  How might I do this? One way is by making an inference to the best explanation. Perhaps the best explanation of my asking whether you can pass the salt is that I mean to be requesting that you do so, and perhaps the best explanation of my remarking that you are standing on my foot, particularly if I use a stentorian tone of voice, is that I mean to be demanding that you desist. By contrast, it is doubtful that the best explanation of my asking whether you intend to quit smoking is that I intend to suggest that you do so. Another explanation at least as plausible is my hope, or expression of hope, that you do so. Bertolet 1994 develops a more skeptical position than that suggested here, arguing that any alleged case of an indirect speech act can be construed just as an indication, by means of contextual clues, of the speaker’s intentional state—hope, desire, etc., as the case may be. Postulation of a further speech act beyond what has been (relatively) explicitly performed is, he contends, explanatorily unmotivated. McGowan et al. (2009) reply by offering three conditions they take to be sufficient for a case of what they term linguistic communication. They would also argue that in, for instance, the smoking case, the speaker meets those three conditions, and thus counts as suggesting that the addressee quit smoking. Bertolet (2017) replies that these three conditions are not sufficient for an instance of speaker meaning, and given that (as we have seen) speaker meaning is a necessary condition for (non-conventional) speech acts, concludes that McGowan et al. have not established that the cases that concern them are indirect speech acts.