This presumption constrains the audience s search for the speaker s communicative intention. Such an intention is goes unfulfilled if the audience fails to identify the right individual in the right way, that is, the one intended in the way intended. This is what happens in the above example. Now let us take up in order Reimer s other examples and consider how, in connection with the referential intention, the act of demonstration or other sources of salience help determine the referent. As we will see, in each case the speaker intends the audience to think of, by way of taking the speaker to be intending and expecting them to think of, a certain dog in a certain identifiable way.
Reference succeeds when the audience does think of the right dog in the right way.
The fulfillment of the referential intention requires that in the circumstances there actually be a unique way of thinking of a particular dog and that the dog thus thought of be the intended one. Pointing at what you have in mind may be necessary to bring it to your audience s attention and to put them in a position to take you to be intending this but often the intended referent is already an object of mutual attention. In the examples where there is no act of demonstration and a certain dog stands out by virtue of being the only one or the only distinctively conspicuous one, the speaker uses that dog with the intention of referring to the dog that thus stands out. In forming the intention to refer to a certain dog, the speaker exploits uniqueness or maximal salience, intending and expecting his audience to recognize his intention on that basis. In the examples where the act of demonstration singles out a certain dog, even when some other dog was antecedently the most salient, that dog becomes the salient one by virtue of being pointed at.