Retreat
I take back what said at the end of my last post about the need to distinguish two kinds of A-intension, one transparent and one intransparent. There's not really any need to do so, and it only leads to a lot of trouble. (For instance, is it a priori that elms satisfy the transparent intension, or the intransparent intension, or both, or neither?) I thought I needed a transparent conception to explicate some sort of speaker meaning and to account for rationality. Certainly, what we need for this is a conception of meanings that it in some sense 'transparent' or 'narrow', but that does not preclude it from making reference to unknown facts about other people or causal chains. For example, the belief that the actual F is not the actual G should not count as irrational (for suitable F and G) even if the actual F is (necessesary) the actual G. But 'F's and 'G's whose A-intension is full of causal and deferential components can nevertheless provide for that, as long as it isn't a priori that the F is the G.
Also, the distinction between 'transparent' and 'intransparent' is far from clear. A term T's A-intension comprises the conditions a thing must satisfy in order for it to be classified as T. These conditions can be conditions about the thing's composition, about its intrisic properties, its relations to other things, its relation to me, its distribution in the universe, and so on. Standing in a certain kind of causal chain to certain tokens of certain strings or passing whatever tests certain people would set up under certain conditions are just further such properties. Perhaps they are a bit more cambridge, but it is hard to see why that matters.
So don't I express two different beliefs with my utterance of "elms are beautiful" if I wrongly believe that elms are not ugly bushes? No. Well, counting beliefs is a difficult and useless business, but there is certainly one single set of worlds of which I think my utterance expresses that the actual world belongs to. It is a set of worlds where the relevant experts' tests for elmhood are passed by roughly the things I have in mind as elms, which are, at all these worlds, beautiful. What went wrong on the assumption that I misunderstand 'elm' is just that these worlds are not the A-intension conventionally associated with "elms are beautiful". There is a distinction here between speaker meaning and public meaning, but that's not a new one.