H. P. Grice, answered from the texts and cited to the page.
An utterer U means_NN something by an utterance x just in case U intends to produce some response r in an audience A, intends A to recognize this intention, and intends A's recognition of the intention to function as A's reason for the response.123 Conventional meaning is to be defined in terms of speaker meaning, and speaker meaning in terms of the psychological phenomenon of intention.
The reductive direction is from the semantic to the psychological, and the unity of meaning across literal speech, conversational implicature, irony, metaphor, and gesture is preserved at the level of the underlying intention-structure rather than at the level of surface convention or rule.45
I do not see the force of this contention, nor indeed do I find it easy to apply the distinction which it makes. Consider just one example. I was listening to a French lesson being given to the small daughter of a friend. I noticed that she thinks that a certain sentence in French means "Help yourself to a piece of cake," though in fact it means something quite different.Studies in the Way of Words, pp. 102–103
Let us start with some examples of imperatives or quasi-imperatives. I have a very avaricious man in my room, and I want him to go; so I throw a pound note out of the window. Is there here any utterance with a meaningNN? No, because in behaving as I did, I did not intend his recognition of my purpose to be in any way effective in getting him to go. This is parallel to the photograph case.Studies in the Way of Words, pp. 219–220
Examples Directed toward Showing the Three-Prong Analysans Too Strong Let us (for simplicity) revert to the original analysans of" U means something by uttering x": " U utters x intending A (1) to producer (2) to think U intends A to produce r (3) to think U intends the fulfillment of (1) to be based on the fulfillment of (2)." Now abbreviate this to "U utters x M-intending that A produce r." I originally supposed…Studies in the Way of Words, pp. 105–106
I shall take as a starting-point the account of nonnatural meaning which appears in Essay 14 in this volume, treating this as an attempt to define the notion of utterer's occasion-meaning.Studies in the Way of Words, p. 92
I will now try a different and, I hope, more promising line. If we can elucidate the meaning of "x meantNN something (on a particular occasion)" and "x meantNN that so-and-so (on a particular occasion)" and of "A meantNN something by x (on a particular occasion)" and "A meantNN by x that so-and-so (on a particular occasion)," this might reasonably be expected to help us with "x meansNN (timeless) something (that…Studies in the Way of Words, pp. 217–218
The founding move of the contemporary intention-based programme in philosophy of language and the most famous contribution of the Oxford period. Strawson's 1964 amendment introduced a fourth intention (that A recognize i₂) to handle counter-examples involving faked evidence; the amendment is friendly, not refuting. Schiffer's 1972 book is the most ambitious development; his 1987 reversal in Remnants of Meaning argued that the iterated intentions cannot ground conventional semantics. Searle's Italian-soldier counter-example argues that the soldier who utters the only German sentence he knows is not really meaning_NN that he is a German soldier because the rules of German do not allow this. Wayne Davis's 1998 book is the most sustained wholesale critique. Bennett, Loar, Avramides, and Neale defend versions of the account.