What is Meant by ‘What is Said’? A Reply to Cappelen and Lepore

In a recent paper Herman Cappelen and Ernie Lepore challenge an assumption that they rightly claim is pervasive among contemporary philosophers of language. According to this assumption (MA), an adequate semantic theory T for a language L should assign p as the semantic content of a sentence S in L if and only if in uttering S a speaker says that p . I claim that the arguments of Cappelen and Lepore are based upon an uncharitable interpretation of MA. If ‘saying’ is understood in a roughly Gricean sense, MA emerges as an eminently plausible assumption.