Knowing who an author is and what his or her likely intentions are in creating a text or artwork is tremendously important to most of us. Not knowing who wrote, or created, some artwork is often very frustrating. Our culture places great worth on the identity of speakers, writers, and artists. Perhaps the single most important aspect of “authorship” is the vaguely apprehended presence of human creativity, personality, and authority that nominal authorship seems to provide. It is almost unthinkable for a visitor to an art museum to admire a roomful of paintings without knowing the names of the individual painters, for a concertgoer to sit through a program of symphonies and concertos without knowing the names of the individual composers, or for a reader not to know who the writer is of the novel she is reading. Publishers proudly display authors' names on the jackets, spines, and title pages of their books. Book advertisements in the New York Review of Books and the New York Times Book Review regularly include pictures of authors and quote authors as they talk about their work, both of which show that our interest is as much in authors as in their books.

Despite our admiration of individual writers, there remain many questions about authorship that pose significant problems for intentionalist views of meaningful experience.