In literary theory and aesthetics, authorial intent is an author's intent as it is encoded in their work. Authorial intentionalism is the hermeneutical view that an author's intentions should constrain the ways in which a text is properly interpreted.A. Huddleston, "The Conversation Argument for Actual Intentionalism", British Journal of Aesthetics 52(3):241–256 (2012). Opponents, who dispute its hermeneutical importance, label this position the intentional fallacy and count it among the informal fallacies.
There are two types of intentionalism: Actual Intentionalism and Hypothetical Intentionalism. Actual Intentionalism is the standard intentionalist view that the meaning of a work is dependent on authorial intent. Hypothetical Intentionalism is a more recent view; it views the meaning of a work as being what an ideal reader would hypothesize the writer's intent to have been—for hypothetical intentionalism, it is ultimately the hypothesis of the reader, not the truth, that matters.
Types of actual intentionalism
Extreme intentionalism Extreme intentionalism, the classic and most substantial form of intentionalism, holds that the meaning of a text is determined solely by the author's intent when they create that work. As C.S. Lewis wrote in his book An Experiment in Criticism, "The first demand any work of art makes upon us is surrender. Look. Listen. Receive. Get yourself out of the way." This position acknowledges that such can apply only when what the author intends to convey can actually be conveyed by the language that they use. If an author uses words that cannot, by any reasonable interpretation, possibly mean what they intend, then the work is simply random noise and meaningless nonsense.
A prominent proponent of this view is E.D. Hirsch, who in his influential book Validity in Interpretation (1967) argues for "the sensible belief that a text means what its author meant". Hirsch contends that the meaning of a text is an ideal entity that exists in the author's mind, and the task of interpretation is to reconstruct and represent that intended meaning as accurately as possible. Hirsch proposes utilizing sources like the author's other writings, biographical information, and the historical/cultural context to discern the author's intentions. Hirsch notes a fundamental distinction between the meaning of a text, which does not change over time, and the significance of the text, which does change over time.
Extreme intentionalism holds that authorial intention is the only way to determine the true meaning even in the face of claims that "the author often does not know what he means". Hirsch answers said objection by distinguishing authorial intent from subject matter. Hirsch argues that when a reader claims to understand an author's meaning better than the author themselves, what is really happening is that a reader understands the subject matter better than the author; so the reader might more articulately explain the author's meaning—but what the author intended is still the meaning of the text they wrote. Hirsch further addresses the related claim that authors may have unconscious meanings come out in their creative processes by using various arguments to assert that such subconscious processes are still part of the author, and so part of the author's intent and meaning, for "How can an author mean something he did not mean?"
Kathleen Stock's book Only Imagine: Fiction, Interpretation, and Imagination (2017) takes an extreme intentionalist stance specific to fictional works. She argues that for fictional content to exist in a text, the author must have intended the reader to imagine that content. The reader recognizes this authorial intention and uses it as a constraint on what is properly imagined from the text.
Weak intentionalism Weak intentionalism (also called moderate intentionalism) takes a more moderate stance and incorporates some insights from reader-response; it acknowledges the importance of authorial intent while also allowing for meanings derived from readers' interpretations. As articulated by Mark Bevir in The Logic of the History of Ideas (1999), weak intentionalists see meanings as necessarily intentional, but the relevant intentions can come from either authors or readers.
Bevir argues that texts do not contain intrinsic meanings separable from the minds interpreting them. Meaning arises from the intentions of the person engaging with the text—whether that is the author producing it or a reader consuming it. However, Bevir privileges the author's intentions as the starting point for interpretation, which then opens up a space for negotiating meanings with readers' perspectives.
Other proponents of weak intentionalism include P.D. Juhl in Interpretation: An Essay in the Philosophy of Literary Criticism (1980). Juhl contends that while authorial intentions provide the central guiding principle, interpretations can legitimately go beyond those original intentions based on the text's public meaning and critics' insights.
Cambridge School conventionalism
The Cambridge School of conventionalist hermeneutics, a position most elaborated by Quentin Skinner, might be aligned as somewhat similar to weak intentionalism. Central to Cambridge School conventionalism is the idea that to understand what a text means, one must understand the context in which a text was written; this includes political, social, linguistic, historical, and even economic contexts that would influence how a text was intended and received. While not dismissing the role of authorial intent, the Cambridge School heavily emphasizes examining how the text interacted with—and responded to—its particular contextual situation. The Cambridge School believes that meaning emerges from scrutinizing the complex interplay between the words on the page and the contextual factors surrounding its creation.
