"Parable of the Invisible Gardener" by John Wisdom,

John Wisdom (1904–1993) was a leading British philosopher considered to be an ordinary language philosopher, a philosopher of mind and a metaphysician.
He was influenced by G.E. Moore, Ludwig Wittgenstein and Sigmund Freud, and in turn explained and extended their work.
Wisdom was for most of his career at Trinity College, Cambridge, and became Professor of Philosophy at Cambridge University. Near the end of his career he was Professor of Philosophy at the University of Oregon. He was president of the Aristotelian Society from 1950 to 1951.
His famous "Parable of the Invisible Gardener" is a profound dialectic on the existence or absence of God.


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It is often used to illustrate the perceived differences between assertions based on faith and assertions based on scientific evidence, and the problems associated with unfalsifiable beliefs. The tale runs as follows:
"Two people return to their long neglected garden and find, among the weeds, that a few of the old plants are surprisingly vigorous. One says to the other, 'It must be that a gardener has been coming and doing something about these weeds.' The other disagrees and an argument ensues. They pitch their tents and set a watch. No gardener is ever seen. The believer wonders if there is an invisible gardener, so they patrol with bloodhounds but the bloodhounds never give a cry. Yet the believer remains unconvinced, and insists that the gardener is invisible, has no scent and gives no sound. The sceptic doesn't agree, and asks how a so-called invisible, intangible, elusive gardener differ from an imaginary gardener, or even no gardener at all."

"Analysis of speaker's meaning","Conception of conversational implicature","Intention-based Semantics" by Herbert Paul Grice,1967

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Herbert Paul Grice was born in 1913 and died in 1988. From the late 1930's until 1967 he held positions at Oxford University. During the war years he served in the Royal Navy. In 1967 he moved to the University of California, Berkeley. He retired in 1979 but continued to teach until 1986. Grice is best known for his analysis of speaker's meaning, his conception of conversational implicature, and his project of intention-based semantics. Largely as a result of these ideas, the focus of the philosophical debate over the nature of meaning shifted during the 1970's and 1980's from linguistic representation to mental representation.

Grice's most important ideas may be found in his William James lectures presented at Harvard in 1967. Several lectures from that series were published in the form of journal articles, and for many years the lectures circulated in their entirety in mimeograph. They were finally published (in revised form) in 1989 in Grice's collection of essays, Studies in the Way of Words. (This was published under the name "Paul Grice". Prior to that, Grice had been known to the world at large as "H. P. Grice".
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I. The Analysis of Speaker's Meaning.

In his seminal paper, "Meaning", first published in 1957, Grice drew a distinction between what he called natural meaning and what he called non-natural meaning. Natural meaning is the kind of meaning that we are speaking of when we say something like, "Those spots mean measles" or "A shiny coat in a dog means health". Non-natural meaning is the kind of meaning we speak of when we say "Those three rings on the bell (of the bus) mean that the bus is full" or "By saying that the child looked guilty, he meant that the child was in fact guilty".

Further, Grice offered a three-part analysis of non-natural meaning: A (an agent) meant something (non-naturally) by x (an utterance or gesture) if and only if A intended the utterance or gesture x to produce some effect in an audience by means of the recognition of this intention. In other work, Grice contemplated a variety of refinements. The preliminary analysis that he offers in "Utterer's Meaning, Sentence Meaning, and Word-Meaning" (1968) for what he calls the occasion-meaning of indicative-type utterances may be represented as follows (this is not a quotation):

By uttering x, U meant that p if and only if for some audience A, U uttered x intending (i) that A should believe that U believes that p, (ii) that A should believe that U intended (i), and (iii) that (i) should be achieved by means of achieving (ii).

Speaker's (or utterer's) meaning, so defined, has to be strictly distinguished from what might be called the conventional meaning of a speaker's words. The place of conventional meaning in Grice's conception of language appears to be that it constitutes a feature of words that speaker's might exploit in realizing the intentions referred to in the analysis of speaker's meaning. This emerges in "Utterer's Meaning and Intentions" (1969), where Grice considers a variety of purported counter examples to his analysis of speaker's meaning and as a result produces a much more complex analysis. Particularly important is the conclusion that when an utterer means that p by utterance x the utterer must suppose that x has some feature f that the audience is to think of as correlated in a certain way with the response that the utterer intends to produce in the audience. In view of the account of so-called timeless meaning in "Utterer's Meaning, Sentence Meaning, and Word-Meaning", Grice's thought would appear to be that this feature is often the timeless meaning of the utterance. Grice's conception of timeless meaning will be further discussed in section III below.


