Benhabib recasts the Derridean idea of `iteration' in democratic terms. While adhering to the original idea that both the fundamental terms of political consociation and the identity of the people itself is `radically' open, Benhabib argues that deliberative norms do and should frame the process of reiteration. For the deliberative democrat, the democratic constitution is not a would-be barrier to iterability (which we are told cannot be contained anyway); it is rather a communicative or discursive space in which the hitherto (...) suppressed or not yet present voice of other people finds its way and expands the terms of meaning giving and hence reason giving. The democratic constitution enables iteration; it is one side of a dialectic that relies upon, balances and, in some sense, makes the most of people power. Immigrants, in the final analysis, are the latest group to proclaim their presence in the sphere of constitutional interpretation, and thereby recalibrate the interpretive frame. And when they make their presence known in this way they have truly become a part of the `people'. When, however, they make their presence known in ways that undermine constitutional self-understanding, instead of engaging it, they are `not us'. Benhabib is hesitant to add this last bit, as she is hesitant to admit how much the constitutional identity of a people `rift with otherness' is reliant upon the historical referent and the generative/steering power of the right sort of constitutional court. (shrink)

This paper1 explores, quite tentatively, possible consequences for the concept of semantics of two phenomena concerning meaning and interpretation, viz., radical interpretation and normativity of meaning. Both, it will be argued, challenge the way in which meaning is conceived of in semantics and thereby the status of the discipline itself. For several reasons it seems opportune to explore these issues. If one reviews the developments in semantics over the past two decades, one observes that quite a bit has changed, and (...) one may well wonder how to assess these changes. This relates directly to the status of semantics. If semantics is an empirical discipline, one might expect that most changes are informed by empirical considerations. However, one may also note that the core notion of semantics, meaning, today is conceived of quite differently than in, say, the seventies. How can that be? How can that what semantics is about, be different now from what is was back then? Or is this perhaps an indication that semantics is not as empirical as it is often thought to be? Moreover, it seems that in some deep sense meaning as explicated in semantics and interpretation as studied in various philosophical approaches are strangely at odds. Meaning is what interpretation is concerned with: meaning is, at least so it seems, what in the process of interpretation language users try to recover (or analogously, what they try to convey in production). Yet, the way meaning is conceived of in semantics seems not to square all that neatly with how the process of interpretation is supposed to proceed. In particular it seems to lack some of the intrinsic features that various approaches to interpretation assume it to have. Given these discrepancies, one wonders how the two can be incorporated within a single theory. And that such a theory is desirable goes, it may be presumed, without saying These are the reasons that figure in this paper. At the background there are some others.. (shrink)

After establishing its roots in basic forms of sensorimotor coupling between an organism and its environment, the new wave in cognitive science known as “enactivism” has turned to higher-level cognition, in an attempt to prove that even socioculturally mediated meaning-making processes can be accounted for in enactivist terms. My article tries to bolster this case by focusing on how the production and interpretation of stories can shape the value landscape of those who engage with them. First, it builds on the (...) idea that narrative plays a key role in expressing the values held by a society, in order to argue that the interpretation of stories cannot be understood in abstraction from the background of storytelling in which we are always already involved. Second, it presents interpretation as an example of what Di Paolo et al. ( 2010 ) have called in their recent enactivist manifesto a “joint process of sensemaking”: just like in face-to-face interaction, the recipient of the story collaborates with the authorial point of view, generating meaning. Third, it traces the meaning brought into the world by interpretation to the activation and, potentially, the restructuring of the background of the recipients of the story. (shrink)

In his recent book Interpretation and Legal Theory , Andrei Marmor makes a number of claims about meaning and interpretation, both in general and in law, which I will argue are mistaken. Actually, there is some confusion in his book between what I take to be his “official” view of the nature of meaning and interpretation, and a very different view which keeps surfacing despite his official rejection of it. I will argue that this alternative, rejected view, when properly developed, (...) is more plausible than his official view, and that the difference between them is of considerable practical consequence for legal interpretation. What is at stake is the role of legislative intention. The alternative view denies Marmor's claim that the meaning of a statute is conceptually independent of the intention or purpose which the legislature had in enacting it. It should be said at the outset that I will focus on just three of the eight chapters in Marmor's book, which contains many virtues that are untouched by my critique. (shrink)

