ABSTRACT
Works of human art are always produced intentionally, unlike objects of natural beauty which may nonetheless display an 'as if' purposefulness, purposefulness without purpose, as Kant expresses it in The Critique of Judgment and as over a century of evolutionary theorizing has made intelligible. Even an artist using chance techniques may make slips in transcription or performance which are legitimately discounted or corrected by an audience, relying on an understanding of the guiding generic intention. However, most theoretical and critical interest has focused not on the idea of generic intention, but on the idea of intentions attached to and accounting for discriminable elements in the content of a work. One might say: we have conventions of language precisely as a means whereby we can make publicly available our thoughts/intentions in action, and nothing more is needed than knowledge of the conventions in order for an audience to recover someone's meaning.
