Having defined speaker meaning in terms of expression and expression in terms of the intention to produce indications of belief or other mental states, we turn our attention now to communication and other concepts that entail communication. We have seen that the Gricean assumption that speaker meaning is the attempt to communicate distorted the Gricean analysis of speaker meaning in a number of ways, and we have suggested that his analysis would fit communicating, informing, and telling much better. We will now see that Grice's conditions are not completely appropriate even for these semantic acts. We will define communication in terms of expression and recognition, and then define informing and telling in terms of communicating. We will therefore adopt the Gricean strategy of reducing communication to intention, while again specifying different intentions from the Gricean ones. In the process, we will draw an important distinction between communicating to and communicating with, and reject the popular transmission model of communication.

Even though we have distinguished speaker meaning from communication, we will nonetheless go on to affirm in Part II that communication plays an important role in word meaning, as the common interest that sustains the conventions in virtue of which words have meaning. The use of words to express certain ideas is conventional, moreover, only when they are conventionally used to communicate them. So the idea that word meaning in living languages depends on communication in some way will be upheld.