Communicative intentions: Private or public?

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 (2001/2023a) and Hansen & Terkourafi (2023) 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.