 The real debate about the intentional fallacy is, or at least should be, over whether (1) provides criterial evidence for (2). Beardsley argues against an entailment relation between the two, admits that there’s an inductive relation but relegates it to the category of indirect evidence, and thinks the job is done. The intentionalist typically wonders how the meaning of a work can be utterly divorced from the voice, the uttering or creating with an intended meaning, of the artist, and brings up hard cases to support the relevance of the artist’s intentions. But neither has focused the issue properly. Beardsley apparently takes direct evidence to be deductively adequate evidence or evidence gleaned from the object itself, and indirect evidence to be evidence based on empirical generalizations or gleaned from something other than the object itself. In neither sense is an artist’s intentions direct evidence of what his work means, and Beardsley is right that there’s an intentional fallacy. But if, as it should be, direct evidence is identified with criterial evidence, and indirect evidence with non-criterial but inductive evidence, Beardsley has failed to establish that there’s an intentional fallacy. On the other hand, the mere strong feeling of the intentionalist that the meaning of a work isn’t independent of the intentions of the artist who created it is no proof of anything, and the hard cases brought up in support of the relevance of the artist’s intentions—typically, cases that involve allusion, irony, or obscure passages—can almost always be explained or explained away, and not implausibly, by the anti-intentionalist. The mistake of Beardsley is to neglect a possibility and thus focus the issue wrongly. The mistake of the intentionalist is typically not to focus the issue with any degree of precision, and to rely on relatively vague but strongly held intuitions.