Ananda K. Coomaraswamy—Intention

[SK's comments]

[from a bad scan; many things fixed manually, with varying degrees of confidence]

[Greek words dashed out by the still-unilingual SK.]

[266]

Intention

My meaning is what I intend to convey, to communicate, to some other person. Now intentions are, of course, intentions of minds, and these intentions presuppose values. Meanings and values are inseparable.

Wilbur M Urban, The Intelligible World
(New York, 1929), p. 190

Messrs Monroe C. Beardsley
and W. K. Wimsatt, Jr.

Gentlemen,

You, Sirs, in the Dictionary of World Literature, discussing "Intention," do not deny that an author

may or may not succeed
in his purpose,

but do say that

his success or failure,
in this respect,
are

indemonstrable.

You proceed to attack the criticism of a work of art in terms of the relation between intention and result;

in the course of this attack you say that

to pretend "that the author's aim can be detected internally in the work even where it is not realized is merely a self contradictory proposition",

and
you conclude the paragraph
as follows:

"A work may indeed fall short of what the critic thinks should have been intended, or what the author was in the habit of doing, or what one might expect him to do,
but
there can be no evidence, internal or external, that the author had conceived something which he did not execute."

In our subsequent correspondence
you say that
even if a criticism
could be made in terms of
the relation of purpose to result,
this would be irrelevant,
because
the critic's main task is
"to evaluate the work itself",
and
you make it very clear that
this "evaluation"
has much more to do with

"what the work ought to be"

than with

"what the author intended it

[267]

to be."

In the same connection you cite the case of a school teacher who proposes to correct a pupil's composition;

the pupil maintains that

what he wrote

is

what he "meant to say";

the teacher then says,

"Well,
if you meant to say so and so,
all I can say is that

you should not have meant it"

You add that
there are

"good intentions
and
poor intentions,"

and that intention per se is no criterion of the worth of the poem

I not only dissent from all but the last of these propositions, but also feel that

you have not done justice to the principle of criticism that you attack;

and, finally, that

you confuse "criticism"
with "evaluation,"

overlooking that

"values" are present

only in

the end to which
the work is ordered,

while

"criticism" is supposed
to be disinterested.

wimsatt and beardsley dictionary article

Dictionary of World Literature:
Criticism — Forms — Technique
Edited by JOSEPH T. SHIPLEY
(1943)

[SK's comments]

I couldn't find the 1943 edition online, but I found a circulating copy at the Los Angeles Public Library. Sclerotic bureaucracies aren't all bad, all the time.

[326]

INTENTION.   Judgments about the author's intention appear in the processes of interpretation and evaluation of literary works.

The present article examines the meaning of such judgments, their role in criticism, and their mode of proof.

In referring to the meaning of a literary work, one should distinguish between

(1) the meaning of the work itself,
and
(2) the meaning that the author intended to express in the work.

These two mean-

[327]

ings are here called

"actual"

and

"intentional"

respectively.

beardsley aesthetics intro

Monroe C. Beardsley
Aesthetics: Problems in the Philosophy of Criticism
(1958)

[SK's comments]
[final revision: 17 Oct 2026]

[1]

INTRODUCTION

There would be

no problems of aesthetics,

in the sense in which I propose
to mark out this field of study,

if no one ever talked

about works of art.

So long as we enjoy a movie, a story, or a song, in silence—  [...]  —there is no call for philosophy.

But as soon as we utter a statement about the work, various sorts of question can arise.

Got it.

  T

alk

ing causes

problems of aesthetics

.

That's what I already think.

Do I still need to read the next 600 pages?

the intentional fallacy (wimsatt and beardsley, orig. 1946)

Wimsatt and Beardsley
"The Intentional Fallacy"
in
Margolis,
Philosophy Looks at the Arts
(Third ed., 1987)

[SK's comments]
[some italics omitted]
[final revision: 2 Oct 2026]

---

Late in the process, after encountering an outrageous typo, I discovered that someone or other has made numerous silent excisions as compared with the 1946 original. The source Margolis gives here is:

W. K. Wimsatt, The Verbal Icon (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1954), Chapter I.

These annotations are arduous, and I decided it was too late to change course.

Mea culpa, and quod bene vertat.

[367]

19. The Intentional Fallacy
W. K. WIMSATT, JR. AND
MONROE C. BEARDSLEY

[...] [epigraph] [...]

