In this paper, I lend novel support to H. P. Grice’s account of speaker meaning (GASM) by blunting the force of a significant
objection. Stephen Schiffer has argued that in order to make GASM sufficient, one must add restrictions that are
psychologically impossible to fulfill, thereby making GASM untenable. In what follows, I explain the elements of GASM that require it to invoke these
psychologically unrealizable restrictions. I then accept Schiffer’s criticism, but modify its significance to GASM. I argue
that the problem that Schiffer notes is not a reason to reject GASM, but a reason to embrace it. GASM shows that meaning is
best understood as an absolute concept—an unrealizable ideal limit. Taking some inspiration from contextualist theories of
knowledge attribution, I argue that my version of GASM offers a useful contextualist account of
meaning attribution. Hence, pragmatic theories of meaning and communication should not wholly exclude GASM from their theorizing,
at least not for the reasons that are commonly given.
Keywords Language - Meaning - Pragmatics - Contextualism - Communication - Grice - Schiffer - Speaker meaning - Intention based semantics