Szu-Yen Lin

A prominent trend in contemporary analytic philosophy of art is to construe literary works as utterances and interpret them accordingly. Actual intentionalists argue that a satisfactory theory of literary interpretation must address the constitutive question: what determines the meaning of a literary utterance? They claim that an author’s successfully realized intention constitutes such meaning and that major anti-intentionalist positions fail to provide a satisfactory alternative. Drawing on insights from the pragmatics of utterance interpretation, I advocate for an anti-intentionalist approach to literary interpretation that questions both the need for utterance meaning as a metaphysical posit and the pivotal role of authorial intention.

Modest actual intentionalism is a major position on interpretation in contemporary analytic aesthetics. The position consists of a disjunctive formulation according to which work-meaning is determined by the author’s intention when such intention succeeds or by non-intentionalistic factors when it fails. I challenge the disjunctive view by presenting a constructive dilemma, the conclusion being that modest actual intentionalism ends up either making non-intentionalistic factors idle or making authorial intent superfluous.