other than what he said. The professor would not say what is on its face irrelevant, and neglect to address what is relevant, namely John’s philosophical acumen, unless he intended to convey

something other than what he said, and the proposition in question is, the reader will judge, likely to be what the professor meant.

The observation that a speaker may implicate a meaning that differs from the linguistic meaning of the sentence he utters has significant consequences. It entails that to understand some person’s act of language use, that is, to identify what he means, one must attempt to identify the communicative intention on which he acts, which may be an intention to convey something other than the linguistic meaning of the sentence. The meaning of a particular act of language use, on this approach, just is the meaning that the speaker intends to convey. The speaker may intend a non-literal or figurative

meaning, rather than the literal sentence meaning. He may also intend indexical terms to have a fixed reference, so that he intends ‘he’ or ‘this’ or ‘here’ to refer to certain objects. Further, when a

sentence has more than one linguistic meaning its literal content is ambiguous. In this case, what the speaker means may be the particular literal meaning that he intends to convey, unless the ambiguity is intentional.

Grice argued that rational communicative action is framed by ‘the Cooperative Principle’, which directs the speaker to ‘[m]ake your conversational contribution such as is required, at the stage at

which it occurs, by the accepted purpose or direction of the talk exchange in which you are

engaged’.53 This framing principle is specified by way of four maxims: quantity, quality, relevance, and manner.54 The maxims, while framed by Grice as directives for speakers, are better understood to inform how hearers judge what it is that the speaker intended to communicate.55