El presente artículo se basa en la teoría de la creatividad artística de Jon Elster para tratar de ofrecer un esbozo de definición del concepto de arte, así como las bases para una teoría del valor artístico. Se sostiene que una obra de arte es una creación humana realizada con la intención de provocar una experiencia estética, así como que el principal valor de una obra de arte radica en su capacidad para producir emociones estéticas y no estéticas. Dicha concepción (...) pone en dificultades a algunas importantes formas de arte contemporáneo, como el arte conceptual. (shrink)

In the contemporary analytic philosophy of literature and especially literary theory, the paradigmatic way of understanding the beliefs and attitudes expressed in works of literary narrative fiction is to attribute them to an implied author, an entity which the literary critic Wayne C. Booth introduced in his influential study The Rhetoric of Fiction. Roughly put, the implied author is an entity between the actual author and the narrator whose beliefs and attitudes cannot be appropriately ascribed to the actual author. Over (...) the decades, this “the author’s second self,” a construct the actual author is seen to create in her act of writing, has gained an established place in literary theory. In the philosophy of literature, in turn, the implied author has evolved into multiple entities; it has been represented and developed as, for instance, “the postulated author” (Alexander Nehamas), “the fictional author” (Gregory Currie) and “the model author” (Umberto Eco). -/- The aim of this paper is to suggest that although the implied author, and its philosophical counterparts, sheds light on certain types of narratives, it is insufficient in approaches which emphasize the truth-claims conveyed by a work. In what follows, I try to show that, first, from an ontological point of view, actual assertions in literary fiction, if any, have to be attributed to the actual author and, second, that the question of truth-claiming in and by literary fiction is an epistemological matter concerning the actual intentions of the author. -/- . (shrink)

Monroe C. Beardsley's unavailability argument is one of the most underrated anti‐intentionalist arguments in the philosophy of interpretation. The main idea of this argument is that, since independent evidence of authorial intent is normally unavailable, the literary interpreter should focus on what a text means rather than on what the author intends it to mean. In this article I propose a revised version of the argument to show that the unavailability of authorial intent suffices to make actual intentionalism untenable as (...) a recommendation for finding out textual meaning. (shrink)

We aim to develop a take on the meaning of works of art that builds on Dennett’s view on the nature of intentionality, namely, that the intentionality exhibited by mental phenomena is not original, but derived. Regarding the meaning of works of art, theories that hold that the meaning is determined by the intentions of the author when creating the work are considered intentionalist. Adopting the view of derived intentionality implies that it is no longer possible to maintain that the (...) semantic content of a work of art is closely linked to the creative act that gave rise to it; accordingly, intentionalist theories should be, broadly speaking, abandoned. However, we claim that one aspect of intentionalist theories is accurate and, moreover, compatible with the perspective on intentionality we adopt: The fact that part of the meaning of a work of art is given by the interpretations that arise when it is assumed that the work was produced by an agent with the purpose of transmitting something. We call this interpretative strategy the work-of-art stance and argue that it should be understood as a subtype of the intentional stance. According to our proposal, this interpretive strategy is part of a view that tries to explain the meaning of works of art as partially indeterminate, relative to a history (and not to a foundational origin) and dependent on interpretive attribution. En este artículo elaboramos una propuesta sobre el significado de las obras de arte que se apoya en la perspectiva de Dennett acerca de la naturaleza de la intencionalidad de los fenómenos mentales. De acuerdo a ella, la intencionalidad que estos exhiben no es original, sino derivada. Adoptar la perspectiva de la intencionalidad derivada implica que ya no será posible sostener que el significado de una obra de arte esté vinculado al acto creativo que le dio origen o que esté determinado por las intenciones que tuvo su autor al crearlas, como han sostenido las teorías intencionalistas. Ahora bien, creemos que hay un aspecto de estas que no es incompatible con la perspectiva de intencionalidad derivada. Se trata del hecho de que parte del significado de la obra de arte está dado por las interpretaciones que surgen sólo cuando se asume que la misma fue producida por un agente con el propósito de transmitir algo. Llamaremos a esta estrategia interpretativa actitud de la obra de arte y defenderemos que debe ser entendida como un subtipo de la actitud intencional. Esta estrategia interpretativa forma parte de una propuesta que intenta explicar el significado de las obras de arte como siendo parcialmente indeterminado, relativo a una historia y dependiente de la atribución interpretativa. (shrink)

This paper is a continuation of a debate between Noël Carroll, who defends intentionalism, and Kent Wilson and myself, who argue that the intentions of artists are not relevant to the interpretation of works of art.