[ChrisW]

Over on the Death of the Author thread, I suggested a way of looking at the debate that I hoped might be worth pursuing. Because it was a considerable departure from the discussion up to that point, I thought it would make sense to start a new thread.

The idea was to start with a set of fairly commonsense perceptions and assumptions about texts, meanings, language and interpretations that one might expect a theory of interpretation to respect and account for. I’ll mention some and I invite others to add to the list. No questions are being begged in setting these common sense perceptions out and asking for the theory to account for them, because the theory can, instead of explaining how the perception is true, may explain why we have the perception even though it is false. These common sense perceptions may conflict – in which case, the challenge is to decide which perception to reject or to find a way that both can be true.

Here are a few such perceptions grouped as much as possible into puzzles:
Puzzles and questions:
I
1. If I utter the sentence ‘John is fat’ today, and you utter the same sentence tomorrow. The conventional meaning of our utterances are the same. Yet it is possible for our individual utterances to mean different things. We may be talking about different Johns, or one of us may be using the sentence ironically.

2. We tend to believe that speaker’s or writer’s intentions are what go beyond the conventional meaning to determine the meaning of this individual utterance (the “speaker meaning” in Paul Grice’s terminology). There’s a conventional meaning and then there’s what the speaker means by it.

3. A full interpretation of a text or utterance will go beyond the conventional meaning to discover what the speaker intended to convey by that utterance.

4. Yet, this makes the hearer or reader appear to be a mind-reader – how can you know my intentions apart from what I actually say? And if you can, why do I need to talk at all?

5. And when it comes to reading “literary texts”, we often put aside the author’s own remarks about his intentions (as well as information about his biography, etc.) as irrelevant to our reading. If the meaning of the text were determined by author’s intention, then we would not put this information aside.

II

1. Novels, plays and poems, have an overt meaning, just as a treatise or a letter to a friend might. But interpreting this overt meaning is not all there is to interpreting such a work. Such works have “deep meanings” which they convey by means of the overt meaning. Interpretation of such texts is aimed at seeing this deep meaning through the overt meaning, and most argument between critics will focus here.

2. Yet if a literary interpreter is able to state this deep meaning declaratively, he either loses much of what is important about the “deep meaning” or he doesn’t

3. If he doesn’t, then why didn’t the author just write what the critic wrote rather than bothering with indirection?

4. So, either the critic’s attempt to understand the deep meaning kills the deep meaning, or the novelist’s work is unnecessarily roundabout. So there appears to be no place for literary criticism of a fairly traditional sort.

III Some plays, poems, novels, etc. are better than others. (How can this be? By what right can we declare this?)

IV Some interpretations are better than others. (How is this possible?)

V Some uses of speech to persuade or convince are more honest and rational than others, and honest, rational persuasion respects the autonomy of the person persuaded, while dishonest persuasion does not. (In this respect dishonest persuasion resembles coercion, though it is not the same thing.) Plato marks this distinction as the difference between "philosophy" and "rhetoric". (What is the difference between rational, honest persuasion and the other kind?)

And here are some constraints on theories of language and interpretation:

VI Speech and writing would never have developed just so we could write and discuss novels, poems and philosophical treatises. The primary uses of speech and writing are practical. A theory of interpretation or of language itself that makes it difficult to see how people ever understand each other seems to face a great deal of evidence that people DO understand each other (as evidenced by the success of their coordination of plans. Also a theory of interpretation of literary works ought to grow naturally out of interpretation of simpler, more practical sorts of interpretation.

VIII Babies learn language – if our theory makes this seem impossible, then we are in trouble.

IX Much of our knowledge (e.g., skill-knowledge, knowing how to do something) and much of our thought is non-linguistic, and much communication is non-linguistic (expressions, body language).

X Other minds are knowable. We do often know what other people think and feel. At the same time, our knowledge of our own minds is itself fallible (e.g., self-deception is possible).

XI Nearly all of our knowledge depends upon probabilistic inference (induction), not on deduction from a priori first principles. Induction is inference to the best explanation, and is necessarily dialectical (theories compete by raising problems for each other on their own terms).
[In line with XI, none of the "constraints" above are to be taken as first principles, but rather as things we have reason to believe based on background theories. All are up for debate themselves.]

As soon as I can get to it, I want to discuss structuralism and deconstruction.



[This message has been edited by ChrisW (edited March 31, 2004).]