I

The claim of the author's "intention" upon the critic's judgment has been challenged in a number of recent discussions,

notably in the debate entitled The Personal Heresy, between Professors Lewis and Tillyard

.

But it seems doubtful if this claim and most of its romantic corollaries are as yet subject to any widespread questioning.

The present writers, in a short article entitled "Intention" for a Dictionary¹ of literary criticism, raised the issue but were unable to pursue its implications at any length. We argued that the design or intention of the author is

neither available nor desirable

as standard for judging the success of a work of literary art,

and it seems to us that this is a principle which goes deep into some differences in the history of critical attitudes.

It is a principle which

accepted

or

rejected

points to the polar opposites of

classical "imitation"

and

romantic expression.

It entails many specific truths about inspiration, authenticity, biography, literary history, and scholarship, and about some trends of contemporary poetry, especially its allusiveness.

There is hardly a problem of a

[368]

literary criticism in which the critic's approach will not be qualified by his view of "intention."

Carroll—A contemporary introduction—Chapter 5—Part III

Noël Carroll
Philosophy of Art: A contemporary introduction
(1999)

[SK's comments]

---

[249]

...

Part III
Identifying art

Definition and identification

Recent attempts to define art ... have proven thus far to be inconclusive. ...

And yet we are able

to identify art ... with a very

high degree of consensus.

" . . . , presuming of course
that nothing important is riding on the

consensus

itself,
for if there is, it will soon disintegrate. . . . "

Thus the question of how we manage to do it

remains pressing.

Well,
the apparent paradox given above establishes that

the question

is difficult,
not that it is

pressing

.

Those are two different things.

Moreover, this is not

merely an academic question.

Classifying artifacts as artworks is

central to our practice

of art. ... is integral to

determining how we should respond

to it. ... Should we attend to the expressive properties of a amalgam of crushed and mangled automobile chassis or

[250]

consign them to the junkyard?

How about

  first the one,

    and then the other

?

If art, these objects bear scrutiny and interpretation. If not, we call the Department of Sanitation.

". . . Quick, what's the number for Critics and Interpreters? . . ."

Carroll—A contemporary introduction—Chapter 5—Part II (cont.)

Noël Carroll
Philosophy of Art: A contemporary introduction
(1999)

[SK's comments]

[this post picks up where this one left off]

---

[226]

...

Neo-Wittgensteinianism has an obvious problem dealing with readymades and found objects. If In Advance of a Broken Arm is an artwork, then any snow shovel that is indiscernible from it, including yours and mine, should be an artwork as well. If we simply attend to the

[227]

perceptible features of the shovels in question, they should all count as artworks, since they are perceptually indiscernible. ... But this result is wrongheaded. ... The Institutional Theorist appeals to certain nonmanifest, relational properties that In Advance of a Broken Arm possesses and that my snow shovel does not, ...

The Institutional Theorist calls the relevant social practice "the artworld." The artworld, he claims, is

a social institution, like religion,

insofar as it is

underwritten by rules and procedures.

Candidates are artworks because they abide by the pertinent artworld rules and procedures. In other words, an artwork is

generated by

playing by

the required rules and procedures. These social rules are the underlying factors that

make artworks possible

(they are

analogous to the genetic mechanisms

that account for family resemblances).

The relation of the artwork

to the rules

is

not a manifest property

of the artwork—you cannot eyeball it ... ; it is

a function of

the social context

into which the artwork is inserted.

This seems not quite

genetic

so long as it is
not quite a

mechanism.

.

It approaches a "mechanistic" tractability only as scale and sample approach infinity.

i.e. It is tractable in this way only where it can be formulated as a problem of disorganized complexity and its surface thereby observed.

But
to land on these emergent

rules

you have to ignore all of the "rules"
which prevail at the organized level,

i.e.,
in this case,
at the so-called individual level.

If the discovery that humanity is a culture-bound superorganism merely becomes the latest rationalization for subjugating 'individuals' to 'the system', then it would be better to put this discovery on a rocket and shoot it to the moon.

Margolis—The Importance of Being Earnest about the Definition and Metaphysics of Art

---

[215]

The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Vol. 68, No. 3 (SUMMER 2010), pp. 215-223

JOSEPH MARGOLIS

---

The Importance of Being Earnest about the Definition and Metaphysics of Art

[SK's comments]

The philosophy of art may be doomed,
again and again
but always once and for all,
to define what it is to be
"a work of art,"
an "artwork,"
"art"
in the sense

best suited to "the fine arts."

