著者

河合 大介

出版者

美学会

雑誌

美学 (ISSN:05200962)

巻号頁・発行日

vol.63, no.2, pp.1-12, 2012

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After "The Intentional Fallacy" (1946/54) by W. K. Wimsatt Jr. and M. Beardsley, the role of the artist's intention in the interpretation of artwork has been one of the central topics in analytical aesthetics. Recently, this issue has been mainly debated between moderate actual (MAI) and hypothetical intentionalism (HI). In this paper, I demonstrate some difficulties of MAI, comparing it with HI. First, I survey Carroll's version of MAI and point out its main arguments: accessibility to "actual intention" and the reliance on private documents. I examine them and show that the discrimination of MAI from HI is unclear. Additionally, I insist that, against Hans Maes' arguments, MAI has no advantages in interpreting contemporary art, because MAT overlooks the distinction between "semantic" and "categorial" intention, which Levinson draws. Since contemporary art employs diverse materials which have no code to mean something, semantic intention cannot play any role in making such artwork. Instead, categorial intention is the precondition for making it art and tells us how it is to be conceived or approached. Through this examination, I argue that there is no reason to maintain MAT, at least in Carroll's version.