 But the third consideration may come to the rescue here. Beardsley himself says that intentional text production is necessary for a text to have a meaning (an admission, incidentally, which goes against a number of things he wrote earlier in his career), and it’s a natural step from there to an author’s intention as criterial for textual meaning, indeed, as criterial for a conceptual correspondence between the two (intending to mean m, meaning m). In addition, even if it’s not a necessary truth that if ‘S’ means m, someone at some time intended that ‘S’ mean m in producing a token of ‘S’, the former is at least criterial for the latter.