 What’s needed to decide whether there’s an intentional fallacy, whether (1) does or doesn’t provide criterial evidence for (2), is, more than anything else, a theory of meaning. A theory of meaning is a theory of what it is for w (some object, in the broad sense of the term) to mean p. Beardsley was always aware of the need for a theory of meaning, and in Aesthetics he proposed one, a complicated theory which he later rejected. A few years later, however, in his final paper on the topic, he embraced a speech-act theory based on the work of William Alston and used it to defend the intentional fallacy.