artful intentions

Artful Intentions: Paisley Livingston, Art and Intention: A Philosophical StudyArt and Intention: A Philosophical Study by Paisley LivingstonReview by: Jerrold LevinsonThe Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Vol. 65, No. 3 (Summer, 2007), pp. 299-305Published by: Wiley on behalf of The American Society for AestheticsStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4622242 .

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Essay Review

Artful Intentions:

Paisley Livingston, Art and Intention: A Philosophical Study

BY JERROLD LEVINSON

LIVINGSTON, PAISLEY. Art and Intention: A Philosophical Study. Oxford University Press, 2005, 272 pp., 2 b&w illus., $65.00 cloth, $35.00 paper.

Paisley Livingston's Art and Intention: A Philo-

sophical Study is the first full-length treatment in the literature of analytic aesthetics of the relevance of intention to the domain of art. Al- though it does not cover the entire range of such issues, it does manage to cover an impressive por- tion. A distinctive feature of Art and Intention is its extensive use of literary and cinematic case studies in support and illustration of its central theses. Livingston deploys the tools of a trained literary scholar, drawing intelligently and sensi- tively on detailed studies of the works, working methods, and working lives of a number of ma- jor novelists and filmmakers in making his points. Another distinctive feature of Art and Intention is its attention to theories and theorists in the conti- nental tradition, although that attention is more often than not critical, sometimes devastatingly SO.

In accord with both what would be the most likely conjecture regarding my writerly intentions at this point, as well as conventional expectations for a review of an academic monograph, I will now

proceed to give a synopsis of the main concerns and claims of this outstanding book.

II

The opening chapter undertakes a task that had until this point been largely dodged by those of us who traffic in intentions as part and parcel of our theorizing about art and its appreciation, namely, what in blazes are they? Livingston adopts a robustly realist perspective on the nature of intentions, regarding them as bona fide mental states or conditions, ones related to yet irreducible to beliefs, desires, wishes, expectations, willings, or any other denizens of the mental menagerie. Af- ter canvassing the most promising lines of thought in contemporary philosophy of mind, Livingston offers a conception of intention inspired mainly by the work of Alfred Mele and Michael Brat- man, to the effect that an intention is a bipartite entity, involving an executive attitude toward an action plan, where the former can be elaborated as an attitude of being settled on trying to exe- cute some plan or of being defeasibly committed to executing it. Intentions are thus prior to actions and standardly initiate them, although they also usually function to sustain and guide actions after they are in progress. Livingston also suggests, plausibly enough, that intentions are in place when- ever someone acts intentionally, so that doing A

The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 65:3 Summer 2007



300 The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism

intentionally is tantamount to having and acting on an intention to do A. The following quote sums pretty well Livingston's conception of intention and its relation to action: "In a range of central cases, intentional action amounts to the execution and realization of a plan, where the agent effec- tively follows and is guided by the plan in per- forming actions that, in manifesting sufficient levels of skill and control, bring about the intended outcome" (p. 14).

The second chapter addresses the nature of creation in art and queries the place of intention in relation to that. Steering between the Scylla of regarding artistic creation as pure inspiration and the Charybdis of regarding it as mere rational applica- tion of method, Livingston sensibly proposes that although all art is at some level intended, phenom- ena such as the "automatic writing" of the Surreal- ists being no exception, this hardly means that all of the artistically relevant features of an artwork have been intended. The complexity of the typical multistage creative process, with its initial visions and subsequent revisions, false starts and fresh be- ginnings, reconceptions and reorientations, is illus- trated through a close study of Virginia Woolf's protracted composition of the novel The Waves. Perhaps the most interesting part of this chapter concerns a distinction between two kinds of completeness one may ascribe to works of art, one aesthetic and one genetic. The former is roughly a matter of a work having attained an optimal aesthetic condition relative to criteria proper to works of that genre. The latter, in contrast, is not an evalua- tive matter, but one tied to the artist's perspective on what he or she has done, implying a decision to the effect that the work is, for better or worse, fin- ished. Livingston nicely shows that such a decision, and hence genetic completeness, is something that implicates long-range intentionality or temporally extended agency, as it involves a commitment, albeit defeasible, to not alter a work further in future, "a retrospective judgment that this work and its creation are thereby complete, at least as far as the artist's own contributions are concerned" (p. 56). The chapter concludes with an illustration of four kinds of artistic fragments-"accidental," "abandoned," "romantic," and "proper" ones-- whose distinctness can be made out only in terms of intentions of their respective artists.