This essay examines the reception of Ivan Pavlov’s work on conditioned reflexes in early to mid-twentieth century Britain. Recent work on the political interpretation of biology has shown that the nineteenth-century strategy of “making socialists” was undermined by August Weismann’s attacks on the inheritance of acquired characters. I argue that Pavlov’s research reinvigorated socialist hopes of transforming society and the people in it. I highlight the work of Pavlov’s interpreters, notably the scientific journalist J. G. Crowther, the biologist Lancelot Hogben, (...) and the science writer H. G. Wells, who made Pavlov’s work accessible to a British audience and embraced the socialist implications of his research – especially the idea that people could be persuaded to become socialists through science writing for a nonspecialist audience and through use of a simplified language such as Basic English. They saw, in the followers of National Socialism, how Pavlovian conditioning could create a national movement, and believed that this could be used for their own more democratic form of socialism. In the final part of the essay, I suggest that this broad socio-cultural movement to reshape humanity proved controversial, especially in the post-war period and in light of Soviet use of brainwashing. The likes of Aldous Huxley and F. A. Hayek feared that conditioning could only lead to totalitarianism, while the historian E. P. Thompson put forward a socialist humanism that left room for human agency. (shrink)

Despite the hadiths and narratives that warn about the interpretation of the Qur’ān by opinion, the question of how Qur’ānic verses can be understood is about the nature of Qur’ānic exegesis. These narratives, which limit the interpretation to the exact field and indicate the invalidity of the specification of the intention with the imprecise information, bring with it the question of how to understand the Qur’ān in each period and society. The issue that has been questioned in the frame of (...) the commentary from the earliest periods is based on the possibility of commenting besides the narration and defining the area that the thought belongs to the commentator. In this context, it is seen that the distinction between the conceptualization of tafsīr-taʾwīl words in classical commentary literature deals with the subject of the tafsīr, their belongings, epistemological values and contexts. Mainly, this study will question whether authors who do not distinguish between tafsīr-taʾwīl categorize the information about commentary in a different context, then it will analyze two basic approaches on tafsīr and taʾwīl. In the paper, it will be suggested that these classifications in the classical literature should be evaluated together within the framework of the search for methodology in exegesis. Summary: The Prophet, who was the first glossator of the Qur’ān, forbade people to talk about the Qur’ān with their own judgments. The prominent people of the companions refused to comment on some words that were closed in meaning (garīb). The words quoted from Abū Bakr and ʿUmar on this subject are quite famous. However, the Qur’ān is a universal book revealed to be understood in all ages and geographies till the doomsday. The fact that all the verses were not interpreted by the Prophet, and the expansions of meaning observed in the Qur’ān wording necessitate the interpretation of the Qur’ān. The fact that the Prophet forbade people to talk with their own judgments about the Qur’ān and the necessity of understanding the Qur’ān in every era constitutes a dilemma that must be explained. The resolution of this issue will both determine the legitimacy of tafsīr (interpretation) and reveal the difference between the Prophet's tafsīr and the tafsīrs by other people. In this context, a distinction was made between the interpretations of the Prophet and of the companions who witnessed the revelation period from the Tabarī (d. 310/923) in the classical tafsīr literature and the interpretations by glossators in terms of their bindingness and information values. Thus, before even starting the interpretation, glossators questioned the possibility of interpretation of the Qur’ān without the tafsīr of the Prophet and the narratives from the companions that have the force of hadith marfūʿ.It is seen in classical tafsīr literature that distinctions between the tafsīr of the Prophet and the interpretations of the glossator are usually constructed on the terms of tafsīr and ta'wil, to which terminological meanings are attributed. In this regard, the methodology of Māturīdī (d. 333/944) is quite specific and clear. According to Māturīdī, tafsīr is an exact field. Only the tafsīr of the Prophet and the narratives of the companions that have the force of marfūʿ can be included in this field. Taʾwīl, on the other hand, is an area based on supposing. Preferences to be made from possible meanings are supposition and related to taʾwīl. The fact that Māturīdī included the explanations of the