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  • Intentionalism in Aesthetics
  • Paisley Livingston (bio)

Intentionalism in aesthetics is, quite generally, the thesis that the artist’s or artists’ intentions have a decisive role in the creation of a work of art, and that knowledge of such intentions is a necessary component of at least some adequate interpretive and evaluative claims. 1 In this paper I develop and defend this thesis. I begin with a discussion of some anti-intentionalist arguments. Surveying a range of intentionalist responses to them, I briefly introduce and criticize a fictionalist version of intentionalism before moving on to an approach I call moderate intentionalism. I consider a salient alternative known as hypothetical intentionalism and try to show why moderate intentionalism should be preferred to it.

Saying what, precisely, intentions are is no small problem, and disputes in aesthetics often hinge on rival assumptions about the nature and function of intentions in general. I shall assume, in what follows, that intentions are mental states having semantic contents, various psychological functions, and practical consequences—but not always the targetted results. 2 I shall not take up any of the more global challenges to intentionalist psychology, such as eliminative materialism or macro-sociological and historicist critiques. 3 I assume, then, that agents sometimes intend to perform an action, such as writing a poem, and that they occasionally succeed in realizing such aims, thereby intentionally doing such things as writing poems.

I. Extreme Intentionalism and Anti-Intentionalism

In an extreme version, intentionalism holds that a work’s meanings and its maker’s intentions are logically equivalent. Such a thesis still has its defenders, yet it is hard to see how it can be reconciled with the fact that intentions are not always successfully realized. A theory of interpretation based on Humpty Dumpty’s semantics does not seem promising. 4 An extreme version of anti-intentionalism also has its advocates, who confront the intentionalist with the following dilemma: either the artist’s intentions are successfully realized in the text or structure produced by the artist, in which case the interpreter need not refer to them; or, the [End Page 831] artist’s intentions are not successfully realized, in which case reference to them is insufficient to justify a related claim about the work’s meanings. Any viable form of intentionalism must find a way out of this dilemma.

A premise of many anti-intentionalist arguments—including the dilemma just mentioned—is that if a work has determinate meanings and value, they must be immanent in the artistic text or structure. This sort of empiricism in aesthetics is vulnerable to some powerful criticisms. Not all of the artistically or aesthetically relevant features of a work of art are intrinsic properties of the text; some are relational and can only be known when the text or structure is cognized correctly in the context of its creation. In making this point, a number of philosophers, such as Arthur Danto, David Davies, Jerrold Levinson, and Gregory Currie, have evoked versions of Jorge Luis Borges’s fictional example of Pierre Menard: tokens of the same text-type, created in different contexts, manifest different, artistically relevant relational features; to know which features are those of one work as opposed to another work, one must interpret the text in its context of creation. 5

Once attention has been drawn to the constitutive status of a work’s relational properties, cogent responses to the anti-intentionalist dilemma can be formulated. The intentionalist can argue that some successfully realized intentions are not simply redundant with regard to the text’s intrinsic features. An example is the intention that a certain meaning be unstated in the text yet implicitly expressed by the work. Even when the intentions are successfully realized, such relations are not immanent in the final artistic structure or text and cannot be simply read off from the latter. Intentionalists also contend that whenever our goal is to evaluate a work as a certain kind of achievement, the artist’s intentions, including unsuccessfully executed ones, are always relevant, because part of what we want to do is take note of the manner and extent of the artist’s realization of the relevant aims. Although it is not...

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