Intention and sense

Does the intention of the author determine the sense? There are problems with saying Yes, particularly when “intention” is assumed to be the mental state of the author, which is unrecoverable. There are also problems with saying No, because that seems to introduce (as ED Hirsch argues) a hermeneutical free-for-all.

We can address this, medievally, by complicating what we mean by “sense.” After all, linking sense to authorial intent is only a problem if there is only one sense. If there are multiple senses, then one of them might be a direct expression of the author’s intention without committing us to saying that all of them are.

Moses intended “rock” to refer to the actual rocky rock that Moses struck. The literal sense is what he intends. But that’s not the only sense there is, as Paul makes clear, and the other senses, though intended by God, need not be intended by Moses. Linking intention to the literal sense, while acknowledging multiple senses, makes possible a proliferating richness of meaning while preventing what Eco calls hermeneutical drift.