 One ambition of relevance theory is to encourage us to see “poetic uses” of language, where an idea is very indirectly suggested by the words used, as less marginal than we would if we thought of the paradigm of communication as the case where an agent utters a sentence that means exactly what the speaker wishes to communicate. Relevance theorists say that such cases of literal meaning are rare or non-existent and do not constitute any kind of communicative ideal. They point to the widespread phenomenon of “weak implicature”: audiences draw a range of conclusions from an utterance, some of them obviously intended but others harder to identify as intended (Sperber &amp; Wilson 1995: 197–9). On this view the totality of what is meant, even in mundane cases, is never more than vaguely specifiable and would, if we bothered to investigate, be subject to the same unresolvable disputes as we find in poetic criticism. It need not be concluded that poetic discourse is entirely of a piece with over-the-garden-wall conversation; the relevance theorist’s point is that the differences are ones of degree and not of kind.