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A Defense of Moderate Actual Intentionalism

  • Journal of Humanities, Seoul National University
  • 2017, 74(4), pp.177-216
  • DOI : 10.17326/jhsnu.74.4.201711.177
  • Publisher : Institute of Humanities, Seoul National University
  • Research Area : Humanities > Other Humanities
  • Received : October 2, 2017
  • Accepted : November 10, 2017
  • Published : November 30, 2017

Chong-hwan Oh 1

1서울대학교

Accredited

ABSTRACT

In this paper I accept Carroll’s position that the meaning of an artwork can be explained by the analogy with utterer’s meaning in ordinary conversations. When confronted with an utterance, our standard cognitive goal is to figure out what the speaker intends to say. Likewise, when confronted with an artwork, we try to figure out what the artist wants to tell us by means of his or her work. Moderate intentionalism holds that we need to know the intent of the speaker in order to fix the meaning of his or her utterance, because the constraints of grammatical, contextual, and background knowledge still allow several possible meanings. Radical intentionalism, on the other hand, holds that the intent of the speaker can determine the meaning of an utterance without those constraints. I argue that the criticism of anti-intentionalism against radical intentionalism does not apply in the case of moderate intentionalism, because the latter concedes the role of those constraints. Moderate intentionalism also concedes the importance of those constraints in the interpretation of artworks, and holds that we need to know the intention of the artist, only when the meaning of an artwork is not determined in spite of our consideration of those constraints. The fact that the interpretations of an artwork can diverge and actually do diverge in the field of artistic criticism shows the implausibility of the anti-intentionalist claim that only those constraints can determine the meaning of an artwork. Therefore, I try to show that Haewan Lee’s criticism against moderate intentionalism, which is based on this claim, begs the question. Hypothetical intentionalism holds that the intention of a writer should be considered as the intention which epistemically ideal readers construct and project onto him or her on the basis of the work for the maximum aesthetic and/or artistic value. Even though this position presupposes the autonomy of the artwork, I argue that we must reject it because its view of intention runs counter to our commonsense. I argue that moderate actual intentionalism is the best theory of the interpretation of artworks, because it explains the actual situations of artistic criticism most convincingly without any logical inconsistency.

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