Once again, there’s something wrong and something right in what Beardsley says. He’s undoubtedly right that sentence meaning and speaker meaning needn’t coincide, and that that proves that the two aren’t identical. Thus the author’s intention isn’t always the final word on what a text means. That, however, doesn’t prove that the author’s intention carries no evidential weight at all. According to the alternative position, it does, but in some cases, perhaps the majority of them, not enough to ca