II. Conversational Implicature

We commonly draw a distinction between what a person's words literally mean and what a person means by his or her words over and above what his or her words literally mean. In "Logic and Conversation" (1975) Grice offered a theory of the latter sort of meaning, which he called conversational implicature.

Grice's explanation of conversational implicature begins with his articulation of a Cooperative Principle, which calls on a speaker to "make your conversational contribution such as is required, at the stage at which it occurs, by the accepted purpose or direction of the talk exchange in which you are engaged" (1989, p. 26). The Cooperative Principle subsumes a number of submaxims, such as "Make your contribution as informative as is required", "Do not say that for which you lack adequate evidence", "Be relevant", and "Avoid obscurity".

In terms of the Cooperative Principle, conversational implicature can be defined as follows (not a quotation, but see 1989, p. 30-31): A speaker conversationally implicates that q by saying that p if and only if (1) he or she is conforming to the Cooperative Principle in saying that p, and (2) the explanation of his or her conformity to the Cooperative Principle is that he or she thinks that q, and (3) he or she thinks that the hearer will recognize that it is his or her thinking that q that explains his or her conformity to the Cooperative Principle.

For example, suppose A says to B, "I'm out of petrol", and B replies, "There is a garage around the corner". Then B may be taken to have conversationally implicated that the garage is open and has gas to sell, for apart from those assumptions, B's response to A would be irrelevant. For another example, suppose A says to B, "Where does C live?" and B replies, "Somewhere in the South of France". B may be taken to have conversationally implicated that he or she does not know more precisely where C lives since B may be presumed to conveying as much relevant information as he or she has evidence for.

Grice employed his theory of conversational implicature to argue that the meaning of the English conditional "if . . . then . . ." is the same as that of the material conditional (1989, ch. 4), where the material conditional is true if either the antecedent is false or the consequent is true. To the extent that there appears to be difference in meaning, that difference is to be attributed to conversational implicature rather than to the literal meaning. Thus, one can explain away the appearance that the falsehood of p is insufficient for the truth of "If p then q" by pointing out that if one knew that p were false, then "If p then q" would indeed be inappropriate, though not false, inasmuch explicitly denying p would more informative than merely asserting "If p then q". Grice's theory of conversational implicature has often been used in this way to justify semantic theories that ascribe to a sentence a different meaning from the one that seems to attach to it.

III. Intention-Based Semantics

As we have seen, Grice's conception of speaker's meaning rests ultimately on a conception of conventional meaning or, in Grice's terminology, timeless meaning. That a certain form of words has a timeless meaning is normally necessary if a speaker is to reasonably expect that an utterance of that form of words will produce the intended effect. Grice's view was that that timeless meaning could in turn be explained in terms of speakers' intentions.

In "Utterer's Meaning, Sentence Meaning, and Word-Meaning" (1968), Grice's basic idea was that the timeless meaning of a form of words may be defined in terms of what speakers of the language have it in their "repertoire" to do by means of that form of words. For instance, someone might have it in his or her repertoire to execute a certain hand wave if he or she intends someone to recognize that he or she thinks that he or she knows the route (on the basis of the hearer's recognition of that intention).

On Grice's theory, an indicative utterance-type means that p for a group of people just in case the members of the group have it in their repertoire to utter that form of words when they intend other members of the group to recognize that they believe that p (on the basis of their recognition of their intention), where retention of that procedure is conditional on the assumption that other members of the group have that procedure in their repertoires. This definition is part of a series of definitions that Grice thinks of as culminating in a definition of timeless meaning, but he does not actually produce a definition of this. So the most one can maintain is that Grice wished to define timeless meaning somehow in terms of what speakers have it in their repertoire to do. The project became especially complicated and fragile as Grice attempted to explain how the meanings of complex expressions could be a product of the meanings of their subsentential parts.

