PRELIMINARIES

• Chapter about the role of context of origin in interpreting artworks and specifically the role of intentions of artists in interpreting art works
• Notice that Stecker is not exploring the view that the context of interpretation affects artwork meaning.
• Why would anyone think that meaning of the artwork is not specified by artist's intention?
• Ordinary people when interpreting artworks or when interpreting utterances (things people say) inquire into the intended meaning (what the artist or speaker meant)
• Suggests identifying intention of artist is a (the?) proper aim of interpretation
• Two extremes about role of intention
• Anti-intentionalists: reference to artist's intention irrelevant to interpretation of their works
• Intentionalists: meaning of works to be identified with artist's intentions
• Stecker rejects both


• For Stecker, at least three factors determining meaning of artwork (or utterance)
• 1. Artist's intention (if realized)
  • If the artist's/speaker's intention is not realized in the artwork/utterance, then it does not fix the meaning of the artwork/utterance
  • E.g., If I say "there is a fly in your suit" (when I mean, there is a fly in your soup), my intention is not realized by my utterance and the meaning of that utterance is not fixed by my intention (but rather by its conventional meaning?)
• 2. Conventional meaning of symbols (e.g., literal meaning of words)
• Sculpture of a hand with middle finger extended has a conventional meaning
• Urinals have certain connotations given what they are used for in our culture
• 3. Context of production
• If the above sculpture was in a store where rings are placed on fingers, that context could affect the meaning
  
• Three issues about art interpretation
• 1. Proper aim: what are interpretations of artworks trying to accomplish
• Aims single or plural?
  • Stecker thinks there are a plurality of legitimate aims
• Figure out their meaning? This seems like the natural aim.
• Make them the best artwork they can be
• Compare with a principle of charity in interpretation (e.g., we don't know what meaning was intended, but this one seems possible and it makes the most sense)
• 2. Monism/pluralism issue: Single correct interpretation of artworks or multiple (noncombinable) acceptable interpretations?
• Noncombinable includes contradictory
  • Combinable: Star wars is about the seductions of power; it is about father-son love
  • Noncombinable: This play is racist; this play is advocates the equality of races.
• Stecker seems to accept pluralism (silent on the combinability issue)
• 3. Work meaning issue: Is there something we can identify as meaning of an artwork and is identifying this at least one (if not the only) aim of interpretation?
• A different aim of interpretation might be to make the artwork (or the aesthetic response to it) as good as it could be.

ALETRNATIVES TO AND CRITIQUES OF INTENTIONALISM

• 1. Aim of interpretation is to enhance appreciation (and so identifying intention is never a proper aim of interpretation)
  • The (single) aim of art interpretation is to achieve a payoff: an enhanced or the best? appreciative experience; making work the best it can be
• Interpreting artworks is for the purpose of better appreciating them
• This becomes a critique of intentionalism if one adds:
• (1) Focus on intention of artists is not best route to achieve this enhanced appreciation or (2) this focus shifts our attention from the proper aim to a different improper one (namely finding out author's intention)
• Stecker's response:
• Stecker claims it is true that sometimes we aim at a sort of enhanced appreciation, or at least that is one of our aims
• So identifying actual intention of creator is not the only aim we have in interpretation
• Stecker's 3 objections
• One: Interpretation that gets at artist's intention might give us the aesthetically best interpretation
• Or it can add to variety of reasonable interpretations of a work and that can add to our appreciation of a work
• So Stecker would seem to accept pluralism of interpretations
• Two: Not clear primary/initial aim of any interpretation is to enhance appreciation
• Rather it aims to point at something in work not obvious
  • Otherwise there would be no need for interpretation
• Or tries to appreciate work by forming a deeper understanding of it
  • Or by arriving at an understanding that delivers richer appreciative exp
• If the aim is appreciative understanding (and not just "enhanced appreciation" independent of understanding) one route to this is to get at actual intention of artist
• Are their artworks where the goal of understanding them is just not appropriate?
• If so, does this mean there is no point in interpreting them
  • Or that they have no meaning?
• Consider abstract painting by Barnett Newman
• Three: There are many goals of art interpretation and no reason to think enhance appreciation is the one and only goal
• Someone may simply want a better understanding of the work
• Or be curious about what an artist intended to do
• So Stecker accepts pluralism of aims
  