Chapter Three is concerned with the notion of authorship and considers a spectrum of views about it, ranging from the most heartily realist to

the most eliminatively irrealist. Siding wisely with the former, Livingston identifies as the primary motivation for recognizing authors in the most ro- bust sense "the interest we take in knowing who, on a specific occasion, has been proximally respon- sible for the intentional production of a given utterance" (p. 68), defining an author as "an agent who intentionally makes an utterance ... an intended function of which is expression or communication" (p. 69). Livingston's attention then turns to the idea of joint authorship, a phenomenon fairly prominent in arts such as literature and film, but more common than one might think in paint- ing and music as well. Joint authorship, Livingston maintains, requires joint action "supported by mu- tual knowledge and reciprocal assistance" (p. 77) where such authors "share the aim of contributing to the making of a single utterance or work" (p. 79). This means, in particular, that "some item can be collectively produced, in the sense of being the result of efforts of more than one person, without having been collaboratively or jointly authored" (p.75). A clear example of this is what Livingston aptly dubs a "traffic jam" movie, unfortunately not an uncommon upshot of the current Hollywood movie-making machine, where the final product results from a great number of individual uncoor- dinated and sometimes flatly antagonistic efforts and decisions.

Chapter Four turns to the fascinating issues of interpretively relevant relations between individual works of a given artist and between any such work and the artist's oeuvre as a whole or, as Liv- ingston most often labels it, the artist's life work. Livingston's point of departure here, I should note, is a 1987 essay of mine, "Artworks and the Future." Starting from a default position of traditional his- toricism, according to which works are rightly viewed and appreciated against the backdrop of works that have preceded them, Livingston considers when, in what manner, and to what extent works may sometimes be rightly viewed and appreciated in the light of works that follow them. Different modes of interpretive retroactivism and retrospectivism are distinguished, with attention then being primarily focused on conditions under which it is legitimate to interpret early works of a given artist in terms of later works, or the entire life work, of that same artist. Livingston exam- ines two of the justifications I offer for retroactive intraoeuvral interpretation, one appealing to a second-order intention on the part of artists that



Essay Review 301

their works be so interpreted and the other to the idea that the artist's works as a whole in effect constitute a grand work or overarching utterance, the parts of which are thus naturally to be understood in relation to one another. Livingston sees problems with both of these alternatives if meant generally, holding that second-order intentions are neither necessary nor sufficient for intraoeuvral relations of interpretive importance and that the ensemble of works of a given artist is not always plausibly viewable as constituting a grand work or overarching utterance, since in many cases clear ruptures, periods, and reversals in an artist's oeuvre are observable. Different sce- narios are then sketched for the emergence of interpretively relevant retroactive intraoeuvral relations, examples from Yukio Mishima, Ingmar Bergman, and Woolf being tellingly contrasted, and then that of Karen Blixen's (or Isak Dinesen's) subsequent self-translation of her Seven Gothic Tales from English to Danish is examined in detail.

Chapter Five concerns itself with terrain fa- miliar to aestheticians lo these forty or so years, namely, the lessons for the understanding and ontology of literary works that are to be drawn from Jorge Luis Borges's celebrated story "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote." Livingston's fo- cus, however, is refreshingly different from most. It is not the lesson itself, which he takes to be valid and which tells us that literary works are not to be identified with their texts nor their meanings with the meanings of their texts, but rather the conception of text that is usually presupposed in framing the argument the story advances from which the lesson can be drawn. Livingston has little trouble in showing that neither a purely syntactic conception ("sameness of spelling") nor a purely illocu- tionary conception ("sameness of what is meant or conveyed") of text is adequate to the situation, the former being too narrow, leaving out features such as font and italicization that are arguably constitu- tive of some texts, and the latter being too broad, according no weight to the manifest lexical di- mension of texts. A combined syntactic-semantic conception, although it fares better, is also held to be subject to counterexamples.

Livingston instead proposes that texts be indi- viduated locutionarily, that is, in terms of what an author has actually written or uttered, which in turn cashes out in terms of the author's intentions in producing inscriptions. A locutionarily identified

text, that is, a text type, consists of "a primary token comprised of intended and grouped characters in a notation scheme used in a target language," plus all replicas of that token, whether causally derived from it or not (p. 123).

