Moderate Actual Intentionalism Defended

Abstract

based works have the same sort of meaning as other linguistic utterances and reference to the actual intentions of a work's creator plays an ineliminable role in specifying what that meaning is. Moderate intentionalists disagree among themselves about the exact role of intention. This article will defend a version of moderate intentionalism, which I call the unified view, from two types of criticism: criticism directed specifically at this view and criticism directed more broadly to the whole approach. Before looking at these criticisms, I set out what the unified view asserts.2 In making a linguistic utterance, a speaker or writer says or does something by using language. The meaning of an utterance is roughly what she or he says or does. To get a more precise account of utterance meaning, one should explain how one fixes what utterances say (when they do say something) and which doings should count as contributing to utterance meaning and which should not. For example, one of the things William Blake did, when he wrote the phrase dark satanic mills, was to make possible an anachronistic interpretation of these words as making reference to industrial factories. But that is no part of Blake's utterance meaning. My more precise account asserts that the meaning of an utterance is the meaning successfully intended by an utterer, or, if the utterer's intention is not successful, the meaning is determined by convention and context at the time of utt rance. Furthermore, an utterer successfully intends a meaning X just in case the utterer intends X, the utterer intends that the audience will grasp this in virtue of the conventional meaning of the utterer's words or an extension of the meaning permitted by those conventions, and the first intention is graspable in virtue of those conventions or permitted extensions of them (uptake condition). Regardless of whether this is correct in all its details, one thing should be fairly clear: since we intend to say or do things in making utterances, whenever those intentions are successful, that is, whenever one succeeds in saying or doing what one intends to say or do, intended meaning and utterance meaning coincide. This is no accident. Since sentences typically are uttered in order to communicate an intended meaning, and since we usually succeed in communicating, a plausible default assumption is that utterance meaning is intended meaning. But that is not to say that utterance meaning is always intended meaning.3 Regarding the interpretation of utterances, I will make a few quick points. First, very often, conversational utterances need no interpretation because their meaning is plain. (This can sometimes be true of other kinds of utterances as well.) Second, when conversational utterances do need interpretation, we usually aim to identify utterance (as well as utterer's) meaning. Interpretations that aim at identifying utterance meaning are correct and incorrect. Finally, correct interpretations identify what utterances actually say or do, not merely what they could say or do, or what would make those utterances especially significant to somebody, though we may be interested in such special significance as well. What is the notion of artwork meaning derived from utterance meaning? In the case of literary