 The principal point at which this argument—admittedly, an extended reconstruction of a few remarks in “The Intentional Fallacy”—might be questioned is in the assumption that works of art are like standard, garden-variety artifacts—lawn chairs and television sets—in leaving their creators behind. For Beardsley, a work of art isn’t fundamentally different from a pair of fingernail clippers: it’s made and then begins its own autonomous life. It is what it is—who knows or cares who created it, and with what intentions. This is a plausible position, but not an unassailable one. The alternative view is that not all artifacts lead autonomous lives, and that for some, works of art as well as, on many people’s view, linguistic artifacts of all kinds (sentence tokens, memos, book chapters, and so on), what they are is intimately linked to their creator, and more particularly to the intention-laden conditions of their origin. Put more concretely and slightly too strongly in terms of an imperfect analogy with physical objects: a rock isn’t space, and to understand a rock we can many times can ignore considerations of space, but if we remove space altogether from our understanding of a rock, there isn’t a rock to understand at all. On this view, then, a proper understanding of works of art—which includes correctly interpreting them—requires the admissibility of considerations of the artist’s intentions, even if those intentions aren’t always available or needed.