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1 W.K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley, “The Intentional Fallacy,” Sewanee Re-
view 54 (1946): 468-488.
2 Monroe C. Beardsley, The Possibility of Criticism (Detroit: Wayne State Univer-
sity Press, 1970), p. 17.
3 The text, of course, is E.D. Hirsch, Validity in I n t e r p r e t a t i o n (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1967).
4 Discussions which presume that intentionalism is committed to the Identity
Thesis (or a comparably strong condition – see note 12, below) include: Steven
Knapp and Walter Benn Michaels, “Against Theory,” in Against T h e o r y , ed. W.J.T.
Mitchell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), pp. 11-30, Richard Shusterman,
“Interpretation, Intention, and Truth,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 46
(1988): 399-411, George Dickie and W. Kent Wilson, “The Intentional Fallacy: Defend-
ing Beardsley,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 53 (1995): 233-250, as well a s
their subsequent discussions of this essay (Wilson, “Confession of a Weak Anti-
Intentionalist: Exposing Myself” and Dickie, “Reply to Noël Carroll”) in Journal o f
Aesthetics and Art Criticism 55 (1997): 309-312.
1
2 TIMOTHY CHAMBERS D86
8 Dickie and Wilson, p. 237. The Antoine-example plays a recurring role in the
essay – cf. pp. 238, 244, and 245.
9 David Novitz, Knowledge, Fiction, and I m a g i n a t i o n (Philadelphia: Temple
University Press, 1987), p. 106.
10 George Dickie, “Reply to Noël Carroll,” p. 311.
4 TIMOTHY CHAMBERS D86
Now, had Tom initially intended to use the word, “weaned”? If not, then
we have a case of misspeaking (type (i)); if so, then we have a case of
malapropism (type (ii)).
(iii) Authorless Texts. What if there’s no author at all? “Some texts,”
Beardsley points out, “have been framed without the agency of an
author, and hence without authorial meaning, nevertheless have a mean-
ing and can be interpreted.” A poem composed by a computer p r o -
gram, for instance, “has meaning, but nothing was meant by anyone.”11
All of these examples trivially show that the Identity Thesis is false, ei-
ther because the author haphazardly misspoke, or the author was mis-
taken about how a word is conventionally used, or there’s no author in
the first place. But do these examples tell against literary intentionalism?
(b) Only if intentionalists in general (or perhaps Hirsch in particular)
commit themselves to the Identity Thesis (or some similarly sweeping
surrogate12). Beardsley purports to find such a commitment. “It is a task
for the historian of culture,” Hirsch writes (and Beardsley quotes), “to
explain why there has been…a heavy…assault on the sensible belief that
a text means what its author meant.”13 Fair enough; but a question re-
mains: does Hirsch take this identity to obtain categorically? Or does it
obtain only if certain preconditions are fulfilled? A more careful reading
reveals that the latter is what Hirsch presumes. “Verbal meaning,” h e
writes, explicitly defining the term, “is [(i)] whatever someone has willed
to convey by a particular sequence of linguistic signs and [(ii)] which can
be conveyed (shared) by means of those signs.”14 Moreover, note that
(iii) the claim, “this phrase verbally means such-and-such” bears norma-
tive force; it makes the strong claim that “this phrase ought to b e inter-
preted as meaning such-and-such.”15
such public unanimity would make a very strong case (in this particular in-
stance) for the practical irrelevance of the author’s intention.17
Again, the (Hirschean) intentionalist need not insist that Humpty-
Dumpty was correct: “when somebody does in fact use a particular
word sequence, his verbal meaning cannot be anything he might wish it
to be….the interpreter…is obliged to understand only those meanings
which ‘the public norms of language’ permit.”18 Hence Hirsch’s refer-
ence to linguistic norms as bearing, not a “determining,” but rather a
“codetermining influence” on a text’s verbal meaning.19
(iii) Does it follow from Hirsch’s principle that an authorless text
“can’t be interpreted,” or doesn’t have “a meaning,” in the sense of b e -
ing interpretable? The definition’s third tenet tells against such an im-
plausible corollary. To be sure, authorless texts lack verbal meaning; b u t
all that follows from this is that we won’t20 be in a position to say, “the
computer’s poem ought to be interpreted to mean such-and-such.” And
this, as one intentionalist has argued,21 is far from implausible.
It’s also worth seeing how the second and third tenets assist in dis-
patching another sweeping charge made against intentionalism. In gen-
eral, Hirsch tells us that one is entitled to say “the text ought to be read
this way” if and only if we can appeal to “a genuinely discriminating
norm;” that is, we can gauge our interpretive conjecture’s success with
respect to “a determinate object.”22 Now, suppose there are cases where
the author’s intention is unnecessary for achieving such determinacy;
consider a case where public norms of language, coupled perhaps with
context of utterance, narrow down the meanings that can be conveyed
by a given text to a single, unique, meaning-candidate. (These cases, b y
the intentionalist’s lights, are rare, especially in literary contexts.) In
those cases, the intentionalist is free to maintain that the “use of language
is,” as Hirsch himself says, “uniquely constitutive of meaning” – i.e., that
we ought to interpret the text in question in the single way convention-
23 Ibid., p. 28.
24 Dickie and Wilson, “Defending Beardsley,” p. 236 (emphasis added).
25 Ibid.