The Title of this Blog Post is meant (nn) to be about Grice on Meaning

1. I agree with Grice on this notion of non natural meaning. It seems plausible that we in some sense will words to meaning in how we utter them. Perhaps for practical reasons we can't just mean to will whatever we want because then words have no communicative usefulness, but there is a sense that we utter things in an intentionally meaningful way.

2. I'm not quite as sure that the opposite notion of natural meaning means that there is some essential entailment process. It seems more intuitive (at least for me) that meaning doesn't possess much necessity to it. Rather, I think when we utter something like "smoke means fire" that there is still some agency involved, that is, it perhaps says something like "smoke should mean to you (a general you) that there is fire" and it just so happens that there is a necessary causal connection there.

3. The problem I have with this notion of natural meaning is that it implies a non-agential causal power in utterance of words, that is, when we say "smoke naturally means there is fire" that there is a logical connection between whatever 'smoke' signifies (the smoke itself and not the word) and whatever 'fire' signifies (fire itself and not the word). However, if we in fact actually have no epistemic access to whatever is being signified by the words uttered, then it seems implausible that we can suggest some kind of non-agential notion of meaning where the actual signified things themselves have some metaphysical entailment.