(..)There is no denying that we can describe utterers and audiences in this way. But should we really embrace this description as an explanation of meaning? To see the worry, imagine we are demigods. For our amusement, we create a race of creatures. We program language use into their brains. We ensure, for example, that, when an utterer produces the sounds “She brandished her clarinet like a tomahawk,” audiences believe that she did. To handle deceptive contexts, figurative language use, language instruction situations, telling jokes, and so on, we also build in heuristics that more or less reliably produce a different appropriate belief in such situations. When a creature utters a sentence and the audience forms the appropriate belief, the explanation is our programming, programming that operates entirely at a physiological level that is entirely inaccessible to consciousness. So, even if an audience reasons to a belief based on a recognition of relevant utterer's intentions, surely that reasoning is an epiphenomenon of limited explanatory interest. The worry is that we may be like the creatures we have imagined. There is extensive physiological and psychological evidence that our use of natural language is to be explained along the lines similar to the explanation in the case of our creatures.