Meaning Meaning

The idea that authorial intentions should be regarded with suspicion has been a literary-critical commonplace for decades. As long ago as 1919, T. S. Eliot seemed to warn against them when he argued that the very idea of a poet expressing their personality in a poem is built upon an excessively unified conception of a personality, and that what is important in poetry often has little to do with the lives of its authors. 'Honest criticism and sensitive appreciation', he concluded, 'are directed not upon the poet but upon the poetry.'¹ Associated ideas flourished in the heyday of New Criticism, with William Empson, in Seven Kinds of Ambiguity (1930), drawing attention to the range of meanings which texts can express and in doing so inspiring later critics to scrutinise meanings in texts beyond those intended by their authors. A more direct attack on authorial intention appeared in 1946 in William Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley's seminal essay 'The Intentional Fallacy', where they argued that 'the design or intention of the author is neither available nor desirable as a standard for judging the success of a work of literary art'.² Judgement was to centre on the text, not the author.

The second half of the twentieth century saw a different set of concerns about authorial intention coming to prominence, many of them deriving from continental philosophy. The stand-out contribution here was Roland Barthes's 'The Death of the Author' (1967), in which Barthes sought at once to describe and effect the demise of a mythical figure which he saw as playing a key role in bourgeois ideology. For Barthes, the death of the author was to be the birth of the reader and with it the end of a system of fealty and obeisance to traditional authorities–God, reason, science, and law. Later writers developed Barthes's suggestions about the political significance of authorial intentions. In 'What Is an Author?' (1969), Michel Foucault argued that authors are not the originators of meanings, but media through which discourse operates, and that the idea of authors as fountains of invention is a barrier to readers interpreting texts in defiance of the rules set down by those with power. Today, scepticism about intentions is everywhere: in her recent primer Criticism (2016), Catherine Belsey identified it as the distinguishing mark of theoretically informed approaches to literature; and many nascent literary critics imbibe it even before they get to university through the classroom maxim that meanings should not be ascribed to the authors of literary texts but to speakers, narrators, or personae.

John Farrell sets himself against all of this. Following the work of analytical philosophers such as Elizabeth Anscombe and Paul Grice, he begins with the observation that in everyday life we readily ascribe intentions to actions. This means identifying the desires and beliefs which motivate them. If someone rises to open the window of an uncomfortably warm room, we are likely to infer that they desire to be cooler and that they believe that opening the window will cool them. Such inferences can never be decisive, because desires and beliefs are not manifest in actions, but they can be made more certain by being based on more information about the actor, the action, and its context. They also presuppose a norm of rationality. As Farrell puts it, 'Interpreting a person's behaviour means recognising that, given these goals, in this situation, under these conditions, understood in a certain way, it would make sense to do what the person is doing' (p. 22). This does not mean that we must endorse all intentional actions as substantively rational, since an intentional action may be based on absurd desires and beliefs, only that when interpreting an action we posit desires and beliefs until we find a set which would make the action rational to perform in light of them. Thinking like this is not something we can help ourselves from doing. Intentional psychology is so fundamental, according to Farrell, that we 'cannot even imagine doing without it...