  
• 2. Aim of interpretation can't be to identify actual intention of artist for this is to be concerned with the biography of the artist not the artwork
  • We do try to figure out artist's intention
  • But dong so has nothing to do with artwork
  • Rather figuring out intention is to be concerned with the biography of artist
• Argument:
• Intentions belong to people not things, so discovering intentions is finding out something about artists and not artworks
• Reply: While true people have intentions and things do not, people's intentions give properties to the things people make/do and those properties/features depend on those people's intentions
• So can't understand those properties of things w/o understanding the intentions that constitute them
• So when discover artist's intentions we do find out something about artist, but also find out something about the work
• Examples of how artist's intention constitutes a work's nature
• You wonder if a tree stump next to my fireplace is a seat, but it is a wood splitting platform in virtue of my intention to used it for that purpose
  • Does the fact it is in my house and that I use it to split wood mean that is what it is and not a seat? If you made fun of me by telling my friends that I have tree stumps in my house as seats, you would be wrong.
• On table is a manuscript titled "A Chronicle"; you say you didn't know I did historical research, I inform you it is a work of fiction; what makes it fiction rather than real chronicle is my intention to produce a certain type of work
• Duchamp's intentions turned the urinal into something else? (At least gave it new properties)
• Art objects thus can be intentional objects in one sense; constituted by intentions of artists (but not by beliefs about the artwork of those interpreting them--they are not intentional objects in this sense)
  
  
• VERSIONS OF INTENTIONALISM

• 1. Identity thesis (an extreme version of intentionalism)
• The meaning of the work is identical to what artist intends to convey or express in the work
• Unrealized-Intention Objection: People/artists do not infallibly succeed in realizing everything they intend to do
• Meaning of a work can't be identical to unrealized intention (identity thesis entails this)
• Example: If a comedian tries to make a funny joke but fails in this intention, we should not identify the joke as a funny one, even thought that is his intention
• Intentionalism theories must rule out unrealized intentions as determining meaning
  • Only realized intentions can be involved in determining meaning?
    
• Unrealized and realized intentions
• Intentions fail to be realized when they violate "operative" conventions
• Convention (about meaning) = typically assumed ways of understanding something
• Example:
• Mrs Malaprop frequently fails to say what she intends as she violates conventions of English
• "There is a nice derangement of epitaphs," when she means "there is a nice arrangement of epithets" (epitaph--writing on a grave stone; epithet--a descriptive phrase)
  
• 2. Convention-constrained intentionalism: Intentions select a meaning when (linguistic) conventions leave an artwork/utterance ambiguous/indeterminate
• Speaker's intentions can make her words refer to a riverside appointment when she says "I will meet you at the bank," because riverside is a conventional meaning of bank
• Intention of artist is what disambiguates literary works that would have two or more viable readings
• Realized intention is one consistent with operative conventions
• Two problems:
• One: We can use words that extend or depart from conventional literal meaning and this does not result in us failing to realize our intentions
  • Consider irony:
    • Say of someone prone to callous behavior that you have always been "impressed with his sensitivity and compassion"
    • If intentions must be consistent with convention, then irony can't work; you failed to say what you meant since callousness is not a conventional meaning of compassion
    • The meaning of ironic phrases (or art?) is just the opposite of the conventional meaning
    • So intention determining meaning need not always be consistent with convention
    • But might not one think of irony as a convention?
  • Irony is a use of language that provides a best case for intentionalism about meaning (the meaning of an ironic phrase depends importantly on the intention of speaker)
  • Convention-constrained intentionalism can't account for irony
• We frequently use words beyond their conventional meaning
  • Examples:
• Use "the bus is coming" to tell my kids to go to the bus stop
• In bridge, say "Mary doesn't have a heart" to convey that she can't trump opponent's ace
• We can say all these things but we are not conveying conventional meanings
• Two: Convention-constrained intentionalism ignores context, and context is just as important as convention in fixing meaning
• Example:
  • Your real estate agent says "we will close on the house at the bank," and she means the riverbank
  • However, the context suggests she's referring to the financial institution
  • Here context supplies a referent to "bank" independently of her intention
• For her intention to (successfully) use words to refer to the riverbank she needs to draw your attention away from context supplied referent (financial institution)
• Stecker is claiming that her statement meant "meet you at the financial institution" and not the riverside, despite her intending to say the second
• Thus, not just convention can make our intentions fail to be realized but also the context.

