Abstract

This paper defends a purely semantic notion of what is said against various recent objections. The objections each cite some sort of linguistic, psychological, or epistemological fact that is supposed to show that on any viable notion of what a speaker says in uttering a sentence, there is pragmatic intrusion into what is said. Relying on a modified version of Grice's notion, on which what is said must be a projection of the syntax of the uttered sentence, I argue that a purely semantic notion is needed to account for the linguistically determined input to the hearer's inference to what, if anything, the speaker intends to be conveying in uttering the sentence.