As Beyer claims, if the hearer does not recognize an intention accompanying an utterance, she does not fail to grasp the literal truth-conditional meaning of an utterance. Arguing for this thesis, Beyer gives examples of sentences that do not have an established use or that share the same general meaning function but have different respective meanings. But here are some objections:
The first question concerns indexicals: could we really grasp the literal meaning of the indexical “I” if we could not dispose a background of self-identification? In other words, what would be the distinctive features of context that allow the right ascription of beliefs, if subjects A and B utter the same content, and in the same context? It might be, for example, a capacity to identify themselves as subjects of a certain state, which is a capacity belonging to the unintentional background. If we do not dispose a concept of an individual subject, but only of collectivity, self-identification would be disturbed. In that case, could we still grasp the literal meaning of a sentence like “I do x”? Such self-identification depends on many factors—physical, like a completely unintentional sense of proprioception or homeostasis, and social, based on norms and rules. The case of physical factors determining the ability to self-identify shows that the Background Hypothesis cannot be reformulated such that the Background must contain intentional elements. As Searle writes:
On the conception I am presenting, the Background is rather the set of practices, skills, habits, and stances that enable Intentional contents to work in the various ways that they do, and it is in that sense that the Background functions causally by providing a set of enabling conditions for the operation of Intentional states. (1983, p. 158)
Intentional elements would not help our grasping of the meaning if they referred to subjective intentions, which, as Beyer admits, are fully accessible only from first-person perspective. Beyer also doubts whether it is possible to make a comprehensive list of assumptions about a hidden object. But Searle’s Background Hypothesis was created precisely to avoid such a regress.
The second question concerns the distinction between literal and contextual meaning. Namely we can raise the doubt: if a hearer does not grasp the contextual meaning, i.e., the truth-conditional meaning, then might she only grasp the sense of the utterance, and not its meaning? If we change terminology, and call general meaning function “sense” or “concept”, then we could use Frege’s theory of sense and meaning (intension and extension) and say that a subject who grasps only conventional linguistic meaning but not respective meaning grasps de facto not the meaning of a sentence but its sense. According to Frege's theory of intension/extension of a sentence, one cannot know a sentence's meaning if one does not know its truth-conditions, because the meaning of a sentence is its truth-value (Frege 1948). Further, if we turned to were Frege as interpreted by Michael Dummett, we could say that a subject who does not know the truth-conditions of some sentence does not understand this sentence, because, according to Dummett, a theory of meaning should be a theory of understanding (1993).
The third objection can be formulated as follows: if, according to Beyer, only a producer carries the burden of the requirements of the Background Hypothesis, and if she was a false expert, is there a method (also accessible to a hearer who does not have to know the background) for the identification of false experts by a non-expert? This is a version of Putnam’s externalism, which says that external factors, which determine the content of our beliefs could be experts, who for example tell us how to properly use the names “elm” and “beech” (cf. Putnam 1975, p. 145). But what if these experts just pretend to be professionals, or simply have a gap in their education?
If only producers should carry the burden of the requirements of the Background Hypothesis, consumers would have limited access to methods enabling the identification of the satisfaction conditions of an uttered sentence. Hence consumers, grasping only literal meaning, would have to believe everything they heard. As was said, intentionality should not be regarded as a feature of an individual mind. Intentionality is a relation between minds and the world. It is a social phenomenon, developed and practiced through interactions with other minds (cf. Tomasello & Rakoczy 2003). Hence there must be a theory that can explain how both speaker and hearer have a potentially equal chance of understanding a sentence (of grasping its truth-conditional content). Such a model of understanding has been proposed by Christopher Peacocke. Peacocke claims that the thinker can only judge the content that she recognizes (cf. Peacocke 1992, p. 51). Recognition is possible only if the person knows the truth-conditions of the grasped content. According to Peacocke, the basic concepts are individuated by the fact that, in certain circumstances, our beliefs containing these concepts will be true. These beliefs constitute the knowledge of the subject. Peacocke builds his theory on the assumption that components of the propositional content are concepts individuated by their possession conditions, which fix the semantic value of concepts.