Modern efforts seem to end
in exhaustion
or bafflement
or sheer scatter
or

a sort of bad faith

that assures us that it was never worth the bother in the first place.

But many are troubled by the nagging sense of failure that no mere dismissal seems able to dispel.

We are still caught in the puzzles of Morris Weitz's extraordinarily disturbing early essay, ...

published ... only a few years after the appearance of Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations (1953),

on which,

however inaccurately,

it claims to depend.

If Weitz's account is regarded
as
the original gauntlet analytic aesthetics took up so eagerly almost at once ...

it is equally plausible
to credit Arthur Danto's immensely influential essay,
"The Artworld," published in 1964,
with
having confirmed
(by the absence of explicit mention,
so to say)
the single most-discussed version
of
the great complication
that
baffled all efforts
at
defining art
in accord with
the new spirit of rigor
that had just taken hold
in
analytic aesthetics.

I mean,
of course,

the trauma

produced by

Duchamp's devilish jokes

(especially the notorious Fountain)

transfigured,

in Danto's hands,
into

the sober metaphysics

of Warhol's Brillo Box.

Kristeller—The Modern System of the Arts

Paul Oskar Kristeller
The Modern System of the Arts:
A Study in the History of Aesthetics
Part I
Journal of the History of Ideas,
Vol. 12, No. 4 (Oct., 1951),
pp. 496-527

[SK's comments]

[minimal excisions in main body]

[many Greek terms dashed out]

---

I read this a while back, once and quickly. It's good to come back to it. But I would not have thought that it would figure in the Definition Wars, and I'm still not sure that it should.

[496]

THE MODERN SYSTEM OF THE ARTS:

A Study in the History of Aesthetics (I)

By Paul Oskar Kristeller

Dedicated to Professor Hans Tietze on his 70th birthday

I

  The fundamental importance of the eighteenth century in the history of aesthetics and of art criticism is generally recognized.

To be sure, there has been a great variety of theories and currents within the last two hundred years that cannot be easily brought under one common denominator.

Yet all the changes and controversies of the more recent past presuppose certain fundamental notions which go back to that classical century of modern aesthetics.

It is known that the very term "Aesthetics" was coined at that time, and, at least in the opinion of some historians, the subject matter itself, the "philosophy of art," was invented in that comparatively recent period

and can be

applied to earlier phases of Western thought

only with reservation. ¹

It is also generally agreed that such dominating concepts of

  ¹ ...

For music: H. Sahlender, Die Bewertung der Musik im System der Kuenste: Eine historisch-systematische Untersuchung (thes. Jena, 1929). ...

[497]

modern aesthetics as taste and sentiment, genius, originality and creative imagination did not assume their definite modern meaning before the eighteenth century.

Some scholars have rightly noticed that only the eighteenth century produced a type of literature in which the various arts were

compared with each other

and discussed

on the basis of common principles,

whereas up to that period treatises on poetics and rhetoric, on painting and architecture, and on music had represented quite distinct branches of writing and were primarily concerned with

technical precepts

rather than with

general ideas.

Finally, at least a few scholars have noticed that the term "Art," with a capital A and in its modern sense, and the related term "Fine Arts" (Beaux Arts) originated in all probability in the eighteenth century.

  In this paper, I shall take all these facts for granted, and shall concentrate instead on a much simpler and in a sense more fundamental point that is closely related to the problems so far mentioned, but does not seem to have received sufficient attention in its own right.

Although the terms " Art," "Fine Arts " or "Beaux Arts" are often identified with the visual arts alone, they are also quite commonly understood in a broader sense.

In this broader meaning, the term "Art" comprises above all the five major arts of

painting,

sculpture,

architecture,

music

and

poetry.

These five constitute the irreducible nucleus of the modern system of the arts, on which all writers and thinkers seem to agree.

On the other hand, certain additional arts are sometimes added to the scheme, but with less regularity, depending on the different views and interests of the authors concerned: gardening, engraving and the decorative arts, the dance and the theatre, sometimes the opera, and finally eloquence and prose literature.

John Wisdom—Things and Persons

Symposium: Things and Persons
D. M. Mackinnon, H. A. Hodges, John Wisdom
Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society.
Supplementary Volumes, Vol. 22 (1948), pp. 179-215

[SK's comments]

[202]

III.—By JOHN WISDOM.

...

[206]

...

