Hey folks, once again, our supporters have enabled us to record some extra discussion that

is behind our paywall for partially examined life citizens or $5 a month Patreon members,

and I want to present some clips of that to you not only to call your attention to that

release and maybe induce you to donate, but because I think some of the points may

here are interesting even taking in isolation.

So first of us and I continue to talk after our episode 189 on authorial intent for about

an hour and a half.

First I want to play you a couple clips from our relating the discussion there to general

philosophy of language.

We talked about the meaning of a work of art.

Well wouldn't that be, in so far as we're talking about language, wouldn't that be depended

on your account of meaning and its relation to language itself?

So the mentalist theory, Paul Greys' theory is that we determine what a piece of language

means not just by what it traditionally means like according to the dictionary, but by

the intention of the speaker.

So he gives this example, well, South Bend is not exactly New York City.

So yeah, we can know what literally that means, but what the speaker probably meant there

is, you know, like the restaurants aren't as good in Indiana as in New York City and

you know, a whole cluster of other snobby things about New York City.

And so Greys actually thinks that speaker meaning is the primary thing that we should

pay attention to and actually it's only a matter of conventional meanings are just built

out of lots of speakers meaning the same thing by the same phrase over time and that sort

...