what the person who wrote the names on the board probably intended, then
the assignment hypothesis becomes far more likely.)
In sum, the two different questions generate two different kinds of knowl-
edge about the first sentence of Pride and Prejudice. Although I realize that
some critics will prefer the Anglo-American deconstructionist question and
others the rhetorical theorist’s question, I contend that such a preference is
not itself evidence that can be appealed to in order to decide what Austen’s
sentence means. To put this point another way, it would be a mistake for either
the deconstructionist or the rhetorical critic to conclude that his ability to
answer his question means that the other’s is thereby rendered obsolete, naïve,
or otherwise wrong-headed (though I can’t help but point out that the decon-
structionist position is limited in a way that the rhetorical is not: it operates
with an a priori commitment to showing that language undoes itself, while
the rhetorical model views such undoing as one of several ways that language
can work).
Similar analyses could be done of other anti-intentionalist positions, but
such analyses would not alter my larger point: neither the long tradition of
an anti-intentionalist orthodoxy nor a close look at details of positions within
that tradition undermines the viability and validity of the intentionalist posi-
tion. Consequently, the intentionalist position ought to have sufficient elbow
room in the territory of contemporary theory to do its work.
INTENTIONALITY FROM A RHETORICAL PERSPECTIVE
Paying attention to the anti-intentionalist positions underlines the need to be
clear about what one means by intention and about the claims one wants to
make for it. From the rhetorical perspective, intention is a mental state, a will
to do something, including to mean something—and to deliver a multilayered
communication to an audience. In this sense, intention is the force that takes
potentially ambiguous matter and shapes it into one thing rather than another
(even intentional ambiguity is ambiguous in some ways rather than others).
Identifying intention as a mental state allows us to recognize that it is not
a synonym for “meaning,” which still rests on the public norms governing
language. If I intend to communicate the proposition that “‘The Intentional
Fallacy’ is itself a fallacy” but instead carelessly write ‘“The Intentional Fallacy’
is not itself a fallacy,” then there is a contradiction between my intention and
my meaning—or to be more precise, between my intention and the meaning
of the sentence I chose to express that intention. In other words, successfully
executing one’s intention to mean something depends on the appropriate use
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