Abstract

This paper is intended to reveal the deeper aspects of the unity’ between Grice’s fundamental notion of intention and his other notions of signification, cancellability. We emphasize that the total signification of an ut-terance is ultimately determined by the speaker’s intention and therefore both what is said and what is implicated are hard to cancel without rendering the whole utterance self-contradictory. We suggest that any intention-based account of meaning be ontologically clear about whose intention we are really invoking, and consequently capture the metaphysics of meaning in order to remove the fallacy “that all the information in an utterance must come from its interpretation”.