Abstract
I clarify Locke’s intentionalism and explain what we might gain by paying more attention to the role of linguistic intentions in the work of the British empiricists.
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Notes
Note that my statement of intentionalism is very undemanding: it stipulates only that one of our main aims as interpreters, and perhaps our primary aim, is to recover what the speaker intended to communicate. I have not undertaken the kind of investigation required to support my suspicion that early modern intentionalism was widespread, but see, in addition to the texts quoted or cited in my paper, Samuel Clarke’s A Demonstration of the Being and Attributes of God, ed. Ezio Vailati (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), Section 3, p. 21, where an author’s “true meaning” is equated with his “true intention,” and the “Apology” in A Tale of a Tub, sixth edition (London: S. Tooke and B. Motte, 1724), pp. iii-xxi, where Jonathan Swift defends himself against interpreters who have “overlooked the author’s intention” (p. viii). (The “Tale” itself, for example in section 2 (pp. 22–44), is in part a parody of anti-intentionalist modes of interpretation.) Swift’s intentionalism resembles mine in allowing for unintended meanings. As an excuse for offensive unintended meanings in his own text, Swift pleads “youth, and frankness of speech, and his papers being out of his power at the time they were published” (p. xii). His final point raises an issue for intentionalism—the social or collaborative character of modern textual production—that is pursued by Jerome J. McGann in A Critique of Modern Textual Criticism (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1992), an expanded edition of a book first published by the University of Chicago Press in 1983.
That appointment (whether by evolving practice or by explicit decree) is itself an act of intention ties everything together into a very neat package.
Locke, Language, and Early-Modern Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), p. 7.
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Winkler, K.P. Early Modern Intentionalism: Replies to LoLordo’s Comments. Philosophia 37, 507–509 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-008-9149-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-008-9149-1