Structure and Intention in Language: A Reply to Knapp and Michaels

Abstract

HE VERY FIRST SENTENCE of the reply by Knapp and Michaels reveals a fundamental misunderstanding of the points I have been trying to make. They write, 'John Searle's criticisms of our account of interpretation all have to do with the distinction he draws between sentence meaning and speaker's or author's meaning--the distinction, that is, between the meaning a sequence of marks or can be said to have when treated as a token of a sentence type in a given language, and the meaning that sequence of marks or acquires when someone intentionally produces (my italics). But the part in italics is precisely not the distinction I draw between sentence meaning and speaker meaning. The whole point of the account I give is that the same sequence of marks or noises does not acquire a new meaning when someone intentionally produces it. Diachrony aside, the word and sentences have the old word and sentence meaning they have always had. Rather the speaker in his or her utterance means the as, or something more or something different from what the words and sentences mean. That is part of the reason why, in addition to the speaker meaning, sentence meaning distinction (Principle 6), I also gave the sentenceutterance distinction (Principle 3). Speaker meaning is not a property of linguistic types and tokens, but of people, their utterances, and hence their speech acts. This is not a trivial mistake in their reply but colors everything that follows. Thus they write, claiming to represent my view, it makes sense to regard interpreters as having to choose between interpreting those marks as the token of a sentence type and as the products of Wordsworth's intentional action. But on my view there is no way you could interpret the metaphorical speaker meaning if you did not already know the literal sentence meaning. That is, if you want to understand the speech act performed in the utterance, you can't choose between interpreting the marks as a token of a sentence type and as the product of an intentional speech act, because the way the speaker produces an intentional speech act-literal, metaphorical, or otherwise-is by producing a sentence that has a literal meaning quite independent of any speaker's particular intentions.