Intention, Interpretation, and Stories

Intention and Interpretation

I “WHAT DOES THE LITERARY INTERPRETER do? He tells us what a literary work means.” Thus says Monroe Beardsley, who has written as thoughtfully and influentially on the subject as any philosopher in the past fifty years, and this is as good a place to start as any. Though there may well be ways of embodying interpretations that do not involve saying what something means (for example, reading a p...

Children’s Picture Interpretation: Appearance or Intention?

Pictures are defined by their creator's intentions and resemblance to their real world referents. Here we examine whether young children follow a realist route (e.g., focusing on how closely pictures resemble their referents) or intentional route (e.g., focusing on what a picture is intended to represent by its artist) when identifying a picture's referent. In 3 experiments, we contrasted an ar...

Intention and Interpretation in Art: A Semiotic Analysis

Intention, interpretation and the computational structure of language

I show how a conversational process that takes simple, intuitively meaningful steps may be understood as a sophisticated computation that derives the richly detailed, complex representations implicit in our knowledge of language. To develop the account, I argue that natural language is structured in a way that lets us formalize grammatical knowledge precisely in terms of rich primitives of inte...

stories of the prophets in the interpretation futuh razi

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