The determination theory for a given concept (together with the world in empirical cases) assigns semantic values in such a way that the belief-forming practices mentioned in the concept's possession condition are correct. That is, in the case of belief formation, the practices result in true beliefs, and in the case of principles of inference, they result in truth-preserving inferences, when semantic values are assigned in accordance with the determination theory. (Peacocke 1992, p. 19)
In fact, in such an account, Peacocke’s theory of knowledge is a theory of social solidarity, where knowledge is not a privilege and subjects are considered not as monads or individual minds but as creating a new interpersonal subjectivity—i.e., a social sphere. On the basis of Peacocke’s model of gaining knowledge, which contains the triadic relation: concepts, the possession condition of concepts, (conditions in which the use of concept is valid), andthrough semantic value (fixed on the basis of determination theory), this solidarity is possible, because according to this model everyone can verify or falsify judgments of others. I support this account. The so-called “theory of social solidarity” assumes that both speaker and hearer must share the Background in order to have an access to conditions of justification of utterances.
From the third objection follows the next question: if only a producer needs to dispose a background, then what would be an indicator of the proper usage of a sentence? How could a consumer conclude that a producer understands the uttered sentence (that is, is a competent language user)?
As I have suggested, the consumer also has to utilise certain methods to conclude whether the producer understands the uttered sentence. This tool of verification should be the world, as in Donald Davidson’s model of epistemic triangulation. In Davidson’s theory, meaning is dispositional. He claims that asymmetry, which happens between a speaker and interpreter’s knowledge about a word’s meaning, is the same kind of asymmetry between the first- second-person perspectives. This means that knowledge about meaning has to be inferential—hence it is to be identified by an interpreter on the basis of the speaker’s behaviour. To understand the behaviour of an agent, the interpreter has to have a hypothesis about her intention, and then check this hypothesis with respect to the external conditions of the world. In this way, he can verify or falsify his interpretation. If it is wrong, then he must change it and form another hypothesis. Interpretation should be undertaken according to a principle of charity, which means that if the hypothesis fails, then it is the probably the interpreter who is wrong and not the sender—here is the place for experts—the interpreter has to assume that the sender acts rationally, but he has tools to prove it (Davidson 1980).
But in the context of the Background Hypothesis we do not even need to refer to Davidson’s theory to show the necessity of an external validation indicator. Searle’s original account is good enough:
If my beliefs turn out to be wrong, it is my beliefs and not the world which is at fault, as is shown by the fact that I can correct the situation simply by changing my beliefs. It is the responsibility of the belief, so to speak, to match the world, and where the match fails I repair the situation by changing the belief. But if I fail to carry out my intentions or if my desires are unfulfilled I cannot in that way correct the situation by simply changing the intention or desire. In these cases it is, so to speak, the fault of the world if it fails to match the intention or the desire, and I cannot fix things up by saying it was a mistaken intention or desire in a way that I can fix things up by saying it was a mistaken belief. Beliefs like statements can be true or false, and we might say they have the 'mind-to-world' direction of fit. Desires and intentions, on the other hand, cannot be true or false, but can be complied with, fulfilled, or carried out, and we might say that they have the 'world-to-mind' direction of fit. (Searle 1983, p. 8)
As I have emphasized, since Background and Intentionality are strongly connected it is impossible to weaken the Background or add intentional elements to it, because then the mechanism of intentional directedness preserving the external and relational character of propositional attitudes will fall. Nevertheless, Beyer rightly begins his considerations with a comparison of the conception of intentionality from Husserl and Searle. What they have common is the antipsychological thesis that intentionality can be expressed in language. Their idea was to separate intentionality from psychological explanations, which is possible when we consider propositional attitudes as reported in sentences containing the I-clause and the that-clause, thus expressing a relation between an attitude and a judgement in a logical sense. In general, antipsychologists claim that intentionality is a binary relation between mental acts and the world: the contents of mental acts refer to objects, which exist outside of these acts, while the relation of intentionality is represented in sentences. The relational approach to intentionality affects how we think of mental functions and products, such as judging, believing, doubting, and so on, which are themselves relational.