The locutionary conception of text identity, as I understand it, is roughly an intentionalized reframing of the syntactic conception, one that makes it more sensitive to aspects of texts we rec- ognize in practice than a purely syntactic conception can be. Happily, on a locutionary conception of texts, the implicit Borgesian argument for the nonidentity of texts and works still goes through. Before concluding, Livingston finds in the list of the fictional Menard's literary accomplishments food for reflection on the varieties of versions of literary works it may be in our interest to counte- nance.

The topic of Chapter Six is the elephant in the room of debates on the relevance of intentions to art. It is the issue of what determines the meaning of a literary work, or equivalently, of what the correct criteria are for interpretation of a literary work. Livingston skillfully reviews the gamut of positions that have lately figured in this debate, running from realist absolute intentionalism (Hirsch, Juhl, Irwin), to irrealist absolute intentionalism (Eco, Fish), to absolute anti- intentionalism (Beardsley, Dickie, Nathan), to fic- tionalist intentionalism (Nehamas), to hypothetical intentionalism (Tolhurst, Currie, Levinson), and finally to partial intentionalism (Iseminger, Carroll, Stecker). The last of these, the view em- braced by Livingston, holds roughly that actual authorial intentions are sometimes, but not always, relevant to a determination of what a literary work means, and that in particular even the text, the context, the operative conventions of dis- course, and our best hypotheses of authorial intention taken together are sometimes not sufficient to fix such meaning in its entirety. At root this is so, Livingston holds, because of the implicit meanings of literary works. Implicit meaning, such as the ironic import of an utterance, is meaning "that is not directly conveyed, but which is conveyed indirectly, that is, by means of the convey- ing of some other meaning" (p. 149). Thus, some actual intentions, namely intentions to convey implicit meanings, are not interpretively redundant, eschewable in favor of manifest features of a work understood in context: "in even the most success- ful art-making, the work's implicit meanings are




not immanent in the final artistic structure ... nor are they fully determined by the latter in conjunc- tion with conventions or other contextual factors alone" (p. 150).

Livingston regards as the most serious rival to the partial intentionalism that he advocates the hypothetical intentionalism that I have de- fended, which takes work meaning to be centrally determined by a best hypothesis as to intended authorial meaning on the part of an appropriate or ideal audience for a work. Livingston accordingly devotes a good part of the present chapter to criticism of that view, a criticism that rests primarily on two grounds. The first is that the distinction hypothetical intentionalism requires between categorial intentions and semantic intentions with respect to a literary work-for example, that some text be taken as a poem versus that it be understood to express a nihilistic world view, so as to allow intentions of the former but not the latter sort to be interpretively crucial-is blurry and prob- lematic. The second is that, even assuming such a distinction to be tenable, there is no clear rationale for according the two sorts of intention different statuses in a theory of interpretation. A third ground, on which Livingston wisely appears to place less weight, is that categorial intentions governing works are quite often difficult to discern. I regard this three-pronged criticism as wide of the mark and respond to it later in this commentary. Oddly enough, however, Livingston devotes virtually no attention to the core of the hypothetical intentionalist perspective, namely, the idea that a best hypothesis of authorial intent, rather than authorial intent itself, is what should be taken as determinative of work meaning on an utterance model of literary works.

The final chapter develops a partial intentionalist account of both fictional status and fictional truth. After sympathetic consideration of Gregory Currie's account of the literary fiction-making intention, which stresses the invitation extended to readers to imagine or make-believe in accord with a text, Livingston proposes a related account of his own, adding a second condition that requires the text to first express a series of imaginings. And after equally sympathetic but critical consideration of the ideas of David Lewis and others as to what makes for truth in fiction, Livingston offers what he labels a pragmatic account of the issue, one that construes fictional truth "in terms of appropriate- ness of make-believe in response to a work's con-

tent" and that has "the advantage of foreground- ing the issue's normative character" (p. 196).

To my mind, what this shows is that issues of fictional truth ultimately devolve on the issues dis- cussed in the previous chapter, as to what ultimately determines a work's meaning or its proper interpretation, on all levels, from that of the most basic story to that of the most abstruse significance.

