Topic summary
Intentional fallacy
Extracted from the Wikipedia article Authorial intent.
In literary theory and aesthetics, authorial intent is 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. Opponents, who dispute its hermeneutical importance, label this position the intentional fallacy and count it among the informal fallacies.