Periodically I post something on my course blog, Interaction Culture Class, that might be of broader interest than just the class. In such situations, I repost them on my personal blog. This is one such example, and its original post can be found here.
Currently, our class is reading a philosophical genealogy of theories of authorship, as we seek to explicate the nature of the creative agency in interaction design. The piece is a book chapter called “Authors” by philosopher Peter Lamarque, as part of his The Philosophy of Literature (Cambridge). One of my students asked me to explain Foucault’s notion of the author-function, and this post is my attempt at an answer.
Underlying Lamarque’s summary of Foucault’s idea here is a heavy reliance on a logical distinction between intensional and extensional reference. (Note that intensional here has nothing to do with the word intentional, as in author intention). Lamarque is saying that Foucault’s author-function can be described as having intensional but not extensional reference. Let me begin by explaining these two terms (see also: the Wikipedia article on the distinction between sense and reference).
Now, words (and other signifiers) can refer to concepts in the mind or things in the world.
- Intensional reference is when we refer to a concept in the mind.
- Extensional reference is when we refer to a thing in the world.
Oftentimes, we can refer simultaneously both intensionally and extensionally. When I say, “[Name] is a student in Interaction Culture” there is a concept of both the class and of being a student in the class, and an assignment of an individual, [Name], to that role. This is intensional reference. But there is also the physical person out there in the world, [Name] herself, and that is extensional reference.
Now imagine this: “the present king of France.” You can understand the sense of this phrase, if you know what the present means, what a king is, and what France is. However, France is not presently a monarchy and therefore has no king. Therefore, “the present king of France” refers intensionally (we can form a concept of the king in our mind) but not extensionally (there is no person in the world who is the present king of France). We can say that “Louis XIV was a king of France,” and this sentence has both intensional and extensional reference.
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