Prophet and his companions in the tafsīr field and stated that they expressed exact information shows that he regarded this information in the value of the statement of mutakallim. The data included in the field of taʾwīl are not as the data included in the field of tafsīr in terms of their bindingness and information value. The interpretations made in the field of taʾwīl include supposition; so they cannot be attributed to the desire of God. The field that the Prophet forbade people from declaring their own views is the field of tafsīr in the methodology of Māturīdī. The exactness of this field is an indication that the tafsīr is related to God's desire. It is not right to declare an opinion with supposition in the field that is exact and definite. Even though the interpretation in the field of tafsīr is in accordance with the truth, this cannot eliminate the responsibility of the interpreter that make determinations based on supposition in the exact and definite field. Some scholars, such as Qushayrī (d. 465/1072), also classify the narrative-sagacity areas by means of tafsīr-taʾwīl concepts. This classification deals with the data that is the subject of tafsīr in terms of their belongingness. Indeed, tafsīr science includes both the data that are linked with transmission and non-transmittable elements that can be achieved by following a methodology. Non-transmittable elements included in the taʾwīl field by those who make a distinction between tafsīr and taʾwīl based on narrative-sagacity are the meanings reached through linguistic efforts. Language is an element that holds possibilities in itself. Considering closeness of meaning, multi-meanings, metaphors and allusions in the wording, it can be thought that the meanings reached by linguistic methods include supposition. In the methodology of Māturīdī, the field of tafsīr is composed of the explanations of the Prophet and the narratives of the companions who witnessed the revelations while in the classifications of those who make a distinction between tafsīr and taʾwīl based on narrative-sagacity, tafsīr generally includes narratives. When the issue is handled within the framework of the desire of God and the statements of the mutakallim, it seems that the classification of Māturīdī is more punctual. However, it is understood that this approach does not give a satisfactory answer to the subsequent situations and bindingness of the mentioned data. In the classifications based on narrative-sagacity, the narratives in the field of tafsīr are taken as a whole without analyzing their health grades and their signification. However, some of these narrations are not authentic; so, in this respect it is a problematic issue that they are the subjects of the field of tafsīr. Besides, sometimes there can be different narrations about the tafsīr of verses from the companions. The evaluation these narratives in a field attributed to the desire of God may also pose a problem. The linguistic data that both Māturīdī and those who make a distinction between tafsīr and taʾwīl based on narrative-sagacity include in the field of taʾwīl does not appear to have a homogeneous structure -as is the case with the narratives-. Indeed, among this data, there are elements whose meanings are quite hard to determine as well as firm ones that possibly have only one meaning. It is controversial that these expressions, which have only one meaning and to the validity of whose meaning other evidence point out are included in the field of taʾwīl.The distinction between meaning and interpretation fields in tafsīr is very important in terms of tafsīr methodology. This field designation is in a way a description of nature of the science of tafsīr. Thus, in matters where the human intelligence remains insufficient with the tafsīr narratives from the Prophet, the bindingness of the narratives from the companions are clarified; furthermore, beyond the narrative, the validity and the information values of interpretations of the glossator are determined. In this regard, the tafsīr-taʾwīl distinctions made in the classical tafsīr literature provide us with a rich content and a multifaceted point of view. However, when addressed separately, these distinctions present a number of problems in terms of scope and applicability. Our study proposes the evaluation of tafsīr-taʾwīl distinctions in classical literature together while the meaning-interpretation fields are specified in the framework of the search for methodology in tafsīr. Thus, the incomplete aspects of the classification will be eliminated and a much more comprehensive and functional classification will be achieved. At this point, the methodologies of some figures as Tabarī, who is known to have used the terms of tafsīr and taʾwīl in the same meaning, must also be evaluated separately. Indeed, when the works of these names are analyzed, it is seen that these names also distinguish the meaning-interpretation fields in tafsīr, but they do not do this through the tafsīr-taʾwīl concepts. (shrink)