"The Philosophy-Linguistics Connection" by Donald Davidson ,1967

Ideas about semantics and logical form fit with what what was going on at the time in linguistics. Davidson’s ideas of the time were expressed in such papers as
“Truth and Meaning,”
“The Logical Form of Action Sentences,”
“Causal Relations,”
and “On Saying That.”
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One part of his view was a stress on the importance for semantics of providing a theory of truth conditions. In a way he was defending a version of Quine’s translational approach to meaning: your semantics for a language L should provide a systemic way to translate from L into your own language, but with some additional restrictions. The system of translation should take the form of a theory of truth for the other language; it should have a finite number of axioms (because it has to be learnable); and it should be expressed in first-order quantification theory. The use of second-order quantification or substitutional quantification is ruled out in part because it trivializes the requirement that the rules of translation should take the form of a theory of truth. Appeal to possible worlds is ruled out as well, for reasons that are less clear to me.
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Like many other philosophers at the time, I was completely unconvinced by Davidson’s meta-view about the connection between truth and meaning. On the other hand I was (also like many others) rather taken with Davidson’s particular accounts of logical form, for example, his suggestion that some sorts of adverbial modification were best treated by supposing that certain sentences involve hidden quantifications over events, that the verbs in such sentences are predicates of events, and that the adverbs represent further predicates of time, place, manner, etc.; or his claim that causal statements are often statements of causal relations between events; or his proposal that sentential that clause complements, as in “Galileo said that the Earth is flat” be treated as performances that the rest of the sentence comments on.

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The Structure of a Semantic Theory
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Although Davidson has written on a wide range of topics, a great deal of his work, particularly during the late 1960s and early 1970s, has focussed on the problem of developing an approach to the theory of meaning that will be adequate to natural language. The characteristic feature of Davidson's approach to this problem is his proposal that meaning is best understood via the concept of truth, and, more particularly, that the basic structure for any adequate theory of meaning is that given in a formal theory of truth.

Davidson's thinking about semantic theory is developed on the basis of a holistic conception of linguistic understanding (see ‘Truth and Meaning’ [1967c]). Providing a theory of meaning for a language is thus a matter of developing a theory that will enable us to generate, for every actual and potential sentence of the language in question, a theorem that specifies what each sentence means. On this basis a theory of meaning for German that was given in English might be expected to generate theorems that would explicate the German sentence ‘Schnee ist weiss’ as meaning that snow is white. Since the number of potential sentences in any natural language is infinite, a theory of meaning for a language that is to be of use to creatures with finite powers such as ourselves, must be a theory that can generate an infinity of theorems (one for each sentence) on the basis of a finite set of axioms. Indeed, any language that is to be learnable by creatures such as ourselves must possess a structure that is amenable to such an approach. Consequently, the commitment to holism also entails a commitment to a compositional approach according to which the meanings of sentences are seen to depend upon the meanings of their parts, that is, upon the meanings of the words that form the finite base of the language and out of which sentences are composed. Compositionality does not compromise holism, since not only does it follow from it, but, on the Davidsonian approach, it is only as they play a role in whole sentences that individual words can be viewed as meaningful. It is sentences, and not words, that are thus the primary focus for a Davidsonian theory of meaning. Developing a theory for a language is a matter of developing a systematic account of the finite structure of the language that enables the user of the theory to understand any and every sentence of the language.

A Davidsonian theory of meaning explicates the meanings of expressions holistically through the interconnection that obtains among expressions within the structure of the language as a whole. Consequently, although it is indeed a theory of meaning, a theory of the sort Davidson proposes will have no use for a concept of meaning understood as some discrete entity (whether a determinate mental state or an abstract ‘idea’) to which meaningful expressions refer. One important implication of this is that the theorems that are generated by such a theory of meaning cannot be understood as theorems that relate expressions and ‘meanings’. Instead such theorems will relate sentences to other sentences. More particularly, they will relate sentences in the language to which the theory applies (the ‘object-language’) to sentences in the language in which the theory of meaning is itself couched (the ‘meta-language’) in such a way that the latter effectively ‘give the meanings of’ or translate the former. It might be thought that the way to arrive at theorems of this sort is to take as the general form of such theorems ‘s means that p’ where s names an object-language sentence and p is a sentence in the meta-language. But this would be already to assume that we could give a formal account of the connecting phrase ‘means that’, and not only does this seem unlikely, but it also appears to assume a concept of meaning when it is precisely that concept (at least as it applies within a particular language) that the theory aims to elucidate. It is at this point that Davidson turns to the concept of truth. Truth, he argues, is a less opaque concept than that of meaning. Moreover, to specify the conditions under which a sentence is true is also a way of specifying the meaning of a sentence. Thus, instead of ‘s means that p’, Davidson proposes, as the model for theorems of an adequate theory of meaning, ‘s is true if and only if p’ (the use of the biconditional ‘if and only if’ is crucial here as it ensures the truth-functional equivalence of the sentences s and p, that is, it ensures they will have identical truth-values). The theorems of a Davidsonian theory of meaning for German couched in English would thus take the form of sentences such as “‘Schnee ist weiss’ is true if and only if snow is white.”

"How to Do Things With Words" by John Langshaw Austin.1961

How to Do Things With Words is perhaps Austin's most influential work.

In it he attacks what was at his time a predominant account in philosophy, namely, the view that the chief business of sentences is to state facts, and thus to be true or false based on the truth or falsity of those facts. In contrast to this common view, he argues, truth-evaluable sentences form only a small part of the range of utterances. After introducing several kinds of sentences which he asserts are indeed not truth-evaluable, he turns in particular to one of these kinds of sentences, which he deems performative utterances. These he characterises by two features:
First, these sentences are not true or false.
Second, to utter one of these sentences is not just to "say" something, but rather to perform a certain kind of action.
He goes on to say that when something goes wrong in connection with the utterance then the utterance is, as he puts it, "infelicitous", or "unhappy."
The action which performative sentences 'perform' when they are uttered belongs to what Austin later calls a speech-act [6] (more particularly, the kind of action Austin has in mind is what he subsequently terms the illocutionary act). For example, if you say “I name this ship the Queen Elizabeth," and the circumstances are appropriate in certain ways, then you will have done something special, namely, you will have performed the act of naming the ship. Other examples include: "I take this man as my lawfully wedded husband," used in the course of a marriage ceremony, or "I bequeath this watch to my brother," as occurring in a will. In all three cases the sentence is not being used to describe or state what one is 'doing', but being used to actually 'do' it.
After numerous attempts to find more characteristics of performatives, and after having met with many difficulties, Austin makes what he calls a "fresh start", in which he considers "more generally the senses in which to say something may be to do something, or in saying something we do something".
For example: John Smith turns to Sue Snub and says ‘Is Jeff’s shirt red?’, to which Sue replies ‘Yes’. John has produced a series of bodily movements which result in the production of a certain sound. Austin called such a performance a phonetic act, and called the act a phone. John’s utterance also conforms to the lexical and grammatical conventions of English – that is, John has produced an English sentence. Austin called this a phatic act, and labels such utterances phemes. John also referred to Jeff’s shirt, and to the colour red. To use a pheme with a more or less definite sense and reference is to utter a rheme, and to perform a rhetic act. Note that rhemes are a sub-class of phemes, which in turn are a sub-class of phones. One cannot perform a rheme without also performing a pheme and a phone. The performance of these three acts is the performance of a locution – it is the act of saying something.
John has therefore performed a locutionary act. He has also done at least two other things. He has asked a question, and he has elicited an answer from Sue.
Asking a question is an example of what Austin called an illocutionary act. Other examples would be making an assertion, giving an order, and promising to do something. To perform an illocutionary act is to use a locution with a certain force. It is an act performed in saying something, in contrast with a locution, the act of saying something.
Eliciting an answer is an example of what Austin calls a perlocutionary act, an act performed by saying something. Notice that if one successfully performs a perlocution, one also succeeds in performing both an illocution and a locution.
In the theory of speech acts, attention has especially focused on the illocutionary act, much less on the locutionary and perlocutionary act, and only rarely on the subdivision of the locution into phone, pheme and rheme.

"Philosophical Investigations" by Ludwig Wittgenstein,1953

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Language is best conceived as an activity involving the uses of words as tools.
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Words are used in a multiplicity of ways and are to be understood by engaging in the language "games" in which they are employed ; words are not labels for things.
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For a large number of cases in which the word "meaning" is used,
the meaning of a word is its use in the language.
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Discourse about sensations is understandable because there is a grammar of the word "sensations",and of such words as "pain" and "remember",which can be grasped by anyone acquainted with the relevant language games ;
no reference to what one has in mind or feels privately makes sense unless it makes in this way.
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Expecting,intending,remembering
-these are ways of life made possible by the use of language ;
and language is itself a way of life.
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