Meaning and Intention: A Defense of Procedural Individualism

Many historians of religion, literary historians, and other textual scholars have understood their task to be the recovery of authorial intentions. ¹ In recovering such intentions, moreover, they have taken themselves to be telling us something about the meanings of the relevant utterances. The intentionalism of such scholars, whether implicit or explicit, has been the subject of fierce theoretical criticism over the last thirty years. ² Indeed, the criticism has been so fierce that intentionalism now has about it a definite aura of theoretical naiveté. One strand of criticism centers on the difficulties of identifying or even postulating authors for certain utterances--the Bible or a "keep off the grass" sign, for example. Another, more influential strand of criticism highlights various gaps between an author's intentions and the meaning of the relevant utterance: gaps associated, for example, with the space between intention and performance, the different ways in which one might understand an utterance, and the effects of the unconscious mind of the author.

All too often, it seems to me, the criticisms are directed at a caricature of the intentionalist position. Few intentionalists, I suspect, want to defend the strong thesis that the only legitimate meaning an utterance may bear is fixed by the conscious, prior purpose of its author. Anyway, irrespective of what other intentionalists would wish to argue, I want to defend a procedural individualism according to which any meaning, or at least any meaning with a temporal existence, is either a meaning for a specific person or an abstraction based on such meanings. The possible restriction of my defense of procedural individualism to meanings with a temporal existence reflects my concern to avoid debates about the possibility of divine or other metaphysical meanings. ³ Clearly some Biblical scholars want to treat the Bible as an atemporal, divine revelation. Even when scholars thus postulate atemporal, metaphysical meanings, however, they presumably will allow that the relevant utterance or utterances have a historical existence such that they have had meanings for people within time. So, if my reader does not believe in metaphysical meanings, he may take procedural individualism to apply to meanings as such; but if he does believe in such meanings, he might take it not to apply to them.

My defense of this procedural individualism will have four sections. In the first, I will argue that all temporal meanings are intentional in the weak sense of being meanings for specific people. More abstract meanings, such as semantic and linguistic ones, are either based on intentional meanings or they are atemporal. In the second section, I will argue, against occasionalists, that we can individuate such weak intentions solely by reference to the individual for whom they exist. In the third section, I will suggest that procedural individualism differs from strong intentionalism in ways that enable us to respond effectively to the criticisms made of the latter by the New Critics, psychoanalytic theorists, and others. Finally, I will conclude by exploring how procedural individualism helps us to make sense of cases in which there seem to be peculiar difficulties in identifying who or what is the author of an utterance.

I

To begin, I want to argue that meanings are intentional in that they exist only in the minds of specific people. Meanings are always fixed by the mental (or intentional) activity of a given individual. One way of approaching the question of what sort of meanings have a temporal existence is tangentially by way of a study of the nature of the meaning an utterance has for a reader. The meaning of an utterance to a reader cannot be its semantic meaning, defined in terms of the truth-conditions of a proposition, because readers sometimes find meanings in statements whose semantic properties elude them. Similarly, the meaning of an utterance to a reader cannot be its linguistic meaning, defined in terms of the conventions governing the usage of a particular language, because readers sometimes find meanings...