Moderate actual intentionalism defended

Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism

Volumn 64, Issue 4, 2006, Pages 429-438

  Stecker, Robert ^a  

^a CENTRAL MICHIGAN UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 61049106933     PISSN: 00218529     EISSN: 15406245     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/j.1540-594X.2006.00221.x     Document Type: Review

References (29)

1. Gregory Currie, Arts and Minds (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), p. 132.
2. I have developed this view in a series of books and papers: "Art Interpretation," The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 52 (1994): 193-206;
3. Artworks: Definition, Meaning, Value (Penn State University Press, 1997);
4. Interpretation and Construction: Art, Speech and the Law (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003);
5. Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art: An Introduction (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2005), pp. 127-142. These works also consider a variety of objections to both the unified view in particular and moderate intentionalism in general. Some of these are reconsidered here; others are not.
6. Alex Kiefer misconstrues my view when he asserts that "Stecker's goal is to support a version of actual intentionalism, according to which an artist's work means just what the artist intended it to mean." In fact, without noticing it, he attributes to me a pair of inconsistent claims, since he immediately goes on to say: "His view is, roughly, that the meaning of a work should be understood along the lines of utterance meaning in ordinary conversation." This entails the inconsistency since utterance meanings can diverge from intended meanings, as Kiefer goes on to explain. Hence no one should have the goal mentioned in the first of the two quoted sentences, while holding the view stated in the second. See Alex Kiefer, "The Intentional Model of Interpretation," The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 63 (2005): 271-281.
7. David Davies argues that utterance meaning, as I set it out, can be reduced to "contextualized conventional meaning" in his review of Interpretation and Construction in The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 62 (2004): 291-293.
8. Noël Carroll, "Interpretation and Intention," Metaphilosophy 31 (2000): 75-95, example on p. 80.
9. Daniel Nathan suggests that a disambiguating intention cannot make an ambiguous "text" unambiguous. "Art, Meaning and Artist's Meaning," in Contemporary Debates in Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art, ed. Matthew Kieran (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), p. 291.
10. This is true, but the object of interpretation is not a sentence or a text, but an utterance or work. See Currie, Arts and Minds, pp. 9-27. I doubt that anyone believes that an utterance of "Mary doesn't have a heart" means all the possible senses of the quoted sentence. For the intention to disambiguate, there must be the possibility of uptake.
11. James Joyce, "The Dead," in The Dead, ed. D. R. Schwarz (New York: St. Martins Press, 1994), p. 48.
12. My point about Blake is found in Interpretation and Construction, p. 47. Kiefer's response is found in "The Intentional Model of Interpretation," p. 272.
13. Kiefer, "The Intentional Model of Interpretation," p. 272.
14. This version of the objection is found in Saam Trivedi, "An Epistemic Dilemma for Actual Intentionalism," The British Journal of Aesthetics 41 (2001): 192-206.
15. I offer a more elaborate reply in Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art, pp. 135-137.
16. Peter Lamarque, "Appreciation and Literary Interpretation," in Is There a Single Right Interpretation? ed. Michael Krausz (Penn State University Press, 2002), pp. 285-306,
17. and Stein Haugom Olsen, "The Meaning of a Literary Work" New Literary History 14 (1982): 13-32, make similar points.
18. Both quotations are from Lamarque, "Appreciation and Literary Interpretation," p. 299.
19. See Olsen, "The Meaning of a Literary Work";
20. Peter Lamarque and Stein Haugom Olsen, Truth, Fiction and Literature (Oxford University Press, 1994).
21. Robert Alan Donovan, "The Two Heroines of Moll Flanders," in The Shaping Vision: Imagination in the English Novel from Defoe to Dickens (Cornell University Press, 1966). I borrow the example from Lamarque.
22. For further discussion of the epistemic problem of identifying intentions in and out of literary works, see my Artworks, p. 179
23. and Interpretation and Construction, pp. 22, 33.
24. Value maximizers about art interpretation include Stephen Davies, "The Relevance of Painters and Writers Intentions," The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 41 (1982): 65-76;
25. Alan Goldman, "Interpreting Art and Literature," The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 48 (1990): 205-214;
26. Peter Lamarque, "Appreciation and Literary Interpretation." For a critique of arguments in favor of value maximization as the unique central aim of art interpretation
27. Jerrold Levinson, The Pleasures of Aesthetics (Cornell University Press, 1996), pp. 175-213;
28. William Tolhurst, "On What a Text is and How it Means" The British Journal of Aesthetics 19 (1979): 3-14.
29. Stecker, Artworks, pp. 188-205,