Research Group
in Analytic Philosophy

Abstract

Wayne Davis (Davis 2003) offered a refreshingly simple alternative account to the Gricean analysis of speaker meaning. Davis’ account has been claimed to avoid in a simple and elegant manner the problems that soliloquy and other cases of audience-less speech present for the Gricean analysis. I argue that Davis’ account does not provide a viable alternative to the Gricean analysis because (i) it is subject to new difficulties of its own, (ii) it has a complexity similar to that of the Gricean analysis, and (iii) the Gricean analysis can be modified so as to successfully account for those cases that were taken to particularly favour Davis’ account.