As Beyer underlines, the problem of meaning intention (termed thus by Husserl) concerns the partly subjective nature of experienced content—a factor that creates the content of the proposition associated with the modality of the state and allows the subject to grasp the content of the experienced state. He refers to Franz Brentano, according to whom every conscious mental act is intentional. In other words, consciousness is intentional because it is always a consciousness of something. Consciousness cannot exist without an intentional act of directedness toward itself. This means that characteristic of mental phenomena is their intentionality or the “mental inexistence of an object [and that] every mental phenomenon includes something as object within itself” (Brentano 1973). So, for example, if I hear a sound, I also grasp the phenomenon of hearing. On the other hand, the content of a mental state is characterized as that which can be expressed in an objectively-verifiable judgment, due to the specific nature of the content which allows the subject to move from first-order beliefs to second-order beliefs that arise when she ascribes to herself a propositional attitude. This switch can be seen as a change in the form of language: from object language referring to the external world to—and here are two possibilities—either metalanguage, in which the subject reports that she has a belief about having a belief, or to subjective language, in which the subject reports having an attitude with a certain content. In the case of metalanguage, this has to do with issues of semantic externalism, like inheriting truthfulness by second-order beliefs.
Meaning exists only where there is a distinction between intentional content and the form of its externalization, and to ask for the meaning is to ask for an Intentional content that goes with the form of externalization. (Searle 1983, p. 28)
Since propositional attitudes are mental states with propositional content, to interpret them correctly one has to dispose a background of physical and social determinants of the content of the sentences expressing the propositional attitude. This is why a proper theory of intentional directedness should treat both speaker and hearer equally. Speaker and hearer cannot be separated. They are so strongly connected that they should be considered holistically as a single intentional structure or one structure of intentional directedness. Only then arises social intersubjectivity, which does not consist only of individual minds but also of interactions between minds and world as in Davidson’s model of triangulation. This relation works for both sides. And the constitution of an individual self is an effect of switching between individual and social minds and between the beliefs of these two kinds: social and individual. It happens for example when an individual mind joints a group and meets regularities different to her own (cf. Tomasello et al. 2005). This means that sometimes, for some reason, it is useful for her to change her beliefs or even her belief-system. She must do this on the basis of her own inferences, so she has to have a reason to do it. Done in any other way she would have problems with understanding this new beliefs.
Hence the triadic model of intentional reference contains a structure that simulates relations of understanding between sender, interpreter, and the world. Subjects never live a solitary life, as is claimed by Husserl. That is why the case of intentionality does not concern a solitary mind. This standpoint gives a straightforward route to contemporary theories of enactive cognition, where a subject is embedded in an environment and, to gain knowledge, has to act and interact with the world of objects and other subjects. This point of view, however, leaves little room for epistemological internalism and thus for the Cartesian mind. Followers of theories of enactivism would say that the content of a subject’s mental states is deeply rooted in the body’s interactions with the environment—because the whole of cognition is.
That is why when one investigates the content of mental states one needs to refer to both the situation and the situated cognizer taken together as a single, unified system (Wilson 2002). Such enactive theories will be a kind of new version of active externalism, which assumes that “the content-fixing properties in the environment are active properties within a sensorimotor loop realized in the very present” (Metzinger 2004, p. 115). This standpoint, however controversial in the light of classic externalism, has much in common with proponents of this view. So, for example, diachronic externalism holds that the causal story, namely all facts in the past that have had an influence on the thinker, together with an environment, are important determinants of the content of a thinker’s propositional attitudes. In contrast to this, synchronic externalism holds also that the content of propositional attitudes is determined by the current environment of the thinker and his disposition to respond to it. On the other hand, social externalism holds that the content of thoughts is determined in part by the social environment of a thinker, and especially by how others in our linguistic communities use words. These “others” could be experts, who establish the scientific names of objects, such as, for example, trees. This version of social externalism could prove fruitful when we consider Searle’s Background Theory, but it creates trouble for Beyer. As I have argued above, in the third objection, externalism is the right approach but it is possible only under the condition of the equal treatment of both participants of the communication process, namely the speaker and hearer, and only when they have access to the background.