Communicative signs meaning naturally

Abstract

Paul Grice distinguishes between natural meaning and non-natural meaning, where the first notion is especially connected to something’s being a natural sign and the second to communication. It is argued that some of the arguments against the distinction being exhaustive are based on a misinterpretation of Grice, but also that the distinction cannot be exhaustive if one takes into account both the criterion of factivity and the connection to communication. If one makes a distinction between natural and non-natural communication, then there are different types of natural communication to be distinguished: goal-directed communication, intentional communication and open intentional communication. Given the empirical evidence, the behavior of chimpanzees and of human infants may be described as goal-directed communication, but there are also important differences between the communicative behavior of the two.

Turning speaker meaning on its head

“…By contrast, what Grice (1989f [1957Grice (1989f [ ], 1989dGrice (1989f [ [1969) suggests is that the communicator must overtly provide evidence of his/ her intention to induce a belief, thereby excluding deception from the model of communication based on meaning NN (Neale 1992;Pfister 2010).…”

“…Such meanings are then subject to cancellation (i.e., "The bus is not actually full because someone rang the bell accidentally", or "He actually managed without his wife on that day"). Several authors (e.g., Wharton 2003Wharton , 2009Reboul 2007;Pfister 2010) find fault with this dichotomy, pointing to examples (e.g., animal signals) which cannot be unequivocally encompassed by either natural of nonnatural meaning. Such criticism aside, in the light of Grice's conceptualisation of meaning NN , a distinction between human verbal and nonverbal communication (in the broader sense, cf.…”

“…Reboul 2007). Nonnatural meanings are non-factive (Grice1989h [1982]), i.e., they do not bear any entailments, and are intentional (Pfister 2010), as in "Those three rings on the bell (of the bus) mean that the bus is full" or "That remark, 'Smith couldn't get on without his trouble and strife, ' meant that Smith found his wife indispensable" (Grice 1989f [1957: 213). Such meanings are then subject to cancellation (i.e., "The bus is not actually full because someone rang the bell accidentally", or "He actually managed without his wife on that day").…”