If an author uses words that cannot, by any reasonable interpretation, possibly mean what he intends, then the work is simply random noise and meaningless nonsense.
Hirsch, who in his influential book Validity in Interpretation (1967) argues for "the sensible belief that a text means what its author meant".
However, Bevir privileges the author's intentions as the starting point for interpretation, which then opens up a space for negotiating meanings with readers' perspectives.
[14][3][5] The Cambridge School of conventionalist hermeneutics, a position most elaborated by Quentin Skinner, might be aligned as somewhat similar to weak intentionalism.
While not dismissing the role of authorial intent, the Cambridge School heavily emphasizes examining how the text interacted with — and responded to — its particular contextual situation.
The Cambridge School believes that meaning emerges from scrutinizing the complex interplay between the words on the page and the contextual factors surrounding its creation.
The intended force of "I do" in such a circumstance can only be comprehended by an observer when he understands the meaning and complexity of the social activity of marriage.
For Cambridge School conventionalists, the task is: to, with as much contextual information as possible, establish which conventions a text was interacting with at the time of its creation; from there, the author's intent may be inferred and understood.
[3] Anti-intentionalism maintains that a work's meaning is entirely determined by linguistic and literary conventions and rejects the relevance of authorial intent.
[3] Anti-intentionalism began with the work of William K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley when they coauthored the seminal paper The Intentional Fallacy in 1946.
In it, he argued that once a work was published, it became disconnected from the author's intentions and open to perpetual re-interpretation by successive readers across different contexts.
"[19] For Barthes, and other post-structuralists like Jacques Derrida, the author's intentions were unknowable and irrelevant to the constantly shifting interpretations produced by readers.
New Criticism, as espoused by Cleanth Brooks, W. K. Wimsatt, T. S. Eliot, and others, argued that authorial intent is irrelevant to understanding a work of literature; the objective meaning is to be found in the pure text itself.
External evidence — anything not contained within the text itself, such as statements made by the poet about the poem that is being interpreted — does not belong to literary criticism.
The approach avoids subjectivity or essentialism in descriptions produced through its recognition that reading is determined by textual and also cultural constraints.
According to Michael Smith and Peter Rabinowitz, this approach is not simply about the question “What does this mean to me?” because if that were the case, the power of the text to transform is given up.
For some of the theorists deriving from Jacques Lacan, and in particular theories variously called écriture féminine, gender and sex predetermine the ways that texts will emerge, and the language of textuality itself will present an argument that is potentially counter to the author's conscious intent.
This approach prioritizes the perspective of an intended or ideal audience, which employs public knowledge and context to infer the author's intentions.
Barrett states that to rely on the artist's intent for an interpretation of an artwork is to put oneself in a passive role as a viewer.
The strongest voices countering an emphasis on authorial intent in scholarly editing have been D. F. McKenzie and Jerome McGann, proponents of a model that accounts for the "social text," tracing material transformations and embodiments of works while not privileging one version over another.