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Finally, there remains on the pro-intentionalist side one more area relevance for authorial intention: anachronism. In his defense of “ the authority of the text,” Beardsley cites some lines written in the eighteenth century: “Yet, by im mense benignity inclin’d / To spread about that primeval joy / Which fill’d himself, he rais’d his plastic arm.” Plastic” has not completely lost the meaning it had for the poet, Mark Akenside, in 1744, but it has gained an additional meaning since then. Consequently,” Beardsley says, “the line in which it occurs has . . . acquired a new meaning . . . Of course, we can inquire into both meanings, if we will; but these are two distinct inquiries.”

Yet how many readers would have any interest in an interpretation of the poem that took “plastic” in this case to refer to that polymer material came into general use only in the twentieth century? It is not that such an anachronistic interpretation is out of line with Akenside’s intentions so much as that it cannot accord with any possible intention might have had. Whimsy might occasionally enable an amusing or illuminating remark about Akenside’s use of “plastic” in relation to the modern sense of the word as “polymer,” but simply and ignorantly to read plastic” as our “polymer” doesn’t go.

The “intentional fallacy” and the “death of the author” have been main intellectual dish at many a feast for philos o phers, critics, literary theorists for fifty years. Not just conferences and anthologies whole research careers have been fashioned around teasing implications of arguments for and against appeals to intention. From an evolutionary psychological standpoint, however, all the disputation seems overwrought. As with other areas in aesthetics, theorists who write about these problems pit against each other conflicting intuitions about storytelling, audiences, and authorship. From an evolutionary perspective, it is these basic intuitions that have to be explained.

Paradoxes of authorship begin with the uneasy coexistence of three distinct functions for language in human social life. These functions deep, are doubtless prehistoric, and appear spontaneously in human about the status and importance of authorial intention.

1. The communicative/descriptive function. Asked why we have language at all, most people will jump first to this reason. We tend to regard language seen as a tool for ordinary descriptions of world and personal communication: “Looks like rain tomorrow,” Pomegranates have doubled in price,” “Don’t forget to bring home bread,” “Madison was a great president,” “I’m in love with Eloise.” Descriptions of the world—including speakers’ descriptions of themselves, their speculations, exhortations, and value judgments—are in such usages normally intended to be taken hearers as true; this is how communication about matters of works. We call narratives in this mode nonfiction. This is used in history, science, gossip, and daily communication, from “God made the world in six days” to “A ten-gallon hat only holds three quarts” to “Please pass the Tabasco sauce.”

2. The imaginary function. This is language as a creative medium telling fictional tales, including expressive stories composed stylized forms such as poetry. “Decoupling” is the term used Tooby and Cosmides to describe this function. As I have already indicated in chapter 6, children at a very young age spontaneously grasp in their play the differences between descriptive uses language for the real world and decoupled uses in a make-believe or storytelling world. The distinction between descriptive decoupled uses of language is universally understood, even when the status of any narrative is disputed. The Iliad was once as a true history. Now it is viewed as “just a story,” and people argue about whether the Old Testament is history. But ability to distinguish reality from make-believe has not changed. Cues indicating fictional intent are sometimes needed for clear understanding and are instantly processed. We know we about to hear