e case that a human could not understandanything in the same way a divine being could, so that would rule out the view that a proper interpretation is onewhere one understands the text as the author did. One way to try to avoid these problems would be to take advantage of the dual author status of revealed texts.The meaning of a revealed text could be determined by the intentions of the human author. It is by understanding,for example, what Paul intended to convey to the Corinthians that we understand the meaning of Paul's letter tothe Corinthians and therefore the meaning of a text considered as revealed. This, then, becomes a version of thestandard question of intentionalism. Gracia provides two arguments for why, in fact, this version of intentionalismis unsatisfactory. First, there is the fact that the author also functions as an audience after writing the text andmay decide that the text means something quite different than what he/she thought it did. To avoid having to saythat the author misunderstands their previous view we need to acknowledge that the meaning isn't established bythe intentions at the time of writing. Secondly, since a revealed text is supposed to speak to people far beyondthe context of its writing, we can't expect the intentions of the historical author, which will certainly be affected bycontingencies of his/her time and culture, to provide an adequate guide for understanding the meaning of the text.Finally there's the possibility that we are not to understand the text as the divine author understands it, or as theintermediary author understands it, but as the divine author intends us to understand the text. Gracia argues thatthis is how we should understand the role of divine intentions for interpretation; the problem, of course, isdiscovering the intentions of the author. Discerning intentions is a difficult, some think impossible project.moreover, in the end the best evidence we have for the intentions the ...
