Communicative intentions or negotiation of meaning: Do we have to choose?

Abstract According to Grice, human communication is based on the expression and recognition of communicative intentions. The meaning-negotiation approach rejects this view, arguing that communicative intentions are inaccessible and therefore explanatorily irrelevant. While acknowledging the inaccessibility of speakers’ private mental states, we propose an interpretation of Grice in which conventions function as normative constraints, enabling hearers to reliably infer public communicative intentions. On this view, Gricean intentionalism identifies a paradigmatic communicative situation characterized by tight constraints on communicative intentions. This not only overcomes the critiques based on the inaccessibility of mental states but also allows us to interpret cases of meaning indeterminacy as deviations from this paradigmatic situation. If this is the case, meaning negotiation presupposes, rather than replaces, communicative intentions.