Grice on Meaning [Henry Tran]

1. Specifically what I agreed with was the part when Grice talks about intention, and says "the utterer must have intended an [audience] to recognize the intention behind the utterance"(Grice 1957 p.382),  not just to have uttered something alone. There has to be an intended hearer for the utterance to successfully give meaning in the intended way. Therefore such situations where we say can be misinterpreted without context from the perspective of unintended audiences can occur.

2. The thing that I somewhat disagreed with towards Grice was the natural meanings. Where "x meant that p and x means that p entail p" (Grice 1957, p.377), and the fact that natural meanings do not rely on the intention of the speaker. Take for example, smoke means fire, it would seem intuitive that smoke means there is a fire but what if that smoke was not caused by a fire, such as the smoke was really something else, like vapor. With natural meanings/and nonnatural I don't think Grice explicitly explains them enough.

3. With the meaning from utterance and intention, what happens to meaning when the utterance's intention is not clearly conveyed? Such as the statement; "The doctor refused to work after death" (News titles with usually double meanings). There is the intention of saying, 'the doctor no longer want to work after a patient died', but can also be understood as something like 'The doctor refused to work after the doctor died'.