In conclusion, Livingston formulates an interpretive heuristic that enjoins interpreters seeking to determine what is true in a fiction to adopt as background to interpretive activity the premises or assumptions that the author settled on in creat- ing the work, provided those mesh in integrating ways with the manifest features of the work, and then illustrates that heuristic in practice through an interpretation of Istvan Svabo's 1991 film Meet- ing Venus.

III

I turn now to some reservations and rejoinders regarding the rich array of analyses and propos- als that Livingston offers us in Art and Intention. Before proceeding, however, I want to underline how substantial is my degree of agreement with Livingston, beginning with allegiance to realism about intentional psychology and continuing with the unavoidability of adverting to real intentions in the interpretation of art, the importance of intraoeuvral relationships in the understanding of art, and the necessity of an intentional characteri- zation of fictionality.

My first reservation is on the score of the ad- equacy of the framework offered in the opening chapter regarding what intentions are as this re- lates to the sphere of art. Although it is true that many of the intentions that are of relevance in that domain are productive intentions that revolve around doing or making artworks and thus lend themselves readily enough to conception along the lines of "executive attitudes toward action plans," there are others, revolving around the intended re- ception and treatment of artworks on the part of audiences or interpreters, that cry out for understanding along different lines. Livingston briefly acknowledges the possibility of intentions that do not seem directed on possible future actions of the agent, such as that of a man who intends that someone he cares for remain physically comfortable (p. 17), but regards them as either borderline cases



Essay Review 303

or else ultimately analyzable as involving attitudes toward plans. However, given the importance and variety of artistic intentions of this sort and their crucial role in art-making, that seems an unpromis- ing strategy. Here is a sampling of such intentions: intending something to be taken as a sculpture; intending performers of one's string quartet to use minimal vibrato; intending one's latest work to be seen as a clear departure in style; and intending those of insufficient culture to give one's film, which bristles with cinematic allusions, a miss. One can go on indefinitely, but with increasing skepticism that all such cases can be assimilated to the model Livingston has offered. Even if, as Livingston suggests, such intentions come close to being mere wishes, I submit that they are still distinct from them and need to be analyzed other than as attitudes toward the agent's own plans of action. Most pointedly, they seem to involve normative attitudes as regards the actions of others.

My second reservation concerns Livingston's treatment of the singular case of Karen Blixen's later Danish translations of stories originally com- posed by her in English, which he broaches at the end of his illuminating discussion of interpretively relevant retroactive intraoeuvral relationships. Recall that they are Blixen's own translations of the stories, but ones that modify them, usually in the direction of greater amplification of detail and greater explication of obscurities. (The clearest such instance is where the Danish version of one of the stories, "Alkmene," employs a mythological idiom, invoking the god Loki's sow- ing of seed, that heightens the sexual undercurrent of the passage in question.) As I understand Liv- ingston's take on this case, it should be seen as one where the later, Danish versions properly in- flect our interpretation of the earlier, English versions and justify an altered view of the content of the stories in their earlier incarnation. Livingston remarks that the subsequent Danish translations "often show us what Blixen was trying to say, but did not fully manage to underscore, in her English texts" (p. 109), and he claims that Blixen's "Danish stories and English originals stand in a special relationship to each other because the Danish rewrit- ings were based on the English ones and provided an implicit refinement and reworking of them" (p. 110).

But as one who is not in principle opposed to retroactive intraoeuvral inflections of content, in this case I beg to differ. Although Blixen's Danish

stories indeed appear to have a somewhat different meaning and tone than the English ones, I do not see the justification for visiting those differences in meaning and tone on the stories in their original form. For that would only seem to under- cut the autonomy the later versions were clearly intended have, viewed as they apparently were by Blixen, as a chance to make explicit, and often starker, what is only implicit, and usually gentler, in the earlier versions. But that something is only implicit or veiled in a work of fiction, rather than explicit or entirely unveiled, is a nontrivial part of its content, and the fact that a later reworking of a story is forthright on some point does not make it retroactively true that such a point is now unequivocally part of the content of the story in its original form. To say so in effect effaces crucial differences between the stories and makes it hard to understand the preference one might rea- sonably have, purely linguistic differences aside, between the two stories. Livingston affirms that when Blixen wrote "The Dreamers," one of the stories in question, "she had no intention of later refining aspects of its artistic content by rewriting the work in Danish" (p. 110). But why think that she did that-that is, refined aspects of the original story's artistic content-rather than giving us a closely related story, with its own specific content, but not one to be retroactively ascribed to the original story?1

