Quote:
Originally posted by Henry Quince:
If you really think the author’s intentions are irrelevant, why would you post work on these boards for feedback?
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Can't we reject "B" without going so far as to say that the author's intentions are irrelevant? How about something like, the author's intentions (insofar as we can discern them) are important but not controlling. As Daniel Haar has already suggested, this is how most legal scholars treat constitutional interpretation.
Imagine that someone created a computer program that could generate sonnets. The programmer made it so that the computer understood iambic pentameter and permissible substitutions and also understood how to construct English sentences. The computer then generated millions of sonnets, most of which were not very interesting, but one of which was a word-for-word reproduction of one of Shakespeare's. Would you interpret the computer's sonnet differently from the Shakespeare sonnet or would you treat them as identical? Would the question of the computer's intentions enter into the matter at all?
epigone