Fallacy of Intention

Wimsatt and Beardsley’s “Intentional Fallacy” had me thinking about the very title of this article.  On first look, I thought that this article would be something similar to Ong’s “The Writer’s Audience is Always a Fiction”.  Fictionalization is like a falsification that the author is purposefully using in order to accomplish a successful writing.    Wimsatt and Beardsley are not saying this.  Their definition of “intentional fallacy” is the idea that “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” (811).  So, the intention seems to refer to the author’s “design or plan” or the author’s “attitude toward his work”, and the fallacy seems to refer to the critics taking into account the author’s intention when looking at the success of a work (811).

I think what gets me is the use and placing of the word “intentional”.    The critics are not intentionally judging a work in a false manner.  The author doesn’t have false intentions.  The author is also not intentionally creating a falsehood.  According to Wimsatt and Beardsley it’s the critics that are creating the falsehood by saying that the author’s intention is the way we should read a piece of work.  So, would that be an intentional fallacy or would there be a “fallacy in looking at intention”?  It doesn’t sound as smooth as intentional fallacy, so maybe a “fallacy of intention”?  Or maybe there needs to be an adjectival form of “fallacy”, like fallical.  Then the title/ term could be a “fallical intention”. 

On the other hand, I am a new reader of the idea of “intentional fallacy”, but I bet many critics and professors would know exactly what “intentional fallacy” means.  Wimsatt and Beardsely created a term and clearly defined it, so when referring to the idea that a work should not be judged based on an author’s intention, professors and critics and students, etc. can use the term “intentional fallacy” without worrying that someone will think they mean something else like the idea of “fictionalization”.