Language

Why do people who study language put so much attention on the speaker's intentions? Isn't it obvious that we often don't say what we want?

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Rats are cuddly. I mean...cats are, but I typed an 'r' instead of a 'c'. Or was I temporarily misguided about the names of certain small mammals? In any case, I said something I didn't intend. Sorry.

But why should we judge that I said that rats are cuddly instead of judging that I said that cats are cuddly in an idiolect which uses 'rats' to pick out cats? The answer arguably comes in two stages: first, 'rats' picks out rats in English because there is an established convention to use that squiggle and those sounds to pick out rats, and this 'rat'-rat convention originated in and is sustained by the intentions (most of them merely implicit) of a community of speakers to employ this convention. Second, my utterances are to be interpreted according to this convention because I have entered into a situation in which what I say is goverened by the English language (which contains the 'rat'-rat convention even if I don't realize it).

This account of how we can say something we don't intend is certainly rough in its details. But if it's generally correct, then speakers' intentions play a crucial role in constituting linguistic meaning, even in cases in which a speaker says something she doesn't intend to say. If this is right, a speaker can only succeed in saying something she doesn't intend if a majority (or some privledged minority) of speakers say what they intend to say. (This is required for the existence and applicability of the conventions that enable errors such as mine). And so, linguistic meaning seems to rely generally upon the intentions of speakers, and the study of language will naturally pay attention to them.

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