• 3. Whatever-works intentionalism (polar opposite of convention-constrained intentionalism)
• Intentions are realized if one manages to communicate them (otherwise they are unrealized)
• Can explain the successful use of irony, figures of speech, context based extensions of meaning (such as bus coming to tell children to go to the bus)
• If Mrs Malaprop succeeds in convey her meaning with that misuse of language her intention has been successfully realized and her utterance has that meaning
• Does not matter that her success has no basis in conventional meaning of those words
• The critic will reject the whatever-works account of utterance meaning and claim that although her intention to communicate an idea has succeeded, she has not succeeded in putting her intention into those words ("intention is unrealized"), that utterance does not have that meaning
• Problem: This view can't make the distinction between
  • What someone says on the occasion of an utterance, and
  • What is conveyed by the utterance on that occasion (because it puts all focus on what is conveyed)
• Distinction between what a speaker intends and what is actually said
• Stecker is not claiming that meaning of utterance should be identified with what is said rather than conveyed, but that not everything conveyed is part of utterance meaning.
• If one manages to convey something despite--rather than because--of the conventional meaning of one's words (as with Malaprop), then that is not part of utterance meaning
• So Stecker is claiming an artist might have a certain intention, successfully convey it via the artwork, and yet the artwork not have that meaning because conventions give that work a different meaning (consider the raised middle finger example)
  • Not sure this is plausible
• Stecker thinks we need a conception of realized intention (and related concept of utterance/work meaning) that is intermediate between whatever works intentionalism and ?convention-constrained intentionalism


• 4. Stecker's moderate actual intentionalism (an intermediate view)
  • Utterance means X if "the utterer intends X and intends that her audience will grasp this in virtue of conventional meaning of words (or a contextually-supported extension of this meaning permitted by conventions) and the first intention is graspable in virtue of those conventions or permissible extensions of them"
• Intention, conventional meaning and context all play a role
• If the conditions are met, intention to convey something with an utterance has been realized
• Intention can be realized in other ways (as notes whatever works intentionalists) but not in ways that guarantee that the utterance will mean what it manages to convey
• Distinction between utterance meaning and what artist manages to covey with it
• Certain intentions conveyed (realized) via contextual pointers are ruled out as meaning determiners because they are not permitted extensions of operative conventions
  • Realized intentions don't always determine meaning of utterance/work used to realize them
• Example: "Fly in your suit" might succeed in conveying "fly in your soup" but that is still not what the utterance means
  • This is a clear case where Stecker downplays the role of intention
• Can extend the intermediate view to other art forms beyond literature
  • By hooking intentions to ways meaning is conveyed in a given art form which may not be via convention, but could be innate
  • Meaning can in part be innately (non-conventionally) determined
  • A painting of a mountain, represents the mountain, not by convention?
• Example: Pictorial representation may operate via natural innate species wide recognitional abilities along with conventional associated with a style or genre
• A painting will represent X, if painter intends it to represent X, intends to do this via the audiences recognition abilities, relevant conventions or permissible extensions of them and if audience can recognize X through these factors
• Intermediate view is not a stand alone account of work meaning, but needs to be part of larger account that can include nonintentional determinants of meaning
  
