The intentional fallacy. What Is an Intentional Fallacy? 2022-10-25
The intentional fallacy
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The intentional fallacy is a concept in literary criticism that refers to the belief that the meaning or significance of a work of art can be determined by examining the artist's intention or motivation behind creating it. This concept was first introduced by W.K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley in their 1946 essay "The Intentional Fallacy," in which they argued that an artist's intention should not be used as a guide for interpreting a work of art.
According to Wimsatt and Beardsley, the intention of the artist is subjective and cannot be objectively verified. Therefore, using the artist's intention as a basis for interpreting a work of art is inherently flawed. Instead, they argued that the meaning of a work of art should be determined by examining the work itself and considering its formal elements, such as its structure, language, and symbols.
One of the main reasons that Wimsatt and Beardsley argued against using the artist's intention as a guide for interpretation is that it can be misleading. For example, an artist may have a specific intention in mind when creating a work of art, but the final product may be interpreted differently by different people. In this case, the artist's intention may not accurately reflect the meaning of the work as it is understood by others.
Furthermore, the intentional fallacy can also lead to a kind of "author worship," where the artist is seen as the ultimate authority on the meaning of their work. This can be problematic because it ignores the fact that the work of art exists independently of the artist and can be interpreted in various ways by different people.
Overall, the intentional fallacy highlights the importance of considering a work of art on its own terms, rather than relying on the artist's intention as a guide for interpretation. By examining the formal elements of a work and considering its cultural and historical context, we can arrive at a more nuanced understanding of its meaning and significance.
The Intentional Fallacy Is Not a Fallacy
But that's simply a matter of certain words in certain combinations meaning certain things and not other things. We must only interpret what we see in the moment of viewing the painting. If we read The Great Gatsby today and then again in twenty years, the words will still be the same, but we may judge it differently because of different life experiences. It is not really up to the performer to make changes "on the fly" in many pieces, but to follow the rules. The challenge is to always act in such ways that make it impossible to later feel: Darn, I wish I hadn't done that. The apparent content of a work is the internal evidence, including any historical knowledge and past expertise or experience with the kind of art being interpreted: its forms and traditions.
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11+ Intentional Fallacy Examples in Media, Real Life, Politics, News & Ads 2022
When people get huffy that the whole world hasn't adopted their subtle, apparently nonsensical redefinitions. Impressions and experiences which are important for the man may take no place in the poetry, and those which become important in the poetry may play quite a negligible part in the man, the personality. The core of the problem is, to return to "Against Theory" which here draws on Searle , "Intention cannot be added to or subtracted from meaning because meanings are always intentional; intention cannot be added to or subtracted from language because language consists of speech acts, which are also always intentional. No new news—wigs like helmets, like they do any good. Reginald already pointed this out.
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The Intentional Fallacy: Defending Myself on JSTOR
This bondage to probability would be true of any other goal of interpretation also. If a person is in authority over us, whether it be an army sergeant or God, our obligation is to obey his will. Yet the poem comes off. No, intent is inferred from the only valid source, the work itself. In the face of these complex stratifications and divisions I learn more when I encounter people speaking directly about the individual poems that spring out of them or the specific poems and specific poetic processes that beset them in their reading lives.
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The Intentional Fallacy and the Meaning of Textual Meaning
When I was much, much younger I had a friend who everyone called Tiny. A work of art should be judged on the realization of meaning. What is not actually contained in the work itself is external. We can tell that he intended this by reference to period usage, the context in which the passage occurs dead tree boughs are compared to the choirs , and so on. A work doesn't cease to mean something when its reader is a highly educated critic who may better understand intention, or when its reader is a layman not specifically interested in aesthetics or the interpretation of it.
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The intentional fallacy and affective fallacy : Thinking Literature by Shyam
You have said they do. In it, they counter the contemporary assumption that the original creator's intention for a work was equal to the meaning and merit of the work. You refuse to think through this logic, though if you would read carefully, you would see that it is spelled out in my last two posts. When we try to understand or appreciate a poem, is it necessary to go beyond "what does this mean? The really important question to pose to the intentionalist me is this: is it more fitting and helpful to define textual meaning as authorial intention and to make that the goal of interpretation, than it is to define meaning as how the speech community would construe the text according to publicly accepted linguistic norms and to make that the goal of interpretation? But it's a strange way to carry on an argument. Obviously my self, my feelings, my thoughts, and, yes, my intentions are part of the material that makes up those objects.
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The Intentional Fallacy, or Authorial Intent — The Writer's Scrap Bin
Analysis using this type of evidence can easily become more concerned with external evidence than the internal content of the work. It's not a matter of excavating irrelevant or inaccessible biographical information : it's rather a process of recapitulating, in the act of response, the intellectual and aesthetic choices which have been made : of getting into the "mind" of the work, recognizing the signals within the phenomena. Michael, Are you excluding the possibility of unconscious intentions in poetry? Beardsley in their book The Verbal Icon 1954. So I started talking back to her in poems like this one, poems that reveal memories of a kind of life that one only knows about if you lived it as Tiny and I to a lesser extent did. On the other hand, it may not be all this. Even contemporary documents, such as letters and journals, may be unreliable.
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On the Intentional Fallacy by Reginald Shepherd
The term "aesthetics," in this connection, is understood to include all studies of the arts and related types of experience from a philosophical, scientific, or other theoretical standpoint. Poetry succeeds because all or most of what is said or implied is relevant; what is irrelevant has been excluded, like 'lumps' from pudding and 'bugs' from machinery. Of course there is the difficulty of all these poets being dead, but we have so many great living poets, and I love hearing about their thought processes — I think there is a kind of reading that can happen in between an author and a text. Perhaps a function of academia's general disconnect from reality. Well, you and I know that the answer is obvious: Shakespeare's sonnets, like all poems, don't exist in a vacuum.
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The Intentional Fallacy by William K. Wimsatt
You agree that this is true for every form of language besides poetry, which is exactly the sort of misty-eyed vatic nonsense that leads to these discussions in the first place. Is the money always good? But if the poem is successful, they are just that: artistic material. Woman holding a book Some may also apply this philosophy to other works of art, not just literature. It contains, insofar as it is a work of art, the reason why it is thus and not otherwise. The poem has to stand or fall on its own merit—which is the one arena in which the text is all that matters, as the New Critics postulated.
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The Intentional Fallacy
If, on the other hand, a poem is subject to the rules of language, then the only thing it can mean is what it means according to those rules. Such writing is purposive, meant to achieve some goal—it is a means to an end. It is sad that you have now so lowered yourself. There is indeed something which sets the production of poetic meaning and effect apart from standard language usage. For a paraphrase is generally a poor substitute for any organized conception that one has fancied he has put into the more essentialized form of the poem itself. This "conversation" is over.
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