Grice originated the program of defining speaker meaning in terms of intention, and provided what is still the benchmark analysis. Many variations have been proposed, all fairly close to the original. I shall review a wide variety of facts that show that Grice's basic approach was wrong, and that mine is more promising. While my analysis is a descendent of Grice's, the fundamental conception has been transformed. Speaker meaning is not the intention to communicate. It contrasts with other semantic acts in that it need not be audience-oriented. Speakers can mean something without expecting or hoping that their intentions be recognized.

Most of this chapter will focus on cognitive speaker meaning, comparing Grice's analysis to Theorem 3.5, according to which S meant that p by e provided that S used e as an indication that he occurrently believes p, without covertly simulating an unintentional indication of the belief. In light of the equivalence between meaning that p and expressing the belief that p (Definition 2.1), the discussion will be an implicit comparison of a Gricean analysis of expression with the analysis provided in Chapter 3.

The major extant competitor to the Gricean analysis will be critiqued in §4.4. This approach seeks to define speaker meaning or expression in terms of commitment and truth rather than in terms of intention and indication. Commitment has been defined variously, in terms of lending one's authority to a belief, or of conventional norms requiring belief, or of intended truth or verification conditions.