The Intentional Fallacy: Defending Myself

Abstract

In “The Intentional Fallacy: Defending Beardsley,” George Dickie and Kent Wilson raise certain objections to my essay “Art, Intention, and Conversation.” In my essay, I attempted to defend the intentionalist interpretation of artworks. I offered a number of arguments against anti-intentionalism, a view that I take to hold that reference to artistic intentions and the biography of the artist are never relevant to the interpretation of the meaning of artworks. In a more positive vein, I also argued that interpretations of artworks should be constrained by our knowledge of the biography of the historical artist and our best hypotheses about the artist's actual intentions concerning the artworks in question. Thus, I maintain that authorial intentions and biographies are relevant to the interpretation of artworks. A number of my arguments, both positive and negative, depend upon a rough analogy with ordinary conversations. I rely on the claim that in such conversations we typically aim at understanding the intentions of our interlocutors. I further argue that I see no principled reasons to suppose that things stand differently with our “conversations” with artworks. Dickie and Wilson challenge this supposition by arguing that I have misconstrued the nature of ordinary conversations. Specifically, in their terminology, they maintain that typically in conversations we are concerned with understanding the meaning of the speaker's utterance and not the speaker's intended meaning. On their view, we are only concerned with the speaker's intended meaning in extraordinary cases where some puzzle arises about the speaker's intended meaning. But, in the main, we are not involved in making conjectures about the speaker's intended meaning.