CONCEPT
Intentionality and Multiple Agents
McGann's argument that the question 'whose intention does the text express?' is not answerable in the simple form the conventional framework assumes — every published text reflects multiple intentions interacting within a social process.
The intentionality problem in textual scholarship asks how to attribute the meaning of a text to an originating consciousness. The conventional answer — the author's intention — presupposes that a single recoverable intention exists and can be separated from the contributions of other agents. McGann's challenge is that authorial intention is one input among several to the collaborative process that produces the published text. The editor's intentions about readability and marketability, the publisher's intentions about commercial success, the compositor's intentions about visual presentation — each of these shapes what the text becomes. The published meaning is not the author's intention realized but the residue of multiple intentions interacting, often in ways that produce outcomes no individual agent intended.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The intentionalist framework had a specific methodological attraction for twentieth-century editorial theory: it provided a principle for deciding between textual variants. When two versions of a sentence exist, the editor privileges