ABSTRACT
Intentions are also an obvious thing to which to appeal in answering questions concerning the boundaries of a work of art. According to hypothetical intentionalism, the primary meaning of a work is given by the best hypothesis, from the position of an appropriately informed, sympathetic, and discriminating reader, of authorial intent to convey such and such to an audience, through the text in question. Irrespective of whether the appropriate category is always determined by the artist's intentions or could be determined by other factors. Monroe Beardsley's example draws a neat distinction between the meaning of the sentence and the author's intention. W. K Wimsatt and Beardsley's position is that, in determining the interpretation of the work, critics must draw only on features that are part of the work and not on features that lie outside it. The alternative is to allow that a work might have multiple interpretations or that the work's meaning may not be stable.
