even exists apart from the conventionalist aspect of saying (as a matter of
linguistic convenience) that a text “means” something. 11
Thus authorial intention, linguistic sign, and readerly understanding
can all be defi ned as “meaning,” but only authorial intention and readerly
understanding can be said to have something real backing them—the real-
ity, that is, of cognitive events. 12 The notion of a non-intentionalist mean-
ing residing within the wording of a text has nothing real backing it—that
is, there is nothing within its conceptual frame that extends to or from a
real philosophical given. It owes its birth as a concept to the habit of refer-
ring to the intentions encoded within a text as the text’s own meaning.
Such a habit was once safe, of course, because in the days of yore hardly
anyone ever considered that meaning might be anything other than the
author’s intention. 13
It is important that I make my point clearly. The fact that common
parlance refers to “meaning” as if it were a native property of texts does
not validate that view. For the sake of comparison, we might consider how
normal linguistic usage departs from the better judgments of philosophy
in its handling of, say, the concepts of “love” and “hatred”—concepts
regularly handled as if they were things that really exist out there, inde-
pendently of lovers and haters. Everyday language treats love and hatred as
interpersonal contagions, and love is spoken of as something “in the air.”
If one had to arrive at a defi nition of “love” strictly on the basis of every-
day language, one would have little cause to think it was not some sort of
fl oating impersonal force. But it is rather evident, as I see it, that love is
not a transportable substance or an impersonal force, and there is no such
thing as love apart from the affections of lovers. The same goes for the
understanding of “meaning” implied by the existence of texts, and by the
call to read and understand those texts: there is no such thing as meaning
apart from the intentions of “meaners.”
It was only when a rather untidy line of thinking mistook a habit of
parlance for a description of how authors relate to texts that the concept
of meaning came to be cut loose from the intentionalist aspect of writing.
This de-intentionalized concept of meaning eventually found enough of
a reception to become a fi xture of hermeneutic discussion, thanks partly
to its receiving a permanent home within the phenomenalists’ reinven-
tion of the world as something explicable without reference to originary
moments. This seems to be the source of the idea of viewing meaning
as an impersonal force—as a fl uid substance that transcends the events
of writing and reading. It would be diffi cult to overestimate the effect
70 J.C. POIRIER