utterer's meaning. He does so very tentatively with the following definition: "x meansNN (timeless) that so-and-so" might as a first shot be equated with some statement or disjunction of statements about what "people" (vague) intend (with qualifications about "recognition") to effect by x. The basic idea here is that the meaning of a word or sentence results from a regularity in what speakers use the word or sentence to mean. Grice would give a much more detailed theory of timeless meaning in his sixth Logic and Conversation lecture. A more influential attempt to expand on this component of intention-based semantics has been given by Stephen Schiffer. Grice's theory of implicature Grice's most influential contribution to philosophy and linguistics is his theory of implicature, which started in his 1961 article, "The Causal Theory of Perception", and "Logic and Conversation", which was delivered at Harvard's 'William James Lectures' in 1967, and published in 1975 as a chapter in volume 3 of Syntax and Semantics: Speech Acts. Saying/implicating distinction According to Grice, what a speaker means by an utterance can be divided into what the speaker "says" and what the speaker thereby "implicates". Grice makes it clear that the notion of saying he has in mind, though related to a colloquial sense of the word, is somewhat technical, referring to it as "a favored notion of 'saying' that must be further elucidated". Nonetheless, Grice never settled on a full elucidation or definition of his favoured notion of saying, and the interpretation of this notion has become a contentious issue in the philosophy of language. One point of controversy surrounding Grice's favoured notion of saying is the connection between it and his concept of utterer's meaning. Grice makes it clear that he takes saying to be a kind of meaning, in the sense that doing the former entails doing the latter: "I want to say that (1) "U (utterer) said that p" entails (2) "U did something x by which U meant that p" (87). This condition is controversial, but Grice argues that apparent counterexamples—cases in which a speaker apparently says something without meaning it—are actually examples of what he calls "making as if to say", which can be thought of as a kind of "mock saying" or "play saying". Another point of controversy surrounding Grice's notion of saying is the relationship between what a speaker says with an expression and the expression's timeless