 The second reason why the conclusion that, strictly speaking, there’s no intentional fallacy is of limited import is in effect pointed out by Beardsley. The notion of speaker meaning—a speaker’s intention that ‘S’ mean m in his utterance of ‘S’—is parasitic on that of a convention, and thus on sentence meaning. In intending what he does, that is, in intending that his sentence mean m, and not n, o, or p, a speaker is perforce trying to conform to what he takes to be a pre-existing convention. If he doesn’t take there to be such a convention, he needs to stipulate one—which itself involves invoking pre-existing conventions. If he doesn’t do that and doesn’t try to conform to a pre-existing convention, there’s no reason to think that he’s trying to communicate, to utter a sentence with a determinate meaning, or to perform any speech act at all. In other words, without the assumption of a pre-existing convention, there’s no content to the notion of an intention to mean anything at all, much less to mean m. Even if a speaker’s intention is criterial in determining conventions and sentence meaning, conventions have to be conceptualized as relatively independent of the speaker, as logically prior to speaker meaning, and as a constraint on speaker meaning.