Interpreting Figurative Meaning critically evaluates the recent empirical work from psycholinguistics and neuroscience examining the successes and difficulties associated with interpreting figurative language. There is now a huge, often contradictory literature on how people understand figures of speech. Gibbs and Colston argue that there may not be a single theory or model that adequately explains both the processes and products of figurative meaning experience. Experimental research may ultimately be unable to simply adjudicate between current models in psychology, linguistics and philosophy (...) of how figurative meaning is interpreted. Alternatively, the authors advance a broad theoretical framework, motivated by ideas from 'dynamical systems theory', that describes the multiple, interacting influences which shape people's experiences of figurative meaning in discourse. This book details past research and theory, offers a critical assessment of this work and sets the stage for a new vision of figurative experience in human life. (shrink)

The basic claims of traditional truth-conditional semantics are that the semantic interpretation of a sentence is connected to the truth of that sentence in a situation, and that the meaning of the sentence is derived compositionally from the semantic values meaning of its constituents and the rules that combine them. Both claims have been subject to an intense debate in linguistics and philosophy of language. The original research papers collected in this volume test the boundaries of this classic view from (...) a linguistic and a philosophical point of view by investigating the foundational notions of composition, values and interpretation and their relation to the interfaces to other disciplines. They take the classical theories one step further and closer to a realistic semantic theory that covers speaker’s intentions, the knowledge of discourse participants, meaning of fiction and literature, as well as vague and paradoxical utterances. (shrink)

When we see or hear a spontaneous emotional expression, we usually immediately, effortlessly, and often correctly interpret it to mean happiness, sadness, or some other emotion as well as what this emotion is about. How do we do that? In this article, I evaluate how useful the concepts of natural meaning and probabilistic meaning are when it comes to explaining how we and other animals interpret emotional signs displayed without communicative intentions. I argue that Grice’s notion of natural meaning, because (...) it is a factive relation, is too restrictive for this purpose. I then present the notion of probabilistic meaning. The latter seems adequate for analyzing our ability to interpret non-communicative emotional signs, but it faces several difficulties when it comes to analyzing how we and other animals interpret emotional _signals_, i.e. signs that have the function to communicate emotional information. I present three of these difficulties. En passant, I suggest that a teleosemantic notion may be better suited for these challenges. (shrink)

Hermeneutics has had a pervasive influence on contemporary philosophy, social and cultural theory, literary criticism, and aesthetics. In this book one of Europe's foremost contemporary philosophers provides hermeneutics with a fresh relevance and a substantive account of its philosophical meaning for science, ethics, religion, and art. Vattimo argues for a reading of hermeneutics that radicalises it according to what the author calls its 'nihilistic vocation', a term referring to the interpretive character of truth and taken from Nietzsche's statement that there (...) are, in the modern period, no facts, only interpretations. Modernity, for Vattimo, is conceived as the advent of nihilism, and the central question of the book is to ask what it means to take this nihilistic vocation seriously. This involves not simply accepting the current status of hermeneutics, but evaluating why it appears when, and where, it does. (shrink)

In this paper an approach to the exhaustive interpretation of answers is developed. It builds on a proposal brought forward by Groenendijk and Stokhof (1984). We will use the close connection between their approach and McCarthy's (1980, 1986) predicate circumscription and describe exhaustive interpretation as an instance of interpretation in minimal models, well-known from work on counterfactuals (see for instance Lewis (1973)). It is shown that by combining this approach with independent developments in semantics/pragmatics one can overcome certain limitations of (...) Groenenedijk and Stokhof's (1984) proposal. In the last part of the paper we will provide a Gricean motivation for exhaustive interpretation building on work of Schulz (to appear) and van Rooij and Schulz (2004). (shrink)

