The intentional model in interpretation

Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism

Volumn 63, Issue 3, 2005, Pages 271-281

  Kiefer, Alex ^a  

^a TEMPLE UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 34249433536     PISSN: 00218529     EISSN: 15406245     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/j.0021-8529.2005.00207.x     Document Type: Review

References (19)

1. Robert Stecker, Interpretation and Construction: Art, Speech, and the Law (Blackwell, 2003)
2. Stecker, Interpretation and Construction, ch. 1
3. See Ludwig Wittgenstein's oft-quoted Philosophical Investigations, § 510: "Make the following experiment: say 'It's cold here' and mean 'It's warm here.' Can you do it?" Perhaps, but as Wittgenstein would say, further "stage-setting" is required
4. This phrase, 'the work in isolation,' is of course not uncontroversial. Whatever conclusions one draws from my use of it here, I do not mean to endorse any doctrine of the "autonomy of the work." I believe there are very interesting things to say about the relation between artworks and their broad contexts, which will be at least touched on in Sections II and III below
5. Stecker, Interpretation and Construction, pp. 70-71, n. 14
6. Stecker briefly discusses this notion on pp. 14-16, Interpretation and Construction
7. This is much like Arthur Danto's point about the "aboutness" of art - namely, that all artworks have to have it (even in the hypothetical case of a painting about nothing, which would turn out to be about something called "nothing"). See Arthur C. Danto, "Art and Meaning," in Theories of Art Today, ed. Noël Carroll (University of Wisconsin Press, 2000)
8. Monroe Beardsley discusses such an example in his "The Authority of the Text," in Intention and Interpretation, ed. Gary Iseminger (Temple University Press, 1992), p. 26. His argument is meant to show that not every meaningful element of a text need be tied to an author's explicit intention (even if some of these intentions are allowed to be "unconscious"). I agree with this point and I think Stecker would as well. My point is that not only parts of works but works as a whole can be brought about without a guiding intention
9. G. E. M Anscombe, Intention (Harvard University Press, 1957), particularly sections 5 and 6
10. The artists concerned in fact suggest such an interpretation in their writings on the subject. Even so, the object itself, and not some communicatively modeled intentional determination of its properties on the artist's part, elicits the response (even if the object looks the way it does because of the artist's intentions in the indirect way discussed above)
11. Stecker is referring to Daniel O. Nathan's essay "Irony, Metaphor, and the Problem of Intention," in Intention and Interpretation
12. The problem with this view, according to Stecker, is that it gets the utterance meaning wrong: we would have to conclude that a work does not mean p in cases where it seems unlikely that an author would intend p, even though the work does mean p for "conventional reasons" (Stecker, p. 44). The advantage of the second version is that it does identify utterance meaning (in Stecker's sense), but unfortunately the meaning it identifies will often be absurd. Since I intend to reject the intentional model in general and the utterance model in particular for art interpretation, I will not spend time here sorting out the implications of this example for various positions
13. This paradox has been discussed in one form or another by several authors: for instance, by Stephen Davies, "Relativism in Interpretation," The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 53 (1995): 8-13
14. Joseph Margolis, "Robust Relativism," The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 35 (1976): 37-46
15. and Robert Stecker, "The Constructivist's Dilemma," The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 55 (1997): 43-52
16. See Beardsley, "The Authority of the Text"
17. and Davies, "Relativism in Interpretation," p. 8
18. This view has much in common with one suggested by Joseph Margolis in "Robust Relativism."
19. Joseph Margolis, "The Deviant Ontology of Artworks," in Theories of Art Today