3. To return.
MacKinnon wants ethical problems taken seriously,
and perhaps we ought to say
that

he wants them taken seriously
not merely
by people who have a particular problem to deal with,
but also
by people who are dealing with a problem of some generality
even though,
as in a problem play,
the problem is presented through a particular case.

Connected with this
which is, I believe, his main concern
are two other points :

(1) He thinks that
many ethical problems are
better put

in terms of people

than

in terms of acts.

Thus he says that writers like Kierkegaard, Buber and Marcel raise the problem of the individual.

He also says that Butler,
as opposed to a utilitarian,
argues that
the proper subject of the moralist is the individual or person in his nature and in his relation with his fellows,
and that
he refuses consequently to allow that we can so to speak
"absorb

ethical reflection

in discussion of

the means of promoting good".

Beardsley, Morgan, and Mothersill—On Art and The Definitions of the Arts

The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism,
Vol. 20, No. 2 (Winter, 1961),
pp. 175-187

ON ART AND THE DEFINITIONS OF ARTS: A SYMPOSIUM

[SK's comments]

THE DEFINITIONS OF THE ARTS

Monroe C. Beardsley

THERE IS ONE VALUABLE—but inadequately appreciated—contribution that aesthetics has made to the growth of 20th-century philosophy in general.

Its generic concepts,
art and work of art,
have served as

paradigm cases

of most of the forms of

waywardness

to which

concepts

are subject:

they have worked overtime as Horrible Examples.

When philosophers were making much of the point
that
some important terms have

variable meaning,

and in some contexts are

ambiguous,

the term "art" provided a fine example,
especially of

the process-product type

of ambiguity.

In some contexts it certainly entails conscious skill,
but
we recall also Shelley's skylark pouring forth its soul
"in profuse strains of unpremeditated art."

When "emotive meaning" came into view,
with all its devious consequences,
the term "work of art" seemed to provide a fine example of "persuasive definition,"
however defined—

for it has widely been assumed to be

classifiable among

the normative or "emotive" terms.

Finally,

through the influence

(at first clandestine,
but after 1953 public)

of Wittgenstein, and others,

many philosophers gave up
the traditional idea
that
general terms are, or ought to be,
definable by necessary and sufficient conditions—

and then these aesthetic terms became

prime examples

of "family-resemblance" and "open-texture" terms.

Haig Khatchadourian—Art-Names and Aesthetic Judgments

Haig Khatchadourian
Art-Names and Aesthetic Judgments
Philosophy, Vol. 36, No. 136 (Jan., 1961), pp. 30-48

[SK's comments]

[30]

I

IN an earlier paper
I have attempted to show,
among other things,
that the names (primarily) of

human artifacts

and

man-devised activities and processes

involve in their uses
the notion of
some

end-in-view,

function,

or use

(more or less different in the case of different names),
which partially regulates these uses.

In this paper I shall limit myself to a somewhat detailed discussion of one very important class of such common names which requires a separate treatment.

I mean art-names.

Haig Khatchadourian—Common Names and "Family Resemblances"

Haig Khatchadourian
Common Names and "Family Resemblances"
Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Vol. 18, No. 3 (Mar., 1958)

[SK's comments]

Maurice Mandelbaum:
"Haig Khatchadourian has shown that Wittgenstein is less explicit than he should have been with respect to the levels of determinateness at which these resemblances are significant for our use of common names."

This paper makes for utterly thankless reading. I think it's also completely wrong about the "determinateness" issue. Unfortunately, several art-philosophers of the day refer to it, including in the above case, where it serves as a means of reconstituting what Wittgenstein sought to dissolve. Hence we charge ahead at full-throttle.

[341]

COMMON NAMES AND "FAMILY RESEMBLANCES"

I

... we propose to give, first,
a brief analysis of Wittgenstein's notion ...

Next we shall try to show
that

whether or not "family resemblances" constitute a general feature of ordinary language so far as common names are concerned,

there are at least some common names
such that the things named by them

do have

one or more features in common,

though this feature or these features are not

a determinate or relatively determinate

quality or characteristic.

Whatsoever could be a

feature

without also being

a determinate

quality or characteristic

?

Whatsoever
could this "determinacy"
be

relative

to?

