The Intentionalist View

The Intentionalist View is the methodological position holding that a catalogued object's meaning is fixed by the purpose of whoever placed it on its floor, rather than by any property observable in the object itself. It is the working doctrine of the Intentionalist School and the principal grounds of that body's long quarrel with the Non-Intentionalist School and, less directly, with the Materialist School. The View is not a single document but a body of rulings, commentaries, and hearing records accumulated since at least the fourth century S.C., and it is cited in the Tower less as a proof than as a default — the position one is presumed to hold until one has filed to hold otherwise.

Statement of the doctrine

The canonical formulation appears in the West Stack Brief, submitted during the hearings on the Waning of the West Stack and subsequently bound into the working papers of the Grey Convocation. The Brief's central sentence is quoted in nearly every subsequent filing on the subject:

"An object means what its depositor meant by it; where the depositor's intent cannot be recovered, the object means what the depositor would have meant had the intent been recorded."

— West Stack Brief, Clause 3

The second half of the clause has caused more litigation than the first. Critics have observed that it licenses the reconstruction of intents never held, by depositors never identified, concerning objects that may have arrived on their floors by routes no longer traceable. The Intentionalist School's answer, restated at the 512 S.C. review of the View, is that the alternative — meaning determined by the object's present arrangement — would require the Tower to accept that a floor could mean something its depositor did not intend, which is held to be administratively unworkable.

The View received its most celebrated application in The Dispute of the Brass Keys, where the School successfully argued for contextual meaning against the Materialist reading. It was applied again, and more controversially, in the matter of the Redundant Gate, which the School held to possess only "the quality of being perceived as a barrier" (Grey Convocation, ruling of 388 S.C.). The following year the School declared the Acoustic Resonator Array conceptually redundant, a finding the Materialist School has never accepted and continues to contest before the Chair of Spiral Integrity.

Scope and exclusions

The View does not extend to all records. Dream data are excluded from intentional reading on the ground that they are the byproduct of a cataloguer's personal neuroses and dietary habits, and are accordingly filed without interpretation. Marginalia are read intentionally only where the annotator can be certified; uncertified marginalia are treated as part of the object's material surface and fall under the Materialist reading by default. A standing instruction of the Central Catalogue requires that any object bearing both a certified and an uncertified annotation be shelved with the certified face outward. Certification itself is a matter for the Intentionalist Roster, maintained in the West Scriptorium on Floor 9,022.

Ascertainment of intent

Intent is established by one of three procedures, in descending order of authority: the depositor's own declaration, sealed at deposit; the testimony of two certified Intentionalists who examined the object before its most recent reshelving; or inference from the object's placement relative to its neighbours. The third procedure is the most used and the least trusted, and a persistent minority on the Convocation has argued that it amounts to reading the floor rather than the object. The School's reply is that the floor is itself an intentional document.

Where all three procedures fail, the object is recorded as intent-pending and may not be cited in support of any claim. The Index of Unresolved Imperatives presently carries some eleven thousand entries so classified, of which a substantial fraction have been intent-pending since before the Concordance Seven recension. Clerks are reminded that an intent-pending object may still be dusted.

Critical reception

The Non-Intentionalist School objects that the View is circular: intent is inferred from arrangement, and arrangement is then explained by intent. The Scribalist School, in the course of its protracted and often hostile dialogue with the Intentionalist School, has pressed the further charge that the View cannot distinguish an intention from a habit. The School's defence, offered by the Convocation in its commentary on the Spectre of the Unfinished Index, is that the distinction is not one the Tower is obliged to draw.

Relations with the Materialist School have been strained since the Resonator finding and were not improved by the Catalogue of Unfinished Bridges, which the Intentionalists read as an intentional document and the Materialists as a record of stopped work. The dispute has generated four Concordance amendments, two of which contradict each other on the question of whether a bridge's incompleteness may be read as its meaning. Concordance Seven, Annex 9, holds that it may; the amendment of 447 S.C. holds that it may not; both remain in force, and both are cited in the current filings.

Status

The View remains the Prevailing View in all matters not expressly reserved to another body, though the phrase is doing quieter work than it once did. Recent hearings have preferred to describe the View as "the position from which departures are measured," a formula drafted by a committee and adopted without debate. The Librarians have not ruled on the doctrine itself and are not expected to. A note pinned in the West Scriptorium since at least 389 S.C. reads only: Intentionalists: west door. Everyone else: the other one.