Greg's now celebrated solution rests on the position that, if a finished manuscript of a text does not survive, the copy-text for a scholarly edition should normally be the text of the earliest extant printed edition based on the missing manuscript, for it can be expected to reproduce more of the characteristics of the manuscript than any edition further removed; variants from later editions which are convincingly shown to be revisions by the author can then be incorporated into this copy-text. (Tanselle 168)

In "The Editorial Problem of Final Authorial Intention," G. Thomas Tanselle proposes that within the methodology W. W. Greg establishes in "The Rationale of Copy-Text," final authorial intention is the unspoken goal of any critical edition. Greg asserts that, while there are specific procedures that he recommends, there can be no set rules regarding the selection of a copy-text. Tanselle follows by stating that whether the editor is engaged in the selection of copy-text or other editorial processes, he must use critical judgment based on "his historical knowledge and his literary sensitivity" to determine the author's intention (Tanselle, 169). Tanselle concludes that "[t]he job of a scholarly editor, therefore, can be stated as the exercise of critical thinking in an effort to determine the final intention of an author with respect to a particular text" (169). Tanselle uses Greg's "Rationale" as a foundation from which he builds a methodology for determining "final authorial intention." Tanselle's purpose is the establishment of clear editorial criteria to be used in the decision-making processes that first determine what the author's intention in a work might be and then to determine final intention. He sets up two hypothetical situations that he believes are most commonly confronted and presents possible choices and strategies of selection as a way of developing a methodology based on critical thinking.

Before he engages the pursuit of final authorial intention, Tanselle deals with the concept of intention in a more general way. He confronts two basic arguments about intention that he sees exemplified in W. K. Wimsatt and Monroe C. Beardsley's "The Intentional Fallacy" and E. D. Hirsch, Jr.'s Validity in Interpretation. As stated by Tanselle, Wimsatt and Beardsley's argument is that "the author's intention is irrelevant to the process of literary interpretation and evaluation" (170), and Hirsch's is that "the meaning of a work is the meaning put there by the author" (171).

Tanselle asserts that neither argument questions the authority of the text and that both assume that the text is "as the author wished it to be" (171). This reaffirms for Tanselle the importance of determining the author's final intention and the editor's need for critical judgment in determining both the "meaning" of a given text and the author's intention in that text. Tanselle wants to make sure his readers understand that the editorial process can be neither a mechanical process nor one determined merely by bibliographical, biographical, or documentary evidence. The editor must also be a critic of the work that he edits. Tanselle asserts that in order to determine intention the editor is "inevitably drawn back to the work itself as the most reliable documentary evidence as to what the author intended" (177). He argues that, while "subconscious intention" (from T. M. Gang) may offer insights into the "author's personality and motivations" (181), it is not reasonable to believe that the author meant every possible meaning available. "It is certainly true that neither the author nor anyone else can construct an explanatory paraphrase which is the exact equivalent of the work itself; but it does not follow that the intended meanings of the work are inexhaustible" (author's italics; 181-2). He uses arguments established by Morse Peckham, William H. Capitan and Quentin Skinner, as evidence that even the author's statements about his or her intention cannot be taken as more valid than the text. (178).

In his search for a definition of intention, Tanselle presents various kinds of intention as defined by T. M. Gang ("practical intention" and "literary intention"), John Kemp ("immediate intention" and "ulterior intention"), Morse Peckham ("mediated intention" and "immediate intention"), Quentin Skinner (and J. L. Austin--whom he footnotes extensively--"Illocutionary intention" and "perlocutionary intention") and Michael Hancher ("programmatic intention"; "active intention"; "final intention") (173-174). He specifically adopts Hancher's definition of "active intention" as his working definition of authorial intention: "[t]he author's intention to be (understood as) acting in some way or other" (174). Tanselle dismisses Hancher's definition of "final intention" ("the author's intention to cause something or other to happen," 175) as being like hopes that reside outside the activities of the text (wealth, changing the reader's views, etc.). Following Hancher, Tanselle believes that "[a]ctive intentions characterize the actions that the author, at the time he finishes his text, understands himself to be performing in that text" (Hancher as quoted by Tanselle, 175). Because he sees the scholarly editor's role as one in which, "[r]egardless of how many meanings he finds in the text," he must make choices based on the author's intention, Tanselle also adopts Hancher's "science of interpretation" ("in which the critic's goal is to determine the 'authorized' or intended meaning") as opposed to the "art of interpretation" ("in which the critic's aim is to find the most satisfying meaning according to his own 'norms of value,'" 181). Using Hancher's definition of "active intention" as his working definition and his "science of interpretation" as what we might think of as a tentative title for his methodology. Tanselle then presents his hypothetical situations and critical editorial strategies.