How do hearers manage to understand speakers? And how do speakers manage to shape hearers' understanding? Lepore and Stone show that standard views about the workings of semantics and pragmatics are unsatisfactory. They offer a new account of language as a specifically social competence for making our ideas public. They argue that this approach is a good way to target the distinctive mechanisms and problems at play in explaining the human faculty of language. At the same time, this view embraces the diverse dimensions of meaning that linguists have discovered. This is the right way to delimit semantics.

"Lepore and Stone's articulation of direct intentionalism offers a strategy for combining into a unified theory both fundamental philosophical theories concerning the nature of intentions and cooperative activity and empirical theories in linguistics and cognitive science concerning the particular mechanism of natural languages. This is a significant accomplishment . . . I wholeheartedly recommend their book for anyone interested in the relationship between conventional meaning and cooperative rational action and the attendant issue of how to understand the relationship between pragmatics and semantics." - Lenny Clapp, Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews