Arthur C. Danto proposes a complex and controversial relationship between surface and deep interpretations in The Philosophical Disenfranchisement of Art (1986). We detail the analogy between understanding human actions and interpreting works of art that both develops a motivation for Danto's view and clarifies it. We object to the most plausible version of content dependency among surface and deep interpretations and in so doing, we also clarify the way in which an interpretation is constitutive of an artwork.

This chapter contains sections titled: A Range of Views Criteria of Assessment The Road to a Solution.

The article’s aim is to clear the ground for the idea of aesthetic archaeology as an aesthetic analysis of remote artifacts divorced from aesthetic criticism. On the example of controversies surrounding the early Cycladic figures, it discusses an anxiety motivating the rejection of aesthetic inquiry in archaeology, namely, the anxiety about the heuristic reliability of one’s aesthetic instincts vis-à-vis remote artifacts. It introduces the claim that establishing an aesthetic mandate of a remote artifact should in the first place be part (...) of a quest after the norms of engagement an artifact’s kind signaled to the intended audience by its appearance. Rather than advocating for a new subdiscipline, the concept of aesthetic archaeology serves to bring into theoretical focus an aesthetic engagement with an artifact’s appearance under circumstances that rule out any acquired competence in distinguishing its aesthetic mandate perceptually—and thus rule out any aesthetic expertise. (shrink)

Kohelet, that ancient postmodern who already remarked that all is vanity and there is nothing new under the sun, also insisted that there is a time for everything: a time to be born and a time to die, a time to break down and a time to build up, a time to embrace and a time to refrain from embracing. There is no mention of a time for interpretation, but surely there is one; and just as surely that time is (...) now. Our age is even more hermeneutic than it is postmodern, and the only meaningful question to be raised at this stage is whether there is ever a time when we refrain from interpreting. To answer affirmatively by citing dreamless sleep is to dodge the real issue, which is whether we can ever refrain from interpreting without thereby refraining from intelligent activity altogether. There is a host of holist hermeneuts who answer this firmly in the negative, maintaining that simply to perceive, read, understand or behave intelligently at all is already, and must always be, to interpret. They hold that whenever we experience anything with meaning, such meaningful experience always must be a case and product of interpretation. (shrink)

Philosophers often characterize discourse in general as aiming at some sort of convergence (in beliefs, plans, dispositions, feelings, etc.), and many views about aesthetic discourse in particular affirm this thought. I argue that a convergence norm does not govern aesthetic discourse. The conversational dynamics of aesthetic discourse suggest that typical aesthetic claims have directive force. I distinguish between dynamic and illocutionary force and develop related theories of each for aesthetic discourse. I argue that the illocutionary force of aesthetic utterances is (...) typically invitational because its dynamic force is influenced by a ‘communal’ norm. I draw on dynamic pragmatics to develop a formal account of this dynamic force that explains why invitation has pride of place in aesthetic conversation. It turns out that the end of aesthetic discourse is not convergence but a distinctive form of community, a kind of harmony of individuality, that is compatible with aesthetic disagreement. If this is right, then convergence theories of aesthetic and normative discourse, and of conversation in general, need to be revised. (shrink)

This article seeks to reconcile a historicist sensitivity to how intellectually virtuous behavior is shaped by historical contexts with a non-relativist account of historical scholarship. To that end, it distinguishes between hierarchies of intellectual virtues and hierarchies of intellectual goods . The first hierarchy rejects a one-size-fits-all model of historical virtuousness in favor of a model that allows for significant varieties between the relative weight that historians must assign to intellectual virtues in order to acquire justified historical understanding. It grounds (...) such differences, not on the historians’ interests or preferences, but on their historiographical situations, so that hierarchies of virtues are a function of the demands that historiographical situations (defined as interplays of genre, research question, and state of scholarship) make upon historians. Likewise, the second hierarchy allows for the pursuit of various intellectual goods, but banishes the specter of relativism by treating historical understanding as an intellectual good that is constitutive of historical scholarship and therefore deserves priority over alternative goods. The position that emerges from this is classified as a form of weak historicism. (shrink)

Philosophers of history in the past few decades have been predominantly interested in issues of explanation and narrative discourse. Consequently, they have focused consistently and almost exclusively on the historian’s output, thereby ignoring that historical scholarship is a practice of reading, thinking, discussing, and writing, in which successful performance requires active cultivation of certain skills, attitudes, and virtues. This paper, then, suggests a new agenda for philosophy of history. Inspired by a “performative turn” in the history and philosophy of science, (...) it focuses on the historian’s “doings” and proposes to analyze these performances in terms of epistemic virtue. It argues that historical scholarship is embedded in “practices” or “epistemic cultures,” in which knowledge is created and warranted by means of such virtues as honesty, carefulness, accuracy, and balance. These epistemic virtues, however, are not etched in stone: historians may highlight some of them, exchange one for another, or reinterpret their meaning. On the one hand, this suggests a rich area of research for historians of historiography. To what extent can consensus, conflict, continuity, and change in historical scholarship be explained in terms of epistemic virtue? On the other hand, the proposal outlined in this article raises a couple of philosophical questions. For example, on what grounds can historians choose among epistemic virtues? And what concept of the self comes with the notion of virtue? In addressing these questions, philosophy of history may expand its current scope so as to encompass not only “writings” but also “doings,” that is, the virtuous performances historians recognize as professional conduct. (shrink)

The aim of interpretation is to capture the past in the future: to capture, not to recapture, first, because the iterative prefix suggests that meaning, which was once manifest, must now be found again. But the postulated author dispenses with this assumption. Literary texts are produced by very complicated actions, while the significance of even our simplest acts is often far from clear. Parts of the meaning of a text may become clear only because of developments occurring long after its (...) composition. And though the fact that an author means something may be equivalent to the fact that a writer could have meant it, this is not to say that the writer did, on whatever level, actually mean it.Alexander Nehamas, professor of philosophy at the University of Pittsburgh, has written articles on ancient Greek philosophy, literary theory, Nietzsche and Thomas Mann. (shrink)

Jerrold Levinson argues that musical works are individuated by their context of origin. But one could just as well argue that musical works are individuated by their context of reception. Moderate contextualism, according to which musical works are individuated by context of origin but not by context of reception, thus appears to be an unstable position. And, although a more thoroughgoing contextualism, according to which musical works are individuated both by context of origin and by context of reception, faces a (...) number of problems, it is nonetheless supported (at least to some extent) by critical practice. (shrink)

I here defend hypothetical intentionalism, the view of literary and cinematic interpretation that I endorse, from some recent criticisms, and then illustrate the appeal of the view in connection with a recent film of enigmatic cast.

The concept of metaphor as primarily a vehicle for conveying ideas, even if unusual ones, seems to me as wrong as the parent idea that a metaphor has a special meaning. I agree with the view that metaphors cannot be paraphrased, but I think this is not because metaphors say something too novel for literal expression but because there is nothing there to paraphrase. Paraphrase, whether possible or not, inappropriate to what is said: we try, in paraphrase, to say it (...) another way. But if I am right, a metaphor doesn't say anything beyond its literal meaning. This is not, of course, to deny that a metaphor has a point, nor that that point can be brought out by using further words.... My disagreement is with the explanation of how metaphor works its wonders. To anticipate: I depend on the distinction between what words mean and what they are used to do. I think metaphor belongs exclusively to the domain of use. It is something brought off by the imaginative employment of words and sentences and depends entirely on the ordinary meanings of those words and hence on the ordinary meanings of the sentences they comprise. Donald Davidson is University Professor of philosophy at the University of Chicago. He is the author of many important essays, including "Actions, Reasons and Causes," "Causal Relations," and "Truth and Meaning," coauthor of Decision-Making: An Experimental Approach, and coeditor of Words and Objections, Semantics of Natural Language, and The Logic of Grammar. (shrink)

SUMMARYThis paper offers practical guidance for empirical interpretation in the history of political thought, especially uncovering what authors meant and why they wrote what they wrote. I thus seek to fill a small but significant hole in our rather abstract methodological literature. To counter this abstraction, I draw not only on methodological theorising but also on actual practice—and on detective-work, a fruitful analogy. The detective analogy seeks to capture the intuition that we can potentially find right answers but must handle (...) fragmentary evidence that different people can plausibly read in different ways. Placing the focus on evidence, and on combining different types of evidence, suggests that orthodox categories like ‘contextualist’ and ‘Marxist’ too often accentuate differences between scholars. This paper instead highlights core principles that unite us—ideas that underpin good textual interpretation across all ‘schools of thought’. (shrink)

This was published in Cultural Critique (Winter 1991-92), pp. 5-32; revised and reprinted in Who Can Speak? Authority and Critical Identity edited by Judith Roof and Robyn Wiegman, University of Illinois Press, 1996; and in Feminist Nightmares: Women at Odds edited by Susan Weisser and Jennifer Fleischner, (New York: New York University Press, 1994); and also in Racism and Sexism: Differences and Connections eds. David Blumenfeld and Linda Bell, Rowman and Littlefield, 1995.

This article analyses the processes involved in description and ‘close looking’ in relation to works of art. Aspects discussed include the often-unspoken appeal to a limited form of artistic intention, the use of ‘context’, and the way that pictorial features are manipulated in the service of interpretation. Ultimately the article shows how great a role the writers’ overarching assumptions (such as about the history of modernism) are likely to play in apparently object-focused analysis, and as such why we should be (...) suspicious of claims that artworks might ‘determine their own interpretation’. (shrink)

While Roman Ingarden is well known for his work in aesthetics and studies in ontology, one of his most important and lasting contributions has been largely overlooked: his approach to a general ontology of social and cultural objects. Ingarden himself discusses cultural objects other than works of art directly in the first section of “The Architectural Work”1, where he develops a particularly penetrating view of the ontology of buildings, flags, and churches. This text provides the core insight into how his (...) more lengthy studies of the ontology of works of art in The Literary Work of Art and the rest of The Ontology of the Work of Art, combined with the ontological distinctions of Der Streit um die Existenz der Welt, may be used to understand social and cultural objects. The view that results, I will argue, is based in foreseeing problems with the reductivist and projectivist views that remain popular, and is capable of resolving central problems still thought to plague those who would offer a theory of cultural objects. (shrink)

Is aesthetics, as has recently been claimed, now able to meet the accusations often levelled against it? This essay examines counters to three of the most common: that aesthetics is based around overly narrow conceptions of "art" and "the aesthetic"; that aesthetics is politically disengaged; and that aesthetics fails to engage with actual art objects and their histories.

Intentionalism in aesthetics is, quite generally, the thesis that the artist's or artists' intentions have a decisive role in the creation of a work of art, and that knowledge of such intentions is a necessary component of at least some adequate interpretive and evaluative claims. In this paper I develop and defend this thesis. I begin with a discussion of some anti-intentionalist arguments. Surveying a range of intentionalist responses to them, I briefly introduce and criticize a fictionalist version of intentionalism (...) before moving on to an approach I call moderate intentionalism. I consider a salient alternative known as hypothetical intentionalism and try to show why moderate intentionalism should be preferred to it. (shrink)