Abstract: This essay briefly restates the view, which locates the meaning of a literary text not in what its author intended it to mean (what one can call ‘utterer's meaning’), nor in what the text might be said to mean as a piece of language in the abstract (what one can call ‘textual meaning’), but roughly in what an appropriate audience would most reasonably hypothesize the contextually situated author to have meant by composing precisely the text that he or she did (what one can call ‘utterance meaning’). It then considers a fair number of objections to the view in the literature and attempts to respond to them.

Keywords: utterer's meaning, textual meaning, literary text,