I suspect that some of you are already mumbling that this is a fallacy no one commits. No one claims explicitly that all art interpretation is so modelled. That is probably true. Nevertheless, the fallacy is alive and well. For even if no one states it outright, many philosophers, especially anti-intentionalists, proceed as if it were the case. Their intuition pumps usually revert to cases of ordinary verbal meaning—for example, concerning the meaning of an utterance where the speaker uses the wrong word. Then, once they elicit the expected intuition, they proceed to generalize the result to all cases of interpretation, media notwithstanding. Moreover, the linguistic fallacy is frequently also in evidence in discussions in which the artistic examples predominantly come from literature, particularly poetry.

The modest, actual intentionalist could and should acknowledge that more aspects of one's cognitive, emotive, and conative networks figure in the determination of the meaning or content of an artwork. Instead of thinking simply of the artist's intentions, narrowly construed, we should consider content or meaning to be determined by relevant elements the mental stock of the artist. Perhaps, in honour of this refinement, as inspired by Wollheim, we should rename our approach modest, actual mentalism or, as Wollheim might want to call it, the psychological approach to interpretation.

Wollheim embraces modest, actual intentionalism inasmuch as he requires that the meaning or content of the artwork, if it is a painting, be something that can be recognized or seen-in the picture. Like card-carrying modest actual intentionalists, Wollheim holds that in order to determine the meaning of the painting, the artist's intentions regarding the content of the painting concur with what can be recognized in the painting

As Wollheim says, ‘the representational artist must at least set himself to do this: to mark the surface in such a way as to ensure that the spectator will not merely identify, he will be able to see, to see in the picture what the picture is intended to represent’ (52). For the modest, actual intentional the meaning or content of the artwork is determined by the communicative intention of the artist which intention has the built-in requirement of audience recognizability, a requirement that, at minimum, demands that what is available upon inspection of the artwork be consistent with the intended meaning or content of the artwork.

For Wollheim, the content of the painting is not whatever the artist intends, come what may. The spectator must be able to identify the content of the artist's intention on the basis of what he sees in the painting. This is undoubtedly related to the Gricean constraint on recognizability when it comes to the artist meaning that x.

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“corporate welfare.”