Abstract
Intention plays an essential role in interpreting all human actions, including literary ones. Farrell explains the distinctions among the levels of intention—communicative, artistic, and practical—embedded in works of literature, and how Wimsatt and Beardsley jumbled them together to create the “intentional fallacy.” Farrell distinguishes the stable meaning of a work from its variable impact. As Sperber and Wilson’s Relevance Theory suggests, language is more like a prompt than a code, its open texture demanding inferences on the part of the audience which can only proceed on the basis of authorial intention. Further implications emerge from discussions of Borges’ “Library of Babel,” Humpty Dumpty’s theory of meaning, the example of Sherlock Holmes’s missing pipe, and Stanley Fish’s “interpretive communities.”
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- 1.
Alexander Rosenberg, The Philosophy of Social Science, 3rd ed. (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2008), 31.
- 2.
For a long time philosophers largely derived the concept of intention from the way we make sense of other people’s speech and behavior, applying Davidsonian “principles of charity” or Daniel Dennett’s “intentional stance,” but in the last decade there has been a resurgence of interest in the direct, first-person experience of our own intentionality, which arguably does not require inference. See, for example, Uriah Kriegel, The Sources of Intentionality (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011).
- 3.
My example may suggest the Humean picture that desires provide the ends which reason, the “slave of the passions,” seeks to implement, but the account I have given does not necessarily exclude the Kantian view that beliefs may incite the desire that leads to action. See Allen Wood, Kant’s Ethical Thought (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 29.
- 4.
Daniel Paul Schreber, A Memoir of My Nervous Illness, trans. Ida MacAlpine and Richard A. Hunter (London: Wm. Dawson and Sons Ltd., 1955).
- 5.
The economist’s interpretive model for the behavior of corporate bodies and individuals, which renders beliefs and desires as “preferences” and “expectations,” does tend to assume that the agent is substantively rational, and it is vulnerable to skepticism on that account.
- 6.
In order to understand other people, we also have to assume that their beliefs correspond to a significant extent with our own. As Donald Davidson has argued, only against a background of largely shared beliefs can we make sense of behavior based on assumptions we do not See “On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme,” in Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), chapter 13.
- 7.
For example, P. M. Churchland, “Eliminative Materialism and the Propositional Attitudes,” Journal of Philosophy 78 (1981): 67–90.
- 8.
Graham T. Allison and Philip Zelikow, Essence of Decision: Explaining the Cuban Missile Crisis (New York: Longman, 1999). Along the same lines, Ronald Dworkin, in Law’s Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986), makes a powerful case that we can make sense of the way the law functions as an institution in a particular community only by endowing it with the integrity, the striving for coherence, that belongs to persons.
- 9.
See Michael Bratman, Intention, Plans, and Practical Reason (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987). Bratman would replace the focus on beliefs and desires with a more unified concept of planning. For a helpful synthesis in the context of aesthetics, see Paisley Livingston, Art and Intention: A Philosophical Study (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), chapter 1.
- 10.
Simon Baron-Cohen, Mindblindness: An Essay on Autism and Theory of Mind (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995).
- 11.
Kim Sterelny, Thought in a Hostile World: The Evolution of Human Cognition (Malden MA: Blackwell Publishers, 2003), chapter 11.
- 12.
See David Buller’s strictures on theory of mind in Adapting Minds: Evolutionary Psychology and the Persistent Quest for Human Nature (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), 190–95.
- 13.
Jorge Luis Borges, Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Writings, ed. Donald A. Yates and James E. Irby (New York: New Directions, 1962), 51.
- 14.
Stanley Cavell, Must We Mean What We Say? A Book of Essays (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1976), 227–28.
- 15.
M. M. Bakhtin, Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, trans. by Vern W. McGee, ed. by Caryl Emerson and Michail Holquist (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1986), 77.
- 16.
As Donald Davidson observes, the “structured hierarchy of intentions” embodied in a single sentence has often been overlooked in discussions of literary intentionality (176). See Truth, Language, and History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 176.
- 17.
Wimsatt, William and Monroe C. Beardsley, “The Intentional Fallacy,” in Virginia Jackson and Yopie Prins, eds., The Lyric Theory Reader: A Critical Anthology (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014), 201–10. It is worth remembering that, along with their attack on intentions, Wimsatt and Beardsley erected a second taboo, against the critical appeal to a work’s effect upon readers, which they labeled “The Affective Fallacy.” This taboo was also effective but has long been dispelled.
