The explanatory idea is to see communication as a rational activity where audiences reason their way to beliefs or intentions via their recognition of the utterer's intention to produce such results.
We can see communication as a rational activity in which an utterer intends to produce certain results and audiences reason their way to those results via their recognition of the utterer's intention to produce that very result.
Grice holds that for speaker meaning to occur, not only must one (a) intend to produce an effect on an audience, and (b) intend that this very intention be recognized by that audience, but also (c) one must intend this effect on the audience to be produced at least in part by their recognition of the speaker's intention.
But what, in addition to intending to cause the belief, is required for meaning that p? Grice's idea was that one must not only intend to cause the audience to form a belief, but also intend that they do so on the basis of their recognition of the speaker's intention.
On the other hand, given his apparent recognition that the speaker's intention to refer to the person who was baptized is related to a body of information which, accurate or not, is causally connected with the man baptized 'Aristotle', perhaps Buridan is nearer to the richer causal account given by Gareth Evans.
The idea of PNR integrates various AI techniques, namely, user intention recognition, normative reasoning over a user's intention, and planning, execution and replanning for assistive actions.
I wrote about Kitware's intention to create "behavior recognition" in camera systems, and this "Questionable Observer Detector" seems like it would be a nice complement to it.
The speaker meaning of U in such a case is the effect that S intends to produce in H by means of H's recognition of that intention.
Grice's analysis is based on the notion of "speaker meaning," which he defines as follows: a speaker S means something by an utterance U just in case S intends U to produce a certain effect in a hearer H by means of H's recognition of this intention.
What seems to be a matter of consensus is that every covert or even neutral (with respect to its intended recognition by the addressee) aspect of the speaker's intention must be left out of the definition of communicative intentions.
So, even if an audience reasons to a belief based on a recognition of relevant utterer's intentions, surely that reasoning is an epiphenomenon of limited explanatory interest.
