Abstract
Abstract The expression ‘The Intentional Fallacy’ was coined by the literary critic William K. Wimsatt and the philosopher Monroe C. Beardsley in a jointly authored article with that title, published in 1946. A fallacy is an invalid mode of reasoning, and Wimsatt and Beardsley claimed that it is fallacious to base a critical judgement about the meaning or value of a literary work on ‘external evidence’ concerning the author’s intentions. In another paper, they described the fallacy as ‘a confusion between the poem and its origins, a special case of . . . the Genetic Fallacy’. Their own position, in contrast, held that ‘the design or intention of the author is neither available nor desirable as a standard for judging the success of a work of literary art’.
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