• Examples of non-intentional determinants of meaning
• Real estate agent proposal to meet at the bank might be a case where the intended referent of bank is less salient and thus overridden by context supplied referent (financial institution)
• Jules Verne racism example
• A literary work, in addition to what it intentionally does, may inadvertently express attitudes toward race/gender that may be part of meaning of the work
• Jules Verne's novel Mysterious Island intentionally and explicitly opposed slavery but also unintentionally but no less actually expresses a residual racism by representing a former slave (Neb) as a superstitions, docile, naive, and childlike individual with an affinity to a domesticated monkey
  
• Summary of Stecker's moderate actual intentionalism
• Intermediate view gives role to actual intentions of utterers/artists in fixing meaning of utterance/sentence
• A modest role compared to identity theorist who claims meaning of these just is the intentions of their makers
• Intermediate view sees actual intentions as one factor that fixes meaning but there are others too and they can fix the meaning so that meanings can be unintended because of these
• Unrealized intentions (and even some realized ones) don't determine work meaning; intermediate view says a subset of realized intentions determine the meaning
  

More Criticism of Actual Intentionalism (per se) 134

• Publicity paradox: Artists create works for public consumption, available to public absent the artist, so it must stand on its own, absent the artists intention
• Artists intend to have their intentions not taken into consideration, so we should not take that intention into consideration?
• Stecker's replies:
• Minor: Not all artists make their works with the publicity intention; some artists work mainly for themselves rather than autonomous public, while others attach all sorts of explanatory appendages to reveal their intentions in the absence of their person
• Fact that works made for public consumption does not imply artists intends her meaning determining intentions not be consulted
• Could be that the public nature of art reveals artist's intentions w/o further consultation
• Publicity is compatible with interest in intentions thought it might suggest that interest is mainly satisfied by means of work itself.
• Might publicity entail that the evidence about intention is limited to consulting the work?
• Intentionalism can recognize that work is primary source of information about intention, it can't confine the evidence to that
• Any evidence should be relevant
• Works are public objects, but more too: need to consult the culture, traditions and individual creator


• How we figure out artwork meaning and artists intention at the same time and in relation to each other
  • Process of mutual adjustment of hypotheses about work meaning and intention of artist helps us establish both
• Example: "This bag is heavy"
• Identify the literal meaning w/o regard to intention
  • Literal meaning: suitcase weights a lot
• You realize utterance is not just to make a factual claim, so form hypotheses about intention in making utterance: 1) request with help to move bag or 2) express fear I will have to pay overweight charge
• Context (some bag struggling) will help you choose
• Result is you read remark as request for help, which identifies utterance meaning as well as successfully realized intention
• Example:
• Joyce's story the Dead: "he (Gabriel) asked himself what is a woman (Gretta) standing on the stairs in the shadow, listening to distant music, a symbol of?"
• Know the literal meaning of the sentence; want to know its point; why it is put there
• Ask same question as Gabriel and we can better answer it?
• Realize that he is asking wrong question and this reveals an alienation from Gretta?
• Default assumption is that we are trying to figure out Joyce's point (intention)
  • Default assumption: We assume by default that interpretation tries to identify artist intention.
  • Only if we can't make this assumption work do we look for alternative determinants of meaning
• **Sometimes the default assumption is not that we are trying to identify an intention of artist:
  • If we ask what attitude does Joyce express toward women in "the Dead" me may not start with assumption that the attitude is one Joyce intended, but we may end up with that view.
    
