Frank Cioffi argues persuasively that our relation to works of literature is such that information about what the author knows, intends, means, and so forth, tends to influence our response to that author's work. Indeed, this feature of the “physiognomy of literature” makes it difficult to sustain the distinction between what Cioffi calls “biographical” information about the author and critical comment about the text:

Writing is an especially complex human activity. A work of literature, like everyday action, is at least partly interpreted, given meaning, or made sense of by holding it up to and examining it through the familiar light of reason-explanation—a form of explanation that trades in details about what the agent intends and wants, what she knows or could not have known. The difficulty Cioffi finds in distinguishing between biographical evidence and textual evidence when it comes to interpreting and evaluating literature applies more generally to the understanding and interpretation of everyday action. Just as our description of what an author has in mind may influence our understanding of what she writes, so, too, may our understanding of what an agent has in mind influence our understanding of her actions and activities, broadly construed. Indeed, it may be denied in the general case that the distinction is a logical one—denied in other words, that what an agent has in mind and what she does are logically distinct phenomena— since our acceptance that an agent had something in mind may not merely force a different understanding of a performance already defined: it may also force a different way of describing it.