- In an extremely tendentious reading of Hirsch, George Dickie and W. Kent
Wilson claim that knowledge of the author’s intention, for Hirsch, is
obtained by “guessing” without the benefi t of textual clues (“The Intentional
Fallacy: Defending Beardsley,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 53
[1995], 233–250 [see esp. 236–239]). To arrive at such a strange interpre-
tation of Hirsch, they seem to take an opportunity from Hirsch’s use of the
word “guess,” fi lling out the implications of his using that word with little
attention to what he actually means by it. They claim that Hirsch is con-
strained to “deny” the inference of intentions from utterances, “because
on his theory the movement is from intended meaning to utterance mean-
ing” (237). Hirsch’s more attentive readers will wonder how such a strange
position could ever be attributed to him, as nothing in his writings sug-
gests that the retrieval of meaning must move from intention to utter-
ance—only that the communication of meaning itself runs in that direction.
It seems as though Dickie and Wilson inferred from Hirsch’s restriction of
the word “meaning” to intention that he does not believe that there is a
sort of meaning (call it what you will) lodged within texts. They are misled
by the fact that Hirsch restricts the word “meaning” to what he thinks is
hermeneutically legitimate, mistaking that restriction for a map of what
obtains phenomenologically! - Hirsch characterizes this view as “semantic autonomy” in Validity in
Interpretation. - “Meaning,” on this account, is not to be confused with “shared lexical
meaning”—that is, with the sort of “meaning” that Ludwig Wittgenstein
discussed at length (again and again) as the conventionality of word usage.
This is something very different from the meaning of a text or communi-
cation—as Wittgenstein well recognized. It is what allows the text or
communication to be formulated and understood successfully. It should
not be confused with the notion that the text has an autonomous
meaning. - That the cognitive event issuing in a meaning is itself a fl eeting moment is
immaterial. It nonetheless remains the marker of a communicative act.
What I propose here is essentially a modernizing, demythologizing read-
ing of Sallustius’s claim that “the soul’s acts of thought, though they pass
on to other objects, nevertheless remain inside their begetters” ( On the
Gods and the World 4, trans. Gilbert Murray, in Five Stages of Greek Religion
[Boston: Beacon, 1951], 202–203). From my standpoint, it suffi ces that
these “acts of thought ... remain” only as an indexical register, apart from
ontological considerations. It is a category error to think of meaning as
something ontological, or as contingent upon ontological commitments. - See John C. Poirier, “Authorial Intention as Old as the Hills,” Stone-
Campbell Journal 7 (2004): 59–72.
78 J.C. POIRIER