I have argued that although the facts motivating TOMI are probably true, the objection does not undermine the value of intentionalism. Intentionalists provide idealized models of a sort similar to special case and minimal models in other disciplines. These models are strictly
speaking false, but purposefully so. Their validity is determined by their usefulness, not their truth. I have aimed to show how intentionalist models of communication are useful, but the strongest evidence of their utility is their persistent ubiquity in research on linguistic communication.
Treating intentionalism as a modeling strategy is successful where other responses to TOMI fail for a number of reasons. It does not require us to place risky empirical bets that future
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experiment will overthrow widely-accepted counterexamples to theory of mind use in linguistic communication. Nor does it have to give up on the scope of intentionalism, since intentionalist models can be useful across all the domains intentionalists work on. Moreover, it accomplishes all this without being overly reductive. In treating intentionalism as a modeling strategy we do not take something as complex as linguistic meaning and reduce it to a single factor. Instead, we provide a tool for exploring one aspect of human communication; a tool, for that matter, which works well in conjunction with our other tools.
Perhaps the most important virtue of my response to the empirical objection is that it captures what intentionalists actually seem to be doing. They abstract and idealize away from some features and instances of linguistic cognition to focus on particularly illuminating factors and cases, and they refine the resulting models, combine them with other models, use them to guide experimental design—all key features of model-driven science. My account is even in the spirit of Grice. Recall that in Aspects he sees himself as creating idealized models, so in construing intentionalism as creating idealized models we not only save it from the strongest objection against it, but we recover those Gricean insights.
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