I now take up the issue of kinds of versions of artworks, broached during Livingston's discussion of the literary output of the fictional Pierre Menard. Livingston recognizes two important kinds of versions, ones that are surrogates for their originals, such as ordinary translations, and ones that are adaptations of originals, such as re- makes of films or cinematic transpositions of nov- els. Although Livingston seems inclined to regard parodies and homages as belonging in the category of adaptations as well, I would be inclined to place them in a category of their own and as not even falling under the broad heading of versions. A version of a work should stand to that work in a relationship of being more or less the same thing or of having more or less the same content. I grant that the phrases I have just employed are immensely vague, but I think they suffice for us to see that how a parody or homage stands to an original is quite different from how a translation or adaptation stands to an original. The former are essentially commentaries on or refractions of their




models, whereas the latter are more like those models in different guises. Generalizing wildly, if one likes an original, one is likely to also like, if perhaps to a lesser degree, versions of it, including translations and adaptations; however, if one likes an original, there is no particular likelihood that one will like a commentary on or refraction of it. Finally, by what criteria might we distinguish kinds of versions of artworks, or versions from nonver- sions? Livingston suggests that the intended function of the item is one key; I suggest that the appreciation appropriate to the item in question is another.

I come now to Livingston's perspective on the interpretation of works of art, literary and cinematic ones in particular. Before getting to some concerns about Livingston's treatment of the issues and of hypothetical intentionalism in particular, I want to second Livingston's skepticism about the aptness of a conversational model of our engagement with works of art, a model that some participants to this debate have recommended. As Livingston notes, we do not literally converse with deceased authors or filmmakers, but because that may seem a somewhat jocular reservation, it is important to stress that the problems with the conversational model go much deeper. For even where living artists are concerned, the in- teraction between the artist and his or her pub- lic is not much like a conversation in the literal sense. First, the parties are not mutually present to one another in a given temporal frame. Second, engagement is primarily with the artwork, albeit understood as the product of a particular person, rather than primarily with a person, through that person's speech. Third, there is no scope for back- and-forth exchange, for spontaneous changes of direction, for instantaneous correction of misun- derstandings. Fourth, there is a glaring asymmetry in role, the artist in effect proposing or offering and the audience in effect disposing or receiving, and fifth, unlike literal conversation, artistic activity does not always have the goal of communication, sometimes confining itself to expression alone, without regard for its communication to another party. It is accordingly unreasonable to think that the interpretive norms of real conversation are robustly in place when it comes to our inter- action with the products of art. So to the extent actual intentionalism is made to rest on an un- derlying conversational model of our engagement with artworks, to that extent, it is on shaky ground.

And now, finally, to Livingston's treatment of hypothetical intentionalism: to begin, I just want to stress that, at least in the version I espouse, a hypothetical intentionalist is not committed in his or her interpretive endeavors to scorning, or taking no account of, authorial facts such as "expressed intentions in interviews" to mean this or that (p. 158). Of course such an interpreter can be guided by such information, which usually pro- vides valuable hints toward apt interpretation, but such an interpreter must decline to consider pub- licly expressed intentions as in any way determinative of how a work is to be interpreted.

Recall now Livingston's three-fold criticism of hypothetical intentionalism: that its presupposed distinction of categorial and semantic intentions is untenable, that the distinction does not in any event justify according a different interpretive status to categorial as opposed to semantic intentions, and that categorial intentions are often difficult to discern.2 Here are some responses to that criticism.

First, the distinction of categorial and semantic intentions is simply not as blurry as Livingston suggests. Consider one of the examples said to prob- lematize the distinction: it is claimed that Henry James's intention, presumably categorial, to write a ghost story in Turn of the Screw is not separable from his intention, presumably semantic, to make the existence of ghosts part of the story. In the first place, it is not entirely clear that ghost story counts as an appreciatively fundamental category for a verbal text on the order of satire, novella, ode, or graphic poem, one whose orientation of our way of taking the text is crucial to correct appreciation. In the second place, and more importantly, intending something to be a ghost story, that is, to be read as belonging to that category, does not strictly require intending part of the story content to be that ghosts exist. Something can be a ghost story, as perhaps is Turn of the Screw, while simply entertaining, or seriously playing with, the idea that there are ghosts; in other words, something in the genre of ghost story need not be fictionally committed to the existence of ghosts. And in the third place, even were we to allow that the categorial intention that something be a ghost story entailed the semantic intention to make the existence of ghosts part of the story's content, the two intentions would remain distinct for all that.3

