I tell you now that my intention, the intention of the author, does not matter for understanding what I write. The next sentence, the sentence you’re reading now, claims the opposite: that the intention of the author does matter for understanding what is written. What’s going on here? The opposition between these two claims rests on an ambiguity in the notion of intention. I can tell you what the ambiguity is and I will now: (1) References to the “intention of the author” can point to a mental state – what’s going on in the mind of the writer – which seems to be something inaccessible and thus irrelevant to understanding. (2) But such references can also point to something said by the author which is expressed by the (linguistic and contextual) conventions the author uses. In the second sense, the intention is not inaccessible but something expressed by conventions accessible to everyone who is familiar with these conventions. Sounds neat, doesn’t it? Yet, I fear that understanding the ambiguity of intentions by distinguishing between the senses of (1) and (2) won’t resolve the problem. Why? Because both senses are real and matter as much as their disambiguation.
Let’s work through an example: If I tell you “I’m not feeling well today”, you don’t understand what I mean. You literally have no idea what I’m going through and what makes me say this! The upshot of what is known as Wittgenstein’s private language argument is that invoking my intentions in the sense of (1) doesn’t help with the meaning of the expression used. What does the trick, instead, is that you understand what I say by understanding the convention of using the expression “I’m not feeling well today”; that would be a reference to “intentions” in the sense of (2). But why doesn’t falling back on (2) settle the issue? Because our communication does not consist in (understanding) conventions. Rather, communication consists in swinging back and forth between (1) and (2). For even if intentions taken as (1) don’t provide meaning, they have a set of communicative functions.
It’s true, trying to understand “I’m not feeling well today” in the sense of (1) won’t work. It won’t provide the meaning of the expression. Trying to look into my head won’t work, not even for me. But the point of going for (1) is not “getting it”; the point is to aspire to get it. Here, (1) works like a teaser for the listener. We cannot get at the mental state. But the (supposed) inaccessibility of the mental state has a function in its own right. Obviously, it gets us started. Obviously, it doesn’t get us where we aspire to be. Instead, it might make us ask questions like “what’s wrong with you?”, while making us resign to a conclusion such as “oh, you probably won’t join the party then?”
However, you will retort, asking such questions and resigning to such conclusions just is going through the conventional motions in the sense of (2). That’s right, I answer. But we don’t aspire to express conventions or respond to them. Arguably, our aspirations are driven by (1). I really want to be understood, even if I have to resign to the fact that this is not even an option for me in a determinate way.
To use an analogy: (1) and (2) are like water versus water frozen into ice cubes. Only ice cubes can be counted but they are still water. If I want to count water, I’m doing the wrong kind of thing. If I want to get at determinate meanings by asking for mental states, thus taking intentions in the sense of (1), I’m like someone who wants to count water. By contrast, if I think that only ice cubes matter for counting, I’m forgetting that ice cubes are a different state of water. Communication (and understanding) is not just about getting at fixed meanings, but also about aspiration. And here it’s (1) that matters most, exactly because intentions in the sense of (1) cannot be saturated.
What can we learn from this ambiguity? I said earlier that the problem cannot be resolved by disambiguation. I can now express more clearly why that is. It’s because intentions in the sense of (1) affect intentions as conventions in the sense of (2) and vice versa. Aspiring to access inaccessible mental states is a set of conventions, too. Countless poems thrive on it, but they inform our daily communication, too. “I can’t express what mean” is a conventional way of saying the unsayable. Such utterances had no meaning if we didn’t experience the frustrated aspiration of saying something unsayable every now and then.
Why does this matter, though? You might say that it only matters for philosophy of language nerds. What does disambiguating intentions do for the rest of us, then? First, it can help us understanding (the frustrations of) communication a bit better. The swinging back and forth between aspiring to access the inaccessible and settling for understanding conventions is clearly at work when we aspire and fail to say something. Someone responds to us by saying “oh, do you really mean that?” and we realise that we missed the appropriate convention. We’re misunderstood and we know that we failed to express ourselves properly. But if communication and understanding content were exhausted by getting conventions, we could not make sense of such failures.
Let me close with two examples: Especially online communication on social media is full of such frustrations. Here, things get messy precisely because conventions are unstable. The quick pace of the turn-taking between interlocutors follows the conventions of spoken language, but the fact that it’s written suggests the conventions of writing. Often when interlocutors accuse each other for misconstruing their Tweets, what in fact happens is that one of them applies conventions conforming to the casual nature of spoken language, while the other one construes the exchange by the more robust conventions of writing. Naturally, the aspirations related to written communication are much stronger, enabling way more depth, than the quickness of spoken exchange allows for. Try thinking through exchanges and their failings with these differences in mind, and miscommunications begin to appear in a new light. A second example is the eternal misconstrual of reading old texts as getting at the intention of the author. Working out these issues in more detail is currently beyond me, though.
Handling Ideas 