Although Dascal (1987) agrees with my essential point that literal meaning should not be equated with compositional meaning, he alleges that the concept of literal meaning can be profitably redefined as the conventional interpretation for a sentence. Contrary to my earlier position, Dascal states that with this revised definition of literal meaning one can easily see that some analysis of literal meaning plays a role, no matter how minor, in guiding understanders to the contextually appropriate interpretations of speakers' messages. There are important implications for the resolution of the literal meaning debate. Virtually all theories of meaning in philosophy, linguistics, psychology, literary theory, and AI presuppose some, mostly implicit, view of what's literal and what's not. In this response to Dascal, I attempt to clarify and extend my discussion of literal meaning and its purported role in understanding language. My position will be that literal meaning, whether viewed as compositional or as conventional meaning, is not an obligatory stage of analysis in psychological process models of language comprehension. People may phenomenologically identify some meanings as literal ones, but these are products of understanding and do not imply that different cognitive mechanisms drive the comprehension of literal and figurative discourse. (Raymond Gibbs)