- 18.
C. S. Lewis and E. M. W. Tillyard, The Personal Heresy: A Controversy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1939).
- 19.
See Herbert E. Tucker, “Dramatic Monologue and the Overhearing of Lyric” (1985), in The Lyric Theory Reader, 144–56.
- 20.
T. S. Eliot attempts to counter this attitude in “The Three Voices of Poetry.” See Jackson and Prins, The Lyric Theory Reader, 192–200. This anthology provides rich sources and a running commentary on the lyricization and de-lyricization of poetry. Regarding the nature of the lyric speaker, see especially Jonathan Culler, “Lyric, History, and Genre” (2009), 63–76.
- 21.
W. H. Auden, The English Auden: Poems, Essays, and Dramatic Writings, 1927–1939, ed. Edward Mendelson (New York: Random House, 1977), 52.
- 22.
Edward Mendelson, Early Auden (Boston, MA: Faber and Faber, 1981), 82–83.
- 23.
Auden, The English Auden, 216–17.
- 24.
Theorists of language call the guessing about guessing I have been referring to “recursive mind-reading,” and if the Theory of Mind thesis is correct, we accomplish it so easily because, like the data-processing that makes vision possible, it occurs in a dedicated “module,” a part of the brain developed just for this purpose. The evolutionary bases of recursive mind reading and its developmental implications regarding the cognitive capacities of young children are still matters of dispute. For a recent discussion see Thom Scott-Phillips, Speaking Our Minds: Why Human Communication Is Different, and How Language Evolved to Make It Special (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), esp. 63–75.
- 25.
W. B. Yeats, Letters, ed. Allan Wade (New York, Macmillan, 1954), 840–41.
- 26.
Frank Cioffi, “Intention and Interpretation in Criticism,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, New Series 64 (1963–64): 90.
- 27.
Peter Bournedal, Speech and System (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 1997), 53.
- 28.
As John Shoptaw puts it speaking of poetry, the quintessential artistic gesture may not be fiat but stet, Let it stand. “Lyric Cryptography,” Poetics Today 21, no. 1 (Spring 2000): 224.
- 29.
For exemplary work of this kind see Leah Price, The Anthology and the Rise of the Novel: From Richardson to George Eliot (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); Virginia Walker Jackson, Dickinson’s Misery: A Lyric Theory of Reading (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005); and Michael C. Cohen, The Social Lives of Poems in Nineteenth-Century America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015).
- 30.
Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author,” in Image-Music-Text, trans. Stephen Heath (New York: Hill & Wang, 1977), 148. When using the word text in his writings, Barthes tends to oscillate strategically, referring at times to a peculiarly recent conception of writing as a repudiation of authorship and at other times to the general condition of literary language—language, that is, being used in an “intransitive” or “symbolic,” which I take to mean non-referential, mode. In this passage it seems clear that he is referring to literary language in general.
- 31.
Hirsch uses the terms meaning and significance, both of which can normally refer to the semantic content of an utterance or to the importance of what it conveys, making his distinction between them seem difficult and hard to remember. See Validity in Interpretation (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1967), 8–10. Impact is a broader term than signficance. It includes the effects that utterances, including works, may have on account of the information they convey, the fact that it has been conveyed, and the way it is conveyed. Hirsch’s version of the distinction has raised skepticism about whether it could be implemented in practice, a reaction I believe was prompted in part by his choice of terminology. The mere difficulty of separating other people’s meanings from our own reactions to those meanings, however, is somewhat beside the point, for as Hirsch himself observes, the fact that a practice is difficult and cannot be carried out with perfect certainty is not an objection to its value and importance (17). We make difficult distinctions between what is intentional and what isn’t every day; our legal and political systems are based on our ability to do so. Only in the context of literary reception, where the information content often matters less than its aesthetic impression, could the difference between meaning and impact seem difficult to discern.
- 32.
