 This pattern of justifications also yields an explanation. The justifications explain by showing that meaning and response are instances of people’s capacity to act rationally. Such instances include actions one engaged in without prior reasoning, and which one would have also engaged in if one had reasoned about whether to do so prior to acting. The appeal to such counterfactuals is explanatory to the extent that speakers and audiences meet this condition: for a wide range of cases of speaker meaning, speakers reliably make utterances and audiences reliably respond without reasoning in (more or less) ways they would have if they had reasoned with sufficient time, insight, and attention. Thus, the Gricean theory of meaning does explain meaning as a rational activity. Grice’s treatment of conversational implicature also illustrates the breadth and power of this approach. Our demi-god example ignored this connection between explanation and justification.