intentional fallacy

Intentionalism regarded as a fallacy.

intentional fallacy, the name given by the American New Critics W. K. Wimsatt Jr and Monroe C. Beardsley to the widespread assumption that an author's declared or supposed intention in writing a work is the proper basis for deciding on the meaning and the value of that work. In their 1946 essay ‘The Intentional Fallacy’ (reprinted in Wimsatt's The Verbal Icon, 1954), these critics argue that a literary work, once published, belongs in the public realm of language, which gives it an objective existence distinct from the author's original idea of it: ‘The poem is not the critic's own and not the author's (it is detached from the author at birth and goes about the world beyond his power to intend about it or control it). The poem belongs to the public.’ Thus any information or surmise we may have about the author's intention cannot in itself determine the work's meaning or value, since it still has to be verified against the work itself. Many other critics have pointed to the unreliability of authors as witnesses to the meanings of their own works, which often have significances wider than their intentions in composing them: as D. H. Lawrence wrote in his Studies in Classic American Literature (1923), ‘Never trust the artist. Trust the tale.’

In aesthetics, the supposed mistake of holding that the author's intentions in making a work form an authoritative basis for interpretation and criticism. It is often remarked (especially in deconstructionism) that even when we have access to the author's intentions through a direct statement, this statement is only an act of self-interpretation by the author, and for us can only be another text, itself ripe for reinterpretation and criticism.