The double movement I have described, toward original meaning and away from original impact, is obviously quite different from the “fusion of horizons” described by Hans-Georg Gadamer as the goal of the hermeneutic process. For Gadamer, interpretation seeks not the author’s meaning but the truth of what he is saying, a truth guaranteed by tradition and by the nature of language itself, which, like Hegel’s Absolute Spirit, has an inherently speculative and therefore truth-relevant character. Ultimately there is only one horizon, that of the truth as sought by present understanding, since “understanding,” Gadamer says, “is, primarily, agreement”—as if one could not understand what one could not accept as true, a condition that would make even one’s own past errors unintelligible. Gadamer’s most fundamental mistake is to believe that we can assess the truth of a statement or a work before we can understand what it is saying, whereas, until we have done that, we have no idea under what conditions it would be true. Only when we know that can we experience the impact of its truth or falsity. See Truth and Method, second, revised edition, trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall (New York: Continuum, 1975), 180 and passim.
- 33.
As Michael J. Reddy has explained, our common way of talking about language implies that it is a conduit which we can put thoughts into and get them out of. See “The Conduit Metaphor—A Case of Frame Conflict in Our Language about Language,” in Andrew Ortony, Metaphor and Thought (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 284–324. On the limited value of the code model for linguistics see Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson, Relevance: Communication and Cognition, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 1995), 1–15.
- 34.
Sperber and Wilson, Relevance, 36.
- 35.
For a recent summary see Dan Sperber and Dierdre Wilson, Meaning and Relevance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), chapter 1. Relevance theory builds on Paul Grice’s account of conversational maxims, which is still a viable alternative and does not depend upon a modular conception of the mind. I have chosen the relevance model here because of its simplicity and because it seems to be more influential at this point. See Paul Grice, Studies in the Way of Words (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989).
- 36.
As Sperber and Wilson put it, “the rational way to go about interpreting an utterance, or any other ostensive stimulus, is to follow the path of least effort and stop at the first interpretation that satisfies one’s expectations of relevance.” Sperber and Wilson, Relevance, 272.
- 37.
Sperber and Wilson, Relevance, 51–52.
- 38.
Poetic effects are often of this kind. Sperber and Wilson, Meaning and Relevance, 118–22.
- 39.
For a lucid account of relevance theory in comparison with its alternatives see Betty J. Birner, Introduction to Pragmatics (Chichester, West Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013), chapters 2 and 3.
- 40.
Robyn Carston provides a detailed account in Thoughts and Utterances: The Pragmatics of Explicit Communication (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 2002), chapters 1 and 2.
- 41.
For a similar example see Seana Coulson, Semantic Leaps: Frame-Shifting and Conceptual Blending in Meaning Construction (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 161.
- 42.
Sperber and Wilson, Relevance, 188.
- 43.
Coulson, Semantic Leaps, 28.
- 44.
I am unable to provide the source of this example.
- 45.
Fredric Jameson, The Prison-House of Language: A Critical Account of Structuralism and Russian Formalism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1972), 211–14.
- 46.
This point of view has been developed in great depth by Donald Davidson. For a late synthesis see the essays in Subjective, Intersubjective, Objective (New York: Oxford, 2001).
- 47.
Stephen C. Levinson, Review of Relevance: Communication and Cognition by Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986), in Journal of Linguistics 25, no. 2 (September 1989): 464.
- 48.
Donald Davidson, “A Nice Derangement of Epitaphs” (1986), in Truth, Language, and History, 89–108.
- 49.
Sperber and Wilson, Meaning and Relevance, chapters 4–6.
- 50.
Sperber and Wilson, Meaning and Relevance, 84–85.
- 51.
Though one can disagree about the implications, the virtual ubiquity of metaphor in our use of language has been amply demonstrated by Lakoff and Johnson and many others following in their wake. See George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), and especially Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner, The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending and the Mind’s Hidden Complexities (New York: Basic Books, 2002). Relevance theory would tend to undermine the sense that metaphor determines thought in the way some of these authors claim.
- 52.
Thomas H. Johnson, ed., The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson (Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1960), 118–19.
- 53.
Helen Vendler, Dickinson: Selected Poems and Commentaries (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), 128.
- 54.
Sperber and Wilson, Relevance, 217
- 55.
Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice: An Annotated Edition, ed. Patricia Meyer Spacks (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), 29.
- 56.
Austen, Pride and Prejudice, 389.
- 57.
Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina: A Novel in Eight Parts, trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (New York: Viking, 2001), 1.
- 58.
Cf., for instance, Alan H. Goldman, Aesthetic Value (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1995), chapter 4.
- 59.
