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Article published In: Pragmatics & Cognition
Vol. 32:2 (2025) ► pp.287–310

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Communicative intentions: Private or public?

The issue of the speaker’s vs. hearer’s authority

ORCiD logo with link | University of Catania
Published online: 13 November 2025
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/pc.24036.maz
Abstract
Communicative intentions, conceived as internal mental states, are subject to an objection already raised by Wittgenstein: since they are not accessible to hearers, they cannot play an explanatory role in utterance understanding. Such an objection has led Sbisà (Sbisà, Marina. 2001. Intentions from the other side. In Giovanna Cosenza (ed.), Paul Grice’s heritage, 185–206. Turnhout: Brepols.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar/. 2023a. Intentions from the other side. In Marina Sbisà (ed.), Essays on speech acts and other topics in pragmatics, 72–89. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar) and Hansen, Maj-Britt M. & Marina Terkourafi. 2023. We need to talk about hearer’s meaning! Journal of Pragmatics 2081. 99–114. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar to propose shifting the weight of explanation from speaker’s to hearer’s meaning. This article delineates the scope of that objection, arguing that communicative intentions are irrelevant if conceived as private mental states, but defending an alternative, public conception of communicatively relevant mental states, framed in terms of representations of public correlations between public facts. This allows for the formation of rules which are intersubjective but nonetheless mental. Importantly, such rules are presupposed by intentional communication as described in animal studies. Given this public conception of the mental, neither the speaker nor the hearer holds special authority over the intended content: they share a narrowly constrained authority.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.The issue of speaker’s vs. hearer’s authority
  • 3.The beetle-in-the-box (and the circularity) argument against communicative intentions
  • 4.A public notion of mental states and communicative intentions
    • 4.1Mental states as intervening variables
    • 4.2Intentional communication
    • 4.3Symbolic communication
    • 4.4Inferential communication
  • 5.Testing the public notion of communicative intention against objections
    • 5.1How to live with the beetle-in-the-box argument
    • 5.2How to live with the circularity argument
  • 6.Conclusions: A constrained and shared authority
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
References (30)
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