Interpretation is the process whereby a hearer reasons to an interpretation of a speaker's discourse. The hearer normally adopts a credulous attitude to the discourse, at least for the purposes of interpreting it. That is to say the hearer tries to accommodate the truth of all the speaker's utterances in deriving an intended model. We present a nonmonotonic logical model of this process which defines unique minimal preferred models and efficiently simulates a kind of closed-world reasoning of particular interest for (...) human cognition. Byrne's “suppression” data (Byrne, 1989) are used to illustrate how variants on this logic can capture and motivate subtly different interpretative stances which different subjects adopt, thus indicating where more fine-grained empirical data are required to understand what subjects are doing in this task. We then show that this logical competence model can be implemented in spreading activation network models. A one pass process interprets the textual input by constructing a network which then computes minimal preferred models for (3-valued) valuations of the set of propositions of the text. The neural implementation distinguishes easy forward reasoning from more complex backward reasoning in a way that may be useful in explaining directionality in human reasoning. (shrink)

Interpretation is the process whereby a hearer reasons to an interpretation of a speaker's discourse. The hearer normally adopts a credulous attitude to the discourse, at least for the purposes of interpreting it. That is to say the hearer tries to accommodate the truth of all the speaker's utterances in deriving an intended model. We present a nonmonotonic logical model of this process which defines unique minimal preferred models and efficiently simulates a kind of closed-world reasoning of particular interest for (...) human cognition. Byrne's “suppression” data (Byrne, 1989) are used to illustrate how variants on this logic can capture and motivate subtly different interpretative stances which different subjects adopt, thus indicating where more fine-grained empirical data are required to understand what subjects are doing in this task. We then show that this logical competence model can be implemented in spreading activation network models. A one pass process interprets the textual input by constructing a network which then computes minimal preferred models for (3-valued) valuations of the set of propositions of the text. The neural implementation distinguishes easy forward reasoning from more complex backward reasoning in a way that may be useful in explaining directionality in human reasoning. (shrink)

Hogan argues that the basis of interpretive method is ordinary inferential reasoning - that there is no general methodological difference between interpretation in the humanities and theory construction in the physical sciences. Further, the nature of interpretation does not entail cultural, historical, or other forms of relativism, as is commonly thought. However, this does not imply that there is only one way of approaching interpretation or that there is one true meaning of any particular work. Rather, there are many kinds (...) of interpretation and many kinds of meaning and the interpreter is free to stipulate one of these in the context of a particular enquiry. More exactly, discussing the constraints upon stipulation, Hogan says that, although there are a large number and variety of intents (those of authors and readers, conscious and unconscious), there are no nonintentional meanings - Platonic, social, essential, or otherwise. (shrink)

The paper proposes a radical change of focus for understanding the fundamental purpose and value of literary interpretation. It criticises an orthodox view in analytical philosophy of literature, according to which theories of meaning in the philosophy of language, in particular Gricean or speech act or other pragmatic theories, offer the most illuminating way to grasp the relevant principles of interpretation. The argument here is that the application of such theories in this context is not just wrong in detail (this (...) or that theory needs revising) but wrong in principle. The focus is wrong. The importation of philosophy of language distorts the essential character of interpretation, which should be seen as involving not so much meaning as value, not individual sentences but whole works, not obsessed with authorial intention but focused on the protocols of reading. (shrink)