Maurice Mandelbaum—Family Resemblances and Generalization Concerning the Arts

[219]

AMERICAN PHILOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY
Volume 2, Number 3, July 1965

V. FAMILY RESEMBLANCES AND GENERALIZATION
CONCERNING THE ARTS

MAURICE MANDELBAUM

[SK's comments]

In 1954 William Elton collected and published a group of essays under the title Aesthetics and Language.

As his introduction made clear,
a common feature of these essays was

the application to aesthetic problems

of

some of the doctrines

characteristic of

recent British linguistic philosophy.

... there have been a number of important articles which, in addition to those contained in the Elton volume, suggest the direction in which this influence runs.

...

"The Task of Defining a Work of Art"
by Paul Ziff,

"The Role of Theory in Aesthetics"
by Morris Weitz,

Charles L. Stevenson's
"On 'What is a Poem'"

and
W. E. Kennick's
"Does Traditional Aesthetics Rest on a Mistake?"

In each of them one finds a conviction which was also present in most of the essays in the Elton volume:

that it is a mistake

to offer generalizations concerning the arts,

...

to attempt to discuss

what art, or beauty, or the aesthetic, or a poem,

essentially is.

In partial support of this contention, some writers have

made explicit use

of Wittgenstein's doctrine of family resemblances;

Morris Weitz, for example, ...

However, ... [he] made no attempt to analyze, clarify, or defend

the doctrine itself.

...

a husserlian interlude within a contemporary introduction (cont. #3)

 

PHENOMENOLOGY, ROLE, AND REASON:
ESSAYS ON THE COHERENCE AND DEFORMATION OF SOCIAL REALITY
By
MAURICE NATANSON
(1974)

[SK's comments]

---

Because the detonator on this discussion was the Institutional Theory of Art, and because I spent the second half of 2025 dabbling in Phenomenology, I can't resist bringing Schutz's sociological notion of "typification" into the current discussion of concept formation, just to see what (if anything) can be gleaned from it. This did open up plenty of new ground, far too much of it.

---

[33]

Chapter III

Alfred Schutz on Social Reality
and Social Science

Familiar things happen, and mankind does not bother about them. It requires a very unusual mind to undertake the analysis of the obvious.—Alfred North Whitehead

I

It has taken American philosophers and social scientists thirty-five years to catch up with the early work of Alfred Schutz.

His Der sinnhafte Aufbau der sozialen Welt: eine Einleitung in die verstehende Soziologie was first published in 1932. ... It is clear that [this work] was closely studied by some of the ablest minds of the 'thirties and 'forties ...

[34]

...

Philosophy is inescapable for the social scientist who seeks clarity and rigor in his work, ...

Nor is it solely a question of interest in the logic of scientific inquiry, ...

Philosophy is rather concerned with

the phenomena of the social world:

men acting in the context of an intersubjective reality, shared and sustained by temporal beings aware of themselves no less than of one another.

...

In its historical focus, The Phenomenology of the Social World is an attempt to vindicate and deepen Max Weber's theory of social action by providing for it a philosophical grounding which derives from some of the central ideas of Edmund Husserl and Henri Bergson.

In its systematic aspect, the Phenomenology is an effort to establish the outlines of a conception of meaning whose constitutive character is grounded in the reality of inner-time consciousness.

In its programmatic dimension, the Phenomenology is an adumbration of

a philosophy of social reality,

[35]

not simply a methodology but

an anatomy of man's existence with his fellow-men in the midst of everyday life,

within what Husserl called

the "natural attitude."

The axis on which this threefold movement turns is phenomenology itself, ...

The social world is primarily the world of everyday life as lived and appreciated and interpreted by common-sense men carrying on the cognitive and emotive traffic of daily life.

"Common-sense men" includes all of us insofar as

we act in the world

rather than

observe it formally as disinterested scientists.

...

Philosophy is, in fact, a reversal of the underlying attitude of common-sense life,

a primordial glance at what the mundane eye has simply accepted without even the intimation of serious question.

It is possible to be swept up and thrown headlong into this

reversal

without asking for it.
In this sense, it is not the

eye

that is

mundane

(or not)
but rather that which is seen.

Just as our purported morals can be broken by constructing ever more outlandish hypothetical choices, so can our

common-sense

views be broken by encountering evermore outlandish situations wherein certain questions are forced upon us.

(For left-identified transplants like me, the homelessness situation in Los Angeles is an excellent example.)

Among those not asking for it, as among those who veritably beg, there must be a full gamut of (in)susceptibility. Still, desire and susceptibility are sold separately, and every man has his price.