Easy Does It: Unnsteinsson on Saying and Gricean Intentions

This paper critically examines Unnsteinsson’s Collapse Argument, which contends that “Easy” views of saying something or expressing a proposition collapse into the Gricean view (Unnsteinsson, Talking About: An Intentionalist Theory of Reference, Ch. 4). Easy views maintain that saying/expressing is simply a matter of uttering a sentence with its meaning, without requiring Gricean communicative intentions. Unnsteinsson argues that Easy views must appeal to such intentions to explain what makes saying/expression intentional and rational and that this collapses them into the Gricean view. I show that this argument fails for several reasons. First, the intentions that the Easy views must posit to explain what makes saying/expressing rational are not equivalent to the Gricean communicative intentions. Second, the constitutive question of what makes an act into a saying/expressing and the rationalizing question of what makes it rational are distinct. Thus, even if Easy theorists would have to appeal to something like Gricean communicative intentions in answering the latter question, this wouldn’t cause their answer to the former question to collapse into the Gricean answer.