David Bordwell's new book is at once a history of film criticism, an analysis of how critics interpret film, and a proposal for an alternative program for film studies. It is an anatomy of film criticism meant to reset the agenda for film scholarship. As such Making Meaning should be a landmark book, a focus for debate from which future film study will evolve. Bordwell systematically maps different strategies for interpreting films and making meaning, illustrating his points with a vast (...) array of examples from Western film criticism. Following an introductory chapter that sets out the terms and scope of the argument, Bordwell goes on to show how critical institutions constrain and contain the very practices they promote, and how the interpretation of texts has become a central preoccupation of the humanities. He gives lucid accounts of the development of film criticism in France, Britain, and the United States since World War II; analyzes this development through two important types of criticism, thematic-explicatory and symptomatic; and shows that both types, usually seen as antithetical, in fact have much in common. These diverse and even warring schools of criticism share conventional, rhetorical, and problem-solving techniques--a point that has broad-ranging implications for the way critics practice their art. The book concludes with a survey of the alternatives to criticism based on interpretation and, finally, with the proposal that a historical poetics of cinema offers the most fruitful framework for film analysis. (shrink)

Recent experiments have shown that naive speakers find borderline contradictions involving vague predicates acceptable. In Cobreros et al. we proposed a pragmatic explanation of the acceptability of borderline contradictions, building on a three-valued semantics. In a reply, Alxatib et al. show, however, that the pragmatic account predicts the wrong interpretations for some examples involving disjunction, and propose as a remedy a semantic analysis instead, based on fuzzy logic. In this paper we provide an explicit global pragmatic interpretation rule, based on (...) a somewhat richer semantics, and show that with its help the problem can be overcome in pragmatics after all. Furthermore, we use this pragmatic interpretation rule to define a new consequence-relation and discuss some of its properties. (shrink)

Interpretive Archaeologies provides a forum for debate between varied approaches to studying the past. It reflects the profound shift in the direction of archaeological study in the last fifteen years. The book argues that archaeologists must understand their own subjective approaches to the material they study as well as recognize how past researchers imposed their value systems on the evidence they presented. The book's authors, drawn from Europe, North America, Asia and Australasia, represent many different strands of archaeology. They address (...) the philosophical issues involved in interpretation and the origins of meaning in the evolution and emergence of "mind" in early hominids. They discuss the ways in which material culture is understood and presented in museums, and how the nature of history is itself in flux. (shrink)

In this paper an approach to the exhaustive interpretation of answers is developed. It builds on a proposal brought forward by Groenendijk and Stokhof (1984). We will use the close connection between their approach and McCarthy’s (1980, 1986) predicate circumscription and describe exhaustive interpretation as an instance of interpretation in minimal models, well-known from work on counterfactuals (see for instance Lewis (1973)). It is shown that by combining this approach with independent developments in semantics/pragmatics one can overcome certain limitations of (...) Groenenedijk and Stokhof’s (1984) proposal. In the last part of the paper we will provide a Gricean motivation for exhaustive interpretation building on work of Schulz (to appear) and van Rooij and Schulz (2004). (shrink)

This book investigates theories of interpretation and meaning in Renaissance jurisprudence.

The paper enriches the conceptual apparatus of the theory of meaning and denotation that was presented in Part I (Section 3). This part concentrates on the notion of interpretation, which is defined as an equivalence class of the relation possessing the same manner of interpreting types. In this part, some relations between meaning and interpretation, as well as one between denotation an interpretational denotation are established. In the theory of meaning and interpretation, the notion of language communication has been formally (...) introduced and some conditions of correctness of communication have been formulated. (shrink)

In his book Tales of the Mighty Dead Brandom engages Gadamer’s hermeneutic conception of interpretation in order to show that his inferentialist approach to understanding conceptual content can explain and underwrite the main theses of Gadamer’s hermeneutics which he calls “the gadamerian hermeneutic platitudes”. In order to assess whether this claim is sound, I analyze the three types of philosophical interpretations that Brandom discusses: de re, de dicto and de traditione, and argue that they commit him to an “ecumenical historicism” (...) that is directly at odds with the hermeneutic approach. Although the variety of de re interpretation that Brandom denominates de traditione comes indeed very close to the Gadamerian approach