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Intentionalism in aesthetics is, quite generally, the thesis that the artist's or artists' intentions have a decisive role in the creation of a work of art, and that knowledge of such intentions is a necessary component of at least some adequate interpretive and evaluative claims. 1 In this paper I develop and defend this thesis. I begin with a discussion of some anti-intentionalist arguments. Surveying a range of intentionalist responses to them, I briefly introduce and criticize a fictionalist version of intentionalism before moving on to an approach I call moderate intentionalism. I consider a salient alternative known as hypothetical intentionalism and try to show why moderate intentionalism should be preferred to it.
Saying what, precisely, intentions are is no small problem, and disputes in aesthetics often hinge on rival assumptions about the nature and function of intentions in general. I shall assume, in what follows, that intentions are mental states having semantic contents, various psychological functions, and practical consequences-but not always the targetted results. 2 I shall not take up any of the more global challenges to intentionalist psychology, such as eliminative materialism or macro-sociological and historicist critiques. 3 I assume, then, that agents sometimes intend to perform an action, such as writing a poem, and that they occasionally succeed in realizing such aims, thereby intentionally doing such things as writing poems.
I. Extreme Intentionalism and Anti-Intentionalism
In an extreme version, intentionalism holds that a work's meanings and its maker's intentions are logically equivalent. Such a thesis still has its defenders, yet it is hard to see how it can be reconciled with the fact that intentions are not always successfully realized. A theory of interpretation based on Humpty Dumpty's semantics does not seem promising. 4 An extreme version of anti-intentionalism also has its advocates, who confront the intentionalist with the following dilemma: either the artist's intentions are successfully realized in the text or structure produced by the artist, in which case the interpreter need not refer to them; or, th artist's intentions are not successfully realized, in which case reference to them is insufficient to justify a related claim about the work's meanings. Any viable form of intentionalism must find a way out of this dilemma.
A premise of many anti-intentionalist arguments-including the...