Talk:Intentional fallacy

Dead Link
Please remove this dead link or find where it has gone to: http://www.eiu.edu/~literary/2205/inten-fall.htm 220.233.103.55 10:42, 18 August 2006 (UTC)

Unfounded Research
The following passage is rambly, not particularly relevant to W & B, and smells of original research. I removed it: When writing, an author must call upon both his understanding of the language in which he writes and his personal experiences about reality to create a work. Even the most escapist fantasy must appeal to some shared understanding in the reader to be intelligible at all. A reader must also call upon his understanding of language and personal experiences in order to decode meaning in a work.

A literary work may thus be looked at as an attempt by an author to communicate to a reader via a shared language and shared experiences with the reader. Without a common ground, communication is laboured or impossible.

There will always be some differences between author and reader, however. The author and the reader will inevitably have had different personal experiences, and therefore hold different beliefs and opinions about what different aspects of reality mean, and their relative importances. Because of these differences, the meaning taken by a reader can only approximate the meaning intended by the author, and also can only approximate the meaning taken by other readers.

Further complicating communication is that both the author and the reader may be unaware of peculiarities in their understanding of reality, and these peculiarities may colour either the work as written or the meaning taken by the reader in ways unconscious to either.

For example, a work written during the immediate Post-World War II era may exhibit commonly-held views of the time, such as prejudices concerning Germans or Japanese. A modern reader might disagree with these prejudices, and see newfound meaning in reviewing how these prejudices color the work. This becomes especially clear when considering works written hundreds of years earlier, or in a radically different culture: how is one to know what a Medieval writer truly meant to say in a poem? If Medieval literature still has value today, it is at least partially because of how we understand it to produce meaning, not by virtue of what the author meant to say.

Modern literary critics argue that this new found meaning is not merely a curious quirk, but an equally legitimate interpretation of the work. -leigh (&#966;&#952;&#8057;&#947;&#947;&#959;&#962;) 23:35, 2 May 2006 (UTC)


 * What an informative and interesting ramble! It is too bad that the author didn't include citations in order to satisfy dismissive Wikipedia's stern demand.Lestrade (talk) 16:45, 27 June 2009 (UTC)Lestrade

first line of the article is not very clear
I think its should be rephrased because you get the impression that intentional fallcay advocates think the authors intentions important.

not settled
the following link indicates that the subject of intentionalism is still under debate and therefore including it in the List of Fallacies article is misleading. To me intentionalism seems to concern the fallacy that leads people to misconstrue a text because they rely on an interpretation of the text provided to them, which is a form of appeal to inadequate authority since it tends to arise in situations where somebody pretends to more knowledge than they have and convinces others to agree with them. Please USE your further reading and that suggested in the article to improve the Intentionalism article. http://www.denisdutton.com/intentionalism.htm 4.249.63.150 (talk) 11:57, 24 November 2010 (UTC)