Finally, some corrections. I begin with two misunderstandings that I find easily comprehensible.
First, my use of the term “producer” may be misleading, as it differs from the ordinary use of the term. Not every producer of an utterance, in the ordinary sense, is a producer in the technical sense that Evans and I associate with the term. To take up the example that Evans gives in the long quotation cited at the beginning of section 5 of my article, if someone uses the name “Livingston” today to refer to (say) an 18th century politician, then she will be a mere consumer of that name, because she could not “have been introduced to the [name-using] practice via [her] acquaintance with” Livingston, to put it in Evans’ terms (1982, pp. 376–393). This holds true even if she is the speaker of an utterance in which the name “Livingston” is used this way. I do not think that the producer/consumer distinction leads to a problematic two-tier society of linguistic insiders and outsiders, as Pacholik-Żuromska seems to believe. It merely reflects the way proper names and other expressions acquire a particular usage, as a matter of fact. Actually, Pacholik-Żuromska herself draws upon a very similar distinction (but see footnote 16 in the target article, Beyer this collection) when she talks about experts. Of course, in principle anyone may become an expert regarding the application of any term—although it is difficult, to say the least, to become a producer regarding a proper name whose bearer has passed away a long time ago (see above). If this latter remark is correct (as I think it is), then it is not the case that in general “everyone can verify or falsify judgments of others,” as Pacholik-Żuromska (this collection, p. 6) wants to claim following Peacocke. In some cases (such as the case of proper names whose bearers have passed away) some people—the mere consumers—are in an epistemically underprivileged position.
Since Pacholik-Żuromska mistakenly equates what I call producers with speakers and mere consumers with hearers, she misreads my proposal to tone down Searle's Background Hypothesis in such a way that only the producers with regard to a given set of sentences need “background know-how regarding the application of those sentences” (as I put it in section 5 in the target article, Beyer this collection), and her relevant arguments are besides the point—even if they contain interesting ideas (see sections 1 and 2 above). I do not claim that the Background Hypothesis “should be restricted only to the speaker,” as Pacholik-Żuromska (this collection, p. 1) puts it in her abstract. I contend that it should be restricted to the producers.
This brings me to a second misunderstanding that also concerns my view on the Background Hypothesis. In some places (like the last paragraph of section 4 in the target article; Beyer this collection) I carelessly put my view in such a way that it invites the following interpretation, which Pacholik-Żuromska takes for granted: only the producers need any background know-how. However, this is, again, a misreading, as becomes clear when one looks at more careful formulations of my view, such as the one quoted in the preceding paragraph or the following formulations from section 5: “Meaning-intentions […] do not generally require a non-intentional background relative to which their (truth-conditional) content and satisfaction conditions are determined;” (Beyer this collection, p. 15; emphasis added) “the applicability of the Background Hypothesis […] needs to be restricted, as far as the part of the background (co-)determining truth-conditional content is concerned, to what I have called the producers.” (Beyer this collection, p. 17; emphasis added) What Pacholik-Żuromska does not notice, and what I should have made clearer, is that I distinguish between two different functions of the background:
On the one hand, some of its elements (such as personal acquaintance with a name-bearer, or with a practice like opening a can) help to determine a particular truth-condition for a sentence-use and its underlying meaning-bestowing act—here I claim that only the producers need a corresponding background.
On the other hand, the existence of what Searle calls the Network is an enabling condition for intentional consciousness.
Regarding the latter, I argue near the end of my article that it is misleading to characterize the part of the Network that constitutes “the set of anticipations determining,” (Beyer this collection, p. 16) what Husserl refers to as the “intentional horizon” of a conscious intentional state as completely non-intentional, because they are mental dispositions to form occurrent higher-order beliefs. In order to save Husserl’s notion of intentional yet unconscious horizon anticipations, which I regard as an indispensable contribution to the theory of intentionality, I propose that we (re)formulate Searle’s background conception in such a way that “the background may indeed contain intentional elements, albeit in a derived sense” (Beyer this collection, p. 17), notably in the sense of mental dispositions to form higher-order beliefs. The only argument I find in Pacholik-Żuromska’s commentary that may at first sight be taken to speak against the admission of such intentional background-elements is the regress argument she refers to in section 4 of her commentary. She points out that the Background Hypothesis is supposed to avoid a regress of assumptions such as the one I describe in section 3 in the target article (under the heading “Background assumptions”) in order to motivate Searle’s radical contextualism. But, quite apart from the fact that I do not claim that all elements of the background are intentional in the relevant sense, I find Searle's corresponding argument for the Background Hypothesis confused. He claims that “[t]he actual content is insufficient to determine the conditions of satisfaction,” and that “[e]ven if you spell out all the contents of the mind as a set of conscious rules, thoughts, beliefs, etc., you still need a set of Background capacities for their interpretation.” (Searle 1992, pp. 189–190) To repeat a point I make in section 5 of my article, this is an absurd view (cf. Beyer 1997, p. 346). Neither intentional content (“actual content”) nor respective meaning can be interpreted (or “applied”) at all—only (utterances of) linguistic expressions, including formulations of rules, can be interpreted, and the result of this interpretation will be (the ascription of) a meaning-bestowing act which displays an intentional content that uniquely determines the conditions of satisfaction.
Here are some further corrections and clarifications.
I do not take the case of indexicals like “I,” “here” and “now” to show that “literal truth-conditional meaning” can be grasped even in the absence of “the correct background.” Unlike “sentences without established use” (as Pacholik-Żuromska aptly calls them; this collection, pp. 2–3), these examples have no bearing on the truth of the version of the Background Hypothesis for which I argue. They can be captured by any standard semantics that distinguishes between general meaning-function (character) and respective meaning (content).
I do not give any example in which “the speaker utters a sentence that the hearer repeats, while referring to another object” (Pacholik-Żuromska this collection, p. 3) than the one the speaker refers to. In the example about the yellow apple and the red ball in the box, the speaker refers to the apple in order to (wrongly) state that it is red, and the hearer may figure this out by applying a suitably modified version of Williamson's principle of knowledge maximization (rather than Davidson’s principle of truth maximization). Nor do I claim that any “false judgment in certain circumstances can count as knowledgeable.” (Pacholik-Żuromska this collection, p. 3) Rather, the unmodified version of Williamson's principle is not applicable in the case at hand.
Furthermore, epistemic contextualism does not only (often) purport to answer sceptical challenges to justified-true-belief accounts of knowledge, but also to other accounts such as reliabilist theories of knowledge that make recourse to the notion of the ability to exclude relevant alternatives. I do not distinguish between “literal truth-conditional meaning” and “contextual respective meaning,” as Pacholik-Żuromska claims in section 3. In the case of indexicals, literal meaning is not to be confused with linguistic meaning in the sense of general meaning-function (character). The relevant distinction is that between literal and figurative meaning; unlike “meaning as usage,” figurative (or non-literal) meaning is a case of (what is expressed by) implicature.
It is misleading to assert that “according to Searle, propositional attitudes are not intentional states” (Pacholik-Żuromska this collection, p. 4). It is true, however, that (like Husserl) Searle does not conceive of them “as a relation of being directed […] towards a judgment in a logical sense” (Pacholik-Żuromska this collection, p. 4), i.e., towards a proposition. Propositional contents are to be distinguished from the satisfaction conditions they determine (which Husserl refers to as states of affairs).
I do not claim that “if the hearer does not recognize an intention accompanying an utterance, she does not fail to grasp the literal truth-conditional meaning.” (Pacholik-Żuromska this collection, p. 4) Grasping that meaning requires, on the part of the hearer, to ascribe the intention to express a meaning-bestowing act to the speaker.
I distinguish (following Borg) between knowing a sentence's truth-condition, on the one hand, and being able to decide whether this truth-condition is satisfied, on the other. Mere consumers do know the truth-condition of a sentence when they understand it, but they are unable to decide (in an epistemically responsible way) whether it is met. Pace Pacholik-Żuromska, this does not mean that they “have to believe everything they [hear].” (this collection, p. 5) Nothing in the notion of a mere consumer implies that he must regard a given speaker as infallible (and sincere), even if this speaker is in fact a producer; and nothing in the notion of a producer implies that producers are infallible (and always truthful). Nor does this mean that producers grasp truth-conditional content more “fully” than mere consumers (see footnote 16 of my target article; Beyer this collection).
On my conception of a producer, there can be no producer who is “a false expert.” It is possible, though, on my view, to be a producer without being a scientific expert on whatever it is that constitutes the extension, reference, or truth-condition of the relevant expression (again, see footnote 16 of my target article; Beyer this collection).
Pacholik-Żuromska raises an excellent question when she asks what, on my view, “would be an indicator of the proper usage of a sentence” (this collection, p. 6). However, it does not speak against a particular approach to meaning that this problem arises in its framework. It arises in any framework.
Husserl took over the idea of intentionality from Brentano, but he does not share Brentano’s view that consciousness is always intentional. According to Husserl, there is also non-intentional consciousness, such as pain. Without intentionality, there would be no stream of consciousness, and hence no consciousness. But not every single element of the stream of consciousness is itself intentional. As usual, I find myself in agreement with Husserl here.