Authorial intent

In literary theory and aesthetics, authorial intent refers to an author's intent as it is encoded in their work. Authorial intentionalism is the hermeneutical view that an author's intentions should constrain the ways in which a text is properly interpreted.^[1] Opponents, who dispute its hermeneutical importance, have labelled this position the intentional fallacy and count it among the informal fallacies.^[2]

There are actually two types of Intentionalism: Actual Intentionalism and Hypothetical Intentionalism. Actual Intentionalism is the standard intentionalist view that the meaning of a work is dependent on authorial intent. Hypothetical Intentionalism is a more recent view; it views the meaning of a work as being what an ideal reader would hypothesize the writer's intent to have been — for hypothetical intentionalism, it is ultimately the hypothesis of the reader, not the truth, that matters.^[3]