Intentions in Words Herman Cappelen Vassar College Philosophers take a great deal of interest in the study of meaning, reference, truth and other semantic properties, but remarkably little attention has been paid to the entities that have semantic properties. The view that’s typically taken for granted has two closely related components: ~1! There is a distinction between types and tokens. Types are abstract ob- jects, for instance patterns. Tokens are concrete particulars, for instance sounds or inscriptions. A particular is a token of a type, T, if and only if it stands in some appropriate relation to T. If T is taken to be a pattern, the relevant relation is the instantiation relation. ~2! The abstract entities that are sign types are semantically and syntacti- cally neutral objects. They have their semantic and syntactic properties contingently, through conventions. This is what David Kaplan in “Words” calls the Type-Token Model. He argues that it both fails to capture our ordinary ~ pre-theoretical! concept of a word and is detrimental to work in philosophy. As an alternative Kaplan presents what I’ll call an intentional theory of words. A theory of words is intentional if it says that it is a necessary or sufficient condition for something being a token a word that the producer of the token was in a certain intentional state at the production time ~intentionalist theories differ in how they describe the required intentional state!. I call the claim that this is a necessary condition the Necessity Thesis and that claim that it’s a sufficient condition the Sufficiency Thesis. In part One I outline Kaplan’s view and present counter-examples to it. Part Two argues that languages must have non-intentionally individuated word to- kens. I end with a brief outline of an alternative to both intentionalism and the Type-Token Model. The immediate target of the arguments below is Kaplan’s theory of words, but it’s important to keep in mind that a number of philosophers hold views similar NOÛS 33:1 ~1999! 92–102 © 1999 Blackwell Publishers Inc., 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA, and 108 Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 1JF, UK. 92