One of the Cambridge School's distinguishing ideas is the concept of "speech acts". Drawing on the philosophy of language, particularly the work of J.L. Austin and John Searle, the Cambridge School argues that language not only communicates information but also performs actions. For instance: when a politician declares war, they are not merely stating a fact, they are also performing an action through their speech.
Similarly, when a betrothed couple say "I do" they are not merely reporting their internal states of mind, they are performing an action—namely, to get married. The intended force of "I do" in such a circumstance can only be comprehended by an observer when they understand the meaning and complexity of the social activity of marriage. Thus, according to the Cambridge School, to understand a text, a reader must understand the linguistic and social conventions that would have been operative at the time the text was produced.
Since speech-acts are always legible—because they are done by the speech/text itself—the Cambridge School presupposes no knowledge about the author's mental state. For Cambridge School conventionalists, the task is: to, with as much contextual information as possible, establish which conventions a text was interacting with at the time of its creation; from there, the author's intent may be inferred and understood.
Mark Bevir, while praising some aspects of the Cambridge School, criticizes it for taking the importance of context too far. He acknowledges context as highly useful and a good heuristic maxim, but not as strictly necessary for understanding a text.
Objections to actual intentionalism Intentionalism is opposed by various schools of literary theory that may generally be grouped under the heading of anti-intentionalism. Anti-intentionalism maintains that a work's meaning is entirely determined by linguistic and literary conventions and rejects the relevance of authorial intent.
Anti-intentionalism began with the work of William K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley when they coauthored the seminal paper The Intentional Fallacy in 1946. In it, they argued that once a work was published, it had an objective status; its meanings belonged to, and were governed by, the reading public. The work existed as a stand-alone object not dependent upon authorial intent. The problem with authorial intent was that it required private knowledge about the author; to know what the author intended, a reader would have to learn contextual knowledge that existed outside of the work. Such outside knowledge might be interesting for historians, but it is irrelevant when judging the work for itself.
One of the most famous critiques of intentionalism was the 1967 essay The Death of the Author by Roland Barthes. In it, he argued that once a work was published, it became disconnected from the author's intentions and open to perpetual re-interpretation by successive readers across different contexts. He stated: "To give a text an Author is to impose a limit on that text, to furnish it with a final signified, to close the writing." For Barthes, and other post-structuralists like Jacques Derrida, the author's intentions were unknowable and irrelevant to the constantly shifting interpretations produced by readers.
Alternatives to actual intentionalism New Criticism
New Criticism, as espoused by Cleanth Brooks, W. K. Wimsatt, T. S. Eliot, and others, argued that authorial intent is irrelevant to understanding a work of literature; the objective meaning is to be found in the pure text itself. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley argue in their essay The Intentional Fallacy 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". Revised and republished in The author, they argue, cannot be reconstructed from a writing—the text is the primary source of meaning, and any details of the author's desires or life are secondary. Wimsatt and Beardsley argue that even details about the work's composition or the author's intended meaning and purpose that might be found in other documents such as journals or letters are "private or idiosyncratic; not a part of the work as a linguistic fact" and are thus secondary to the trained reader's rigorous engagement with the text itself.
Wimsatt and Beardsley divide the evidence used in making interpretations of poetry (although their analysis can be applied equally well to any type of art) into three categories:
Internal (or public) evidence Internal evidence refers to what is presented within a given work. This internal evidence includes strong familiarity with the conventions of language and literature: it "is discovered through the semantics and syntax of a poem, through our habitual knowledge of the language, through grammars, dictionaries, and all the literature which is the source of dictionaries, in general through all that makes a language and culture". Analyzing a work of art based on internal evidence will not result in the intentional fallacy.
External (or private) evidence What is not literally contained in the work itself is external to that work, including all private or public statements that the artist has made about the work of art, whether in conversations, letters, journals, or other sources. Evidence of this type is directly concerned with what the artist may have intended to do even or especially when it is not apparent from the work itself. Analyzing a work of art based on external evidence will likely result in the intentional fallacy.