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first-
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person pronoun. What is the content of the relevant intention? The best
place to start is with Grice’s communication-theoretic account of meaning
(1957), on the entirely reasonable assumption that an account of the
intention to refer linguistically to oneself can be derived only from an
account of communicative intent in general. As is well-known, the general
form of Grice’s attempt to use the notion of communicative intent to illuminate
the notion of meaning is this: that A means something by x is to
be understood in terms of A’s intention that the utterance of x should
produce some effect in an audience by means of the recognition of this
intention.1 Although this general form has been somewhat refined in response
to counterexamples (see particularly Grice 1969), we can safely
ignore these complexities. What is immediately relevant is a general bifurcation
that Grice introduces between two different types of responses that
might be communicatively intended—what might be termed the informational
and the practical. When an informative message is intended, the
response that an utterer intends to produce in his audience is a belief or
some other kindred cognitive state. When a practical message is intended,
the response that an utterer intends to produce is an action of some form
or other. Let me schematize these. Communicatively intending an informational
message takes (roughly) the following form:
An utterer u utters x to mean p if and only if u utters x intending
a. that some audience a should come to believe that p,
b. that a should be aware of intention (a),
c. that the awareness mentioned in (b) should be part of a’s reason for
believing p.
Communicatively intending a practical response takes this form:
An utterer u utters x to mean that an audience a should do f if and only
if u utters x intending
a. that a should do f,
b. that a should be aware of intention (a),
c. that the awareness mentioned in (b) should be part of a’s reason for
doing f.
Other philosophers of language in the communication-theoretic tradition
(Armstrong 1971, Bennett 1976) have followed Grice in this bifurcation in
the central notion of intending to bring about a response in the audience.
Solving the Paradox of Self-Consciousness 277
It is not clear from the work of Grice and his successors whether they
intend their account of communicative intent to be part of a statement of
the necessary and sufficient conditions that must be satisfied on any given
occasion of language use, so that whenever a token sentence x is used to
mean that p, or to bring about the response f, it must be accompanied
by the appropriate communicative intent. Many philosophers would find
such a claim psychologically implausible. Let me offer such philosophers
a weaker construal of the communicative-intent theory. One way of reading
the theory on which it would not have this sort of psychological implausibility
would be as an account that operates at the level of sentence
types rather than sentence tokens. A weak reading of the claim that the
meaning of sentence type X is given by a complex communicative intent
of the sort just indicated is that no speaker could be credited with a meaningful
use of a token of type X unless he learned how to employ tokens
of type X through appreciating the complex communicative intention
given by the theory. For the purposes of this chapter I shall stick with the
Gricean position as formulated for expository convenience. For what I
have to say, however, the weaker reading is perfectly sufficient.
The two-branched analysis of communicative intent in terms of intended
informational and practical messages is relatively straightforward
at the level of the sentence. There is a simple and easily identifiable distinction
between assertoric or declarative sentences, which it is plausible
to analyze along the first branch as intended to generate beliefs in the
audience, and imperative or injunctive sentences, which it is equally plausible
to analyze along the second branch as intended to bring about some
act or other on the part of the audience. The particular use to which I
wish to put the theoretical notion of communicative intent is in illuminating
intentional self-reference, and there are two good reasons why this
bifurcated theory of communicative intent cannot be unproblematically
applied here.
The first reason is a general one. At a level of analysis below the sentence
we are dealing with particular acts like reference and predication,
which do not lend themselves to this clean bifurcation. Let me bring this
out with respect to the act of reference. If a clear bifurcation between
informational and practical communicative intent is to be maintained below
the level of the sentence, then reference ought to be construed in
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terms of informational communicative intent, so that the response that
an utterer intends to produce in his audience is a belief. Let us assume,
for the sake of simplicity, that we are dealing with the simple subjectpredicate
sentence ‘That is green’ uttered in the presence of a green
Granny Smith apple to which I am pointing and that I intend to produce
in my audience (Jones) the belief that the apple is green. How are we to
understand the reference of the demonstrative pronoun ‘that’? Straightforwardly
adapting the informational account would yield the thought
that my utterance of the demonstrative pronoun (accompanied by a suitable
ostensive gesture) is intended to produce in Jones the belief that the
object to which I am pointing is the subject of my sentence through what
Bennett helpfully terms the Gricean mechanism (that is, through Jones’s
recognition of my intention to produce in him that belief). But it is surely
not necessary either for Jones to have any such belief or for this to be
what I am trying to do, for me successfully to communicate to him the
thought that the apple is green. Nor is it necessary for me to intend to
produce in him any beliefs about the apple being the subject of my sentence.
I do, of course, intend to produce in Jones a belief about the apple,
namely that it is green. As part of that project I refer demonstratively to
the apple. And the apple is indeed the subject of my sentence. But none
of this adds up to my intending Jones to form a belief about the apple
being what my sentence is about. I shall return to this shortly.
The second reason that the theory of communicative intent is problematic
at this level is a psychological one highly pertinent to the matter in
hand. It is relatively uncontroversial among developmental psychologists
that a full-fledged concept of belief emerges relatively late in cognitive
development, and certainly long after the emergence of even relatively sophisticated
language use (including, for that matter, competent use of the
first-person pronoun). The evidence for the late emergence of the concept
of belief is the well-known false-belief task, a beautifully simple paradigm
designed to identify whether or not young children can deploy the idea
of a mental state representing the world to be a way other than the way
it is. In the false-belief task, children are presented with the following
situation. A character, Maxi, places some chocolate in a cupboard and
then leaves the room. While he is away, the chocolate is moved to another
location. The child is asked where Maxi will look for the chocolate when