Second, there is a clear rationale for according categorial intentions a status different from



Essay Review 305

semantic intentions in interpreting a work and thus for respecting actual ones of the former stripe while keeping one's distance from actual intentions of the latter stripe. It is that categorial intentions are interpretively prior to semantic ones, being absolutely crucial to figuring out what works are before attempting to discern what they might mean. Without a basic grasp of a work's categorial identity-its genre, medium, or artform-interpretation is wholly unlikely to ar- rive at what a work is saying, expressing, or convey- ing. That is why categorial intentions and semantic intentions with respect to a work of art cannot be thought of as on a par or equally negotiable.

Finally, the difficulty of ascertaining the categorial intention that governs an artwork, perhaps most acute in connection with items of contemporary visual art, which range over conceptual works, performance pieces, sculptural groups, as- semblages, installations, and so on, is one thing; the difficulty of determining whether such a categorial intention has been realized is another. The former is sometimes substantial, as the categorial intentions behind works of art are generally not written on their surfaces or affixed to them as labels; the latter is usually minimal, just a matter of noting whether the work, with its manifest features, can be ranged under the category in question, regard- less of whether such ranging is particularly natural.

So much for the criticisms of hypothetical intentionalism to be found in Art and Intention. Turn- ing as they do almost entirely on the viability of the distinction between categorial and semantic intentions, they seem to largely sidestep the main issue, namely, how is the meaning of artworks best understood? What is needed at this point from a defender of hypothetical intentionalism is a restatement of the basic motivation for understanding work meaning in terms of optimally projected intentions to mean, and this is that it squares best with what it is to interpret something as a work of art, with what we properly aim at in doing so. We want to know what a verbal text conveys as a work of literature, what an image sequence conveys as a work of cinema. As such, these constitute utterances, ones anchored in particular agents and contexts, as most participants to this debate agree, but they are ones whose meanings are not rightly identified, even in part, with what meanings those agents actually intended to convey in those contexts, but rather with what meanings it would be most reasonable, on a combination of epistemic

and aesthetic grounds, and in light of all interpretively admissible evidence, to ascribe to such agents as intended.

A conception of work meaning along such lines has signal advantages over that proposed by moderate actual intentionalists such as Livingston, Gary Iseminger, and Robert Stecker. First, it is attractively univocal, whereas that of moderate actual intentionalism is unavoidably disjunctive. Second, it underscores, rather than blurs, the distinction between the meaning of a literary utterance, on the one hand, and what an author meant in making such an utterance, on the other hand. Clearly, a restatement of motivation seasoned with hints of advantages does not amount to a full defense of hypothetical intentionalism, but this is not the place for that.4

Art and Intention addresses itself to an impressive number of issues of interest in contemporary philosophical aesthetics. On each of them it advances the debate in no small measure. It thus be- comes an essential reference in the future evolu- tion of that debate.

JERROLD LEVINSON

Department of Philosophy University of Maryland College Park, Maryland 20742 INTERNET: [email protected]

1. A case similar in many respects to the present one is that of Isaac Bashevis Singer's self-translation into En- glish of stories originally written in Yiddish. "These translations -'second originals' as Singer called them-grew to be quite different from the Yiddish texts. Singer often stripped much of the metaphysics and verbal density out of his native- language efforts, leaving a simpler mix of the imaginative and the quotidian, the carnal and the concrete, that he felt would appeal to the tastes of English-language readers" (D. T. Max, New York Times Book Review, December 24, 2006, p. 9). Clearly, in this case as in that of Blixen, the meaning and force of these "second originals" should not be ascribed to or allowed to impose on that of the "first originals."

2. I cannot forbear drawing attention to the similarity between this sequence of charges and the well-known anec- dote recounted in Freud's book on jokes, which tells of someone who borrows a kettle from a neighbor, who is then un- satisfied with it upon its return owing to the large hole it now contains, only to be offered this defense by the other: "In the first place, I didn't borrow your kettle; in the second place, it already had a hole in it when you lent it to me; and in the third place, I returned it to you intact."

3. Thanks to Noel Carroll for this observation. 4. I hope to undertake such elsewhere, partly through

rebuttal of some recent criticisms of hypothetical intentionalism.



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