Introduction

A natural and historically popular view of the relation between meaning in public natural languages and thought is that thought is metaphysically prior, that natural language meaning depends on the meaning or content of mental states of one sort or another. Today this view is most closely associated with the work of Paul Grice and various philosophers broadly inspired by Grice's original work. This work (which I shall refer to collectively as ‘Convention-Based Semantics’) ultimately seeks to ground natural language meaning in a complex web of beliefs and intentions of language users. Many versions of Convention-Based Semantics have been put forward and, in spite of the numerous objections and purported counterexamples which have been raised against various versions of the theory, it remains the dominant view about the nature of natural language semantic properties amongst philosophers.

While I am sympathetic with these philosophers in their attempt to ground language in thought, I think that Convention-Based Semantics is wrong, not just in detail, but fundamentally. One basic way in which Convention-Based Semantics seems to me to go wrong is in assimilating natural language linguistic meaning to communicative phenomena generally. In my view it is a mistake to try to find a common reductive analysis that will ground natural language meaning and the meanings variously associated with pantomime gestures, with lighthouse beacon patterns, with hand gestures to help a friend back her car into a tight spot and any of a variety of other forms of meaningful communication.