 These suggestive distinctions led Alston to believe that the meaning of a sentence is the sentence’s total speech act potential, its potential for performing all of the various speech acts it could be used to perform. In effect, this is to take the slogan “Meaning is use” very seriously, and to cash in “use” in terms of the performance of speech acts. Sentence meaning is primary on this theory, and word meaning secondary and derivative, since it’s defined in terms of a word’s contribution to the speech act potential of the sentences into which it can figure. Beardsley thought this theory correct and used it to argue that the intentional fallacy is indeed a fallacy.