Intentional fallacy

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As intentional fallacy or intentionalistischer fallacy (English intentional fallacy ) is in the literary theory of the New Criticism , which aims referred to an approach to texts that intention (intention) of the author to reconstruct when composing the work.

The intentional fallacy must be distinguished from the intensional fallacy .

The concept of intentional fallacy goes back to the essay The Intentional Fallacy , published by William Kurtz Wimsatt, Jr. (1907–1975) and Monroe Beardsley in 1946. This also includes its classic formulation:

"[...] the design or intention of the author is neither available nor desirable as a standard for judging the success of a work of literary art"

"[...] the intent or intent of the author is neither available nor desirable as a yardstick for judging the success of a literary work."

Such an “intentionalist” interpretation was considered a fallacy by the New Critics , as they understood the literary work of art ontologically as a self-contained, autonomous textual system that had to be interpreted from within. This view represented a break with the approach that had dominated the academic literature from the beginning of the 19th century to the 1920s, which interpreted texts in relation to their historical, biographical and linguistic ( philological ) context.

literature

  • WK Wimsatt, Monroe Beardsley: The Intentional Fallacy . In: WK Wimsatt: The Verbal Icon . University of Kentucky Press, Lexington 1954.
  • Lutz Danneberg , Hans-Harald Müller: The “intentional fallacy” a dogma? Systematic research report on the controversy about an intentionalist conception in the text sciences. Part I and II. In: Zeitschrift für Allgemeine Wissenschaftstheorie XIV, 1983, pp. 103-137 and pp. 376-411.