See the discussion in Bernard M. W. Knox, The Heroic Temper: Studies in Sophoclean Tragedy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966), 104–06.
- 60.
For Fish’s most virtuosic performance see “Normal Circumstances and Other Special Cases,” in Is There a Text in This Class? The Authority of Interpretive Communities (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980), chapter 11.
- 61.
The student’s reported gloss on her own words is “in this class do we believe in poems and things, or is it just us?” Fish, Is There a Text, 305.
- 62.
Fish, Is There a Text, chapter 15.
- 63.
For a striking illustration, see the essays collected in the Norton Critical edition of Oedipus Tyrannus, trans. and ed. by Luci Berkowitz and Theodore F. Brunner (New York: Norton, 1970).
- 64.
E. R. Dodds, “On Misunderstanding the Oedipus Rex,” in Berkowitz and Brunner, eds., Oedipus Tyrannus, 218–29, rptd. from Greece and Rome 13 (1966), 37–49.
- 65.
Peter Allt and Russell K. Alspach, The Variorum Edition of the Poems of W. B. Yeats (New York: Macmillan, 1957), 150–51.
- 66.
In the introduction to Is There A Text in This Class? Fish describes the process by which, in the course of his career, he has shifted the locus of meaning from the authorless text of the New Critics to the activities of the reader, and then to the all-subsuming interpretive community. More recently, having done his best to make sense of the alternatives, Fish has taken what I hope will be the final step of returning to intentionalism, though in doing so he insists that intentionalism is uninstructive because it doesn’t tell you whose intention is at stake or how to find it—as if the author of Surprised by Sin and How Milton Works leaves us in any doubt about whose intentions govern in Paradise Lost, where, according to his account, the “epic voice” of Milton harasses, shames, surprises, tempts, and above all educates his fallen reader with an astonishing battery of manipulative techniques. See the introduction to Versions of Antihumanism: Milton and Others (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 5–6.
- 67.
Coulson, Semantic Leaps, 27.
- 68.
Paul de Man makes the remarkable claim that Cratylic thinking is fundamental to aesthetics and to the reliability of language in general and that the absence of Cratylic correspondence between sign and thing gives language “considerable freedom from referential restraint, but…makes it epistemologically highly suspect and volatile, since its use can no longer be said to be determined by considerations of truth and falsehood, good and evil, beauty and ugliness, or pleasure and pain.” I can think of no one who has attributed more importance to the way individual words look and sound or who makes all cognitive, aesthetic, and ethical claims depend upon it. See The Resistance to Theory (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 10.
- 69.
Fauconnier and Turner, The Way We Think, 277.
- 70.
Stanislas Dehaene, Reading in the Brain: The Science and Evolution of a Human Invention (New York: Viking, 2009), 113. Ellipsis in the original.
- 71.
Yuri Lotman, The Structure of the Artistic Text (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1977), 55.
- 72.
Allt and Alspach, The Variorum Yeats, 441.
- 73.
There is no end to the subtlety of the distinctions artists can count on readers to make. Readers of Browning’s poem “Porphyria’s Lover,” for example, grasp that the character is mad and that he is an eminently unreliable narrator, but this judgment is based upon details we accept from him as accurate. How do we know what we can trust and what we can’t? Why shouldn’t we take the speaker for a prankster who is pulling our leg rather than for a madman narrating the enactment of his delusion?
- 74.
Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John MacQuarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper and Row, 1962), 191–95.
- 75.
Laurence Dreyfus, Wagner and the Erotic Impulse (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012), 117.
- 76.
For a reconstruction of Freud’s bio-historical account of human development, see John Farrell, Freud’s Paranoid Quest: Psychoanalysis and Modern Suspicion (New York: New York University Press, 1996), chapter 1.
- 77.
Through the Looking-Glass, in Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland, ed. Donald J. Gray, 3rd ed. (New York: Norton Critical Editions, 2013), 113–14.
- 78.
Patricia Meyer Spacks, “Logic and Language in Through the Looking-Glass,” in Robert Phillips, ed., Aspects of Alice: Lewis Carroll’s Dream Child as Seen Though the Critics’ Looking-Glasses, 1865–1971 (New York: The Vanguard Press, 1971), 274.
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Farrell, J. (2017). Actions, Intentions, Authors, Works. In: The Varieties of Authorial Intention. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-48977-3_2
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