Today we will focus on the role that intentional understanding plays in communication, and more specifically, in language use and language learning.

Gibbs provides a broad context within which to think about the relevance, or perhaps more accurately, the centrality, of intentional understanding to human interpersonal functioning. He offers telling examples ranging from literature to art to the legal setting in illustration of how inferences about intentions shape our interpretation of others' actions, utterances, and creative productions. He also supplies a bit of philosophical and historical context for our discussion of intentional understanding, pointing to fundamental controversies within philosophy and art/literary criticism over the role intentions should properly play in our assignment of meaning and value to action, utterance, and art. Worthy of note is that Gibbs offers a definition of intentions rather different from others we've considered. He suggests that "it is best to conceive of intentions as the joint product of an interaction between a speaker/listener, writer/reader, or artist/observer rather than as purely, (sic) individual, private mental acts." (p. 49).

Grice is concerned with how best to characterize meaning. He provides a number of examples to clarify distinctions that enable him ultimately to articulate a fairly specific definition of what it means to mean something: to mean something an individual "must intend to induce by x a belief in an audience, and he must also intend his utterance to be recognized as so intended." (p. 219) This account of meaning has some interesting consequences. First, it integrates the concept of meaning with other core notions within a folk psychological theory, notions such as belief and intention. More traditional definitions of meaning within philosophy and linguistics (e.g., those of Frege, Tarski, Dowty) do not. Second, a corollary of this account is that our ordinary talk about word or utterance or sentence meaning is actually only a shorthand; what we are really talking about is what people mean when they use those words, utterances, sentences. An extension of Grice's argument can be made to the acquisition context: when we talk about the question of how children discover what words mean, we are really talking about how children discover what people mean when they use those words.

Baldwin & Tomasello's account of word learning coincides nicely with Grice's analysis. They provide evidence that even infants in the second year of life actively consult speakers for clues to their intentions to guide inferences about the meanings of new words. In other words, infants spontaneously attempt to discover what people mean when they use language. Furthermore, B & T argue that infants' sensitivity to intentional cues radically expedites the word learning process, and their evidence confirms this.

Malle's "Implicit Verb Causality" article is concerned with a different set of issues, although linked to the more general topic of the centrality of folk psychological notions, including intentionality, to our use and interpretation of language. Malle focuses on the so-called "verb causality effect," in which distinct verb classes can be identified that reliably yield opposing attributions of causality. For example, if asked "Who caused this?" regarding an event in which an actor is described as helping another, we will reliably attribute causality to the actor. In contrast, we will reliably attribute causality to the object of the verb for an event in which an actor is described as dreading another. Malle argues that the verb causality effect can be tidily explained by recognizing folk psychology as a basic framework guiding linguistic interpretation ("action verbs imply agent causality; experience verbs imply stimulus causality" (p. 23). Malle's account seems preferable to other available accounts (e.g., that of Rudolph & Foersterling) for a number of reasons. It provides an organization to the findings regarding the verb causality effect and better accounts for these findings than the covariation principle typically offered. As well, Malle's analysis seems to capture an intuitively available distinction, and thus meets a theoretical criterion sometimes called the goal of "descriptive adequacy." Finally, in my view, the analysis provides some hope of accounting for how the system of verb causality can be acquired developmentally.