The concept of intentionality in Paul Grice and Edmund Husserl
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Date
2026-08-02
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Plovdiv University Press
Abstract
The text explores a possible meeting between intention in Grice’s theory of communicative
meaning and intentionality in Husserl’s phenomenology. Such a meeting can be thought of after the
particular “return” of the subject in ordinary language philosophy. With its appearance, the subject
overturns referential semantic models, problematizes strict realism, and breaks the ideal unambiguity
of language in use. Meaning begins to be measured through intention - in the formation of sense and
in the mutuality of conversation. Phenomenological intention, however, is a condition for the
constitution of the world. The world is not something already found; it is a transcendental result of the
intentional activity of the subject. This sheds light on both concepts as acts of achieving meaning - one
linguistic and one ontological.
From this perspective, the figure of the Other is especially important. In phenomenology,
intersubjectivity is a condition for the world to gain the status of a shared world, while in language theory, the communicative act becomes empty without mutual orientation toward intentions and their
recognition. In both cases, meaning arises not in isolation, but in contact.
In conclusion, although intention in Grice and intentionality in Husserl belong to different
methodological fields and traditions, they meet in the idea of active directedness as a constitutive
principle of meaning. Through it, the acting subject appears as a bridge between the phenomenology
of lived experience and the philosophy of language, and as the place where world and meaning are
generated.
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Keywords
intention, subject, sense, meaning, world, sedimentation, language