American Philosophical Quarterly Volume 50, Number 4, October 2013 ©2013 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois TALKING TO INFANTS: A GRICEAN PERSPECTIVE Steffen Borge 1. The Background According to Paul Grice, when we ad- dress someone, we intend to make ourselves understood, partly by the addressee’s recogni- tion of that intention. Call this set of nested audience-directed intentions an M-intention. The standard Gricean analysis of speaker’s meaning goes as follows: “U meant something by uttering x” is true iff, for some audience A, U uttered x intending: (1) A to produce a particular response r (2) A to think (recognize) that U intends (1) (3) A to fulfill (1) on the basis of his fulfillment of (2). (Grice 1969, p. 92) Call this analysis the M-schema, and to fulfill it, to M-intend. In the Gricean tradition there has been a debate as to the exact form of M- intentions (especially whether clause (3) is needed or should be left out of the analysis), but these are details that I will not address here. The phenomenon of talking to infants challenges the Gricean analysis of address- ing others. We talk to infants, but such cases cannot be described as M-intending anything, since the speaker must realize that he will not be able to make himself understood in the re- quired manner. The Gricean mechanism lacks an appropriate addressee. Some Griceans have argued that in cases of no appropriate addressee, the speaker is actually addressing himself (Schiffer 1972, p. 80; Avramides 1989, p. 66). This response might be tempting for soliloquy, but I will show that it is unsuited for the phenomenon of talking to infants. 2. The Challenge Orthodoxy has it that we cannot M-intend when we talk to infants, since we cannot expect infants to grasp such complex audi- ence-directed intentions. Mitchell Green, for example, argues that this shows that the Gricean M-intention fails as a description of speaker’s meaning (see also Davis 1992). [G]azing into my newborn daughter’s eyes I might say, “All things valuable are difficult as they are rare,” meaning what I say, without hav- ing the slightest intention to produce beliefs or other attitudes in her or in anyone else. (Green 2007, pp. 60–61) The Green example is not well crafted, since it makes it tempting to say that the speaker is talking to himself and thus fulfilling the M-schema. A further and more interesting question is whether people actually talk to children in the manner Green says he does— reciting words as if he were an actor on stage delivering a monologue. Mathilda Holzman has studied the interac- tion between pre-linguistic infants and their mothers, and in her study, we find no reciting of poetry or other actor-like monologues. In- stead, the mother engages the child, and there 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46