Michael Baxandall has usefully developed in detail an account of inten-
tions and reasons for action that are at work in the making of pictures. He
notes that both R. G. Collingwood and Karl Popper, in considering histor-
ical understanding,“talk of thereconstructionof the process of thought,”^7
differing only in that Collingwood regards this reconstruction as recaptur-
ing occurrent events in the mind of the agent interpreted, while Popper
regards the reconstruction asouridealized story about what might have
gone on. Baxandall himself deliberately suppresses the ontological ques-
tion about the status of our“reconstruction”of plans and intentions, in
favor of sticking to“the procedural pattern of problems and situations and
solutions”^8 on which any reconstruction of plan and intention must be
based, as both Collingwood and Popper agree. Here Baxandall’s ontological
modesty is the path of wisdom and insight. When we undertake to under-
stand the plans, intentions, thoughts, and actions of another agent, then
what we develop is“a representation of reflection or rationality purpose-
fully at work on circumstances...andwederiveasenseoftheagent’s
quiddity by relating to these circumstances the solution [the poem or
painting, sonata or building, as may be] he actually arrived at.”^9 Since
problem situations, and especially problem situations of artistic work, can
be complex, since the action of artistic making is frequently temporally
extended,andsincethethoughts,reasons,plans,intentions,andsoforth
of the agent are formed out of publicly intelligible strategies, some articu-
lated and some not, we need not and should not linger on worries about
any single“real intentional cause”of the artist’saction.^10 Any story that
cogently relates details of the work and of collateral historical evidence
where available to any aspect of the artist’s complex problem situation
mayberegardedasastorythattellsatruth about the work–about what
itisasaproductofactionandaboutwhatitmeans.
(^7) Baxandall,Patterns of Intention, p. 14, emphasis added.
(^8) Ibid. (^9) Ibid., p. 36.
(^10) Hence we need not worry about actual intentionalism, focusing on a single occurent
event, vs. hypothetical intentionalism, focusing on what interpreters posit in order to
explain actions–a debate that has been prominent in the recent literature on understand-
ing. For an outline of this debate and for the sensible suggestion that we do notneed to
resolve it, see Robert Stecker,“Interpretation,”inThe Routledge Companion to Aesthetics,ed.
Dominic McIver Lopes and Berys Gaut (London: Routledge, 2001), pp. 239–51.
Understanding art 149