Meaning as attention-direction: a revised theory

According to the Gricean conception of non-natural meaning, a speaker means something when she performs an utterance whilst “intending to produce some effect in an audience by means of the recognition of this intention” (1957, p. 385). Here, I follow Keiser (2022) in proposing an alternative characterization of the speaker intention associated with meaning, wherein a speaker aims for attention-direction rather than an audience’s recognition of her intention. In particular, a speaker means m just in case they intend for an audience to attend to m. I use a technical notion of attention, drawing from Wu’s (2011, 2014) theory of attention as selection-for-action to develop a cognitively robust analysis of meaning. Along the way, I identify working memory as the substrate within which meaning-relevant effects arise in an audience. Doing so allows for a clear distinction between bare meaning, a speech act wherein a speaker intends for an audience to hold a content in mind, and further speech acts (such as assertions, directives, and questions) of which bare meaning is a proper part. After establishing this distinction, I argue that speech acts beyond meaning can be understood as involving a speaker’s intention to constrain an audience’s action. In successful cases, the audience’s prior intention to respond is updated (or fine-tuned) to correspond with the speaker’s intention. I conclude by considering unsuccessful speech acts, illustrating how the disentangling of bare meaning and further speech acts facilitates a more systematic analysis of non-ideal communication.