[sam h]

[ QUOTE ]
The question isn't so much original intent, but original meaning. After all, intent can be impossible to determine from a document.

[/ QUOTE ]

I agree that intent is very difficult to discern. But I believe that the "meaning" of the document, as well as most other historical documents, is also very difficult to discern without recourse to intent. A historiography based on the idea that written evidence should be considered "authorless" is going to be fundamentally flawed. Very few serious historians, the people who are best practiced in thinking about these questions, would take this approach.

[ QUOTE ]
I've never met someone with a serious objection to this method.

[/ QUOTE ]

See my point above, as well as the argument Elwood makes (as I did in the previous post too) that perhaps the text was not intended to be interpreted through an "original meaning" approach.