• Another criticism of intentionalism: Reference to intentions is eliminable (and not essential to account of work meaning)
  • Context and convention can do it all
• Convention and context can help fix properly realized intended meaning
• When there is no properly realized intention to fix meaning, this is accomplished by convention and context
• Example: There is a fly in you suit, but intend to say there is a fly in your soup
• If context is you are wearing a suit, that and the conventional meaning of words, determines that the meaning is there is a fly in your suit, and the unrealized intention doesn't fix the meaning
• So when I do intend to say there is a fly in your suit, why isn't it the case that here too intention plays no role and context and convention do it all?
• But context and convention are not always enough
• Mary doesn't have a heart (said while playing bridge)
• Need to appeal to an intention to disambiguate words before context and convention can do job
• Refer to card she can play? To her style of playing? Her general attitude to other people?
• Except in straightforward/literal cases we generally won't be able to fix what is being said w/o thinking about intention, or the point of saying it
• Even more true in artistic cases than conversational ones
• That figuring out intention is important
• What role does convention play in music or other arts? And context?
• Won't be able to recognize irony, allusion, parallelism, imagery or symbolism w/o trying to figure out intention
• Almost always ask of a work of art "what is the point" (default assumption)
• Might end up thinking that these words or the work could not convey any plausible intention of author so must be understood in other terms
• When the interpretative question is "what is the point?"
• We typically will need to look for intention.
• What other interpretative question is there?



• 5. Hypothetical Intentionalism (138)
• The intention that specifies meaning is not the actual intention of the artist but some ideal intention
• Like actual intentionalism, hypothetical intentionalism thinks when we interpret to identify utterance/work meaning, we look for an intention or point with which something is presented
• But it denies intention looking for is actual intention of utterer/artist
• Two versions:
  • One: Hypothetical intention is ideal audience's (ideal audience knows artist's corpus and other publicly available features of context of creation) best hypothesis regarding actual artist's intention, but direct pronouncements by the artist of her intention are not to be considered
    • Can coincide with actual intention, but need not
    • Crazy view? Define meaning by intention, but in figuring this out you must ignore artist's statements about her intention?
    • Best hypo is one most justified by evidence and where tie, the one that makes the work aesthetically better
  • Two: Meaning is fixed by hypothetical utterer/artist who is fully aware of context and conventions and uses them flawlessly to say or do what she intends
• Reasons in support of hypo intentionalism
  • One: Meaning of work/utterance should be identified with intended meaning, nor with conventional or literal meaning
• And this view gives an alternative more elegant than Stecker's view
• Moderate actual intentionalism says sometimes properly realized actual intention determine meaning, sometimes nonintentional considerations do, including conventional and contextual considerations
• Two Gives work of art greater autonomy from creative artists, as actual intention of artist plays no direct role in fixing their meaning
• Counter-examples to hypo intentionalism
  • 1^st version is that meaning of work is the intention an ideal audience would attribute to actual artist based on admissible evidence (which does not include artists statements about her intentions)
• Example where work means one thing, but was not intended to mean that and audience is justified in thinking it was not intended to mean that
• Conrad Doyle (author of Sherlock Holmes) gives Dr. Watson a wound during service in British army but gives it two incompatible locations
• Given the realist nature of the stories (rules out fictional assertion of impossibilities) and fact wound can't be in two locations, we know this was unintentional on part of Doyle
• But this fictionally impossibility is asserted and is part of the meaning of the story
• Ideal audience would not attribute this to Doyle and so claim this is not part of meaning of story (which is false)
  
• Summary:
• Identifying artist's actual intention is a proper and central aim of art interpretation
• Artwork meaning is defined, in part, in terms of artist's actual intention
• But great care is needed to define this role of intention in fixing work meaning and in not overstating its importance
• For, among other things, intentions can be unrealized and convention and context also play a role in meaning

Miscellaneous

• (Skip) Okay this shows that "constitutive intentions" must be understood to identify or understand correctly certain items
  • But do actual intentions bear on not just type of thing, but its meaning or what it communicates
• To understand an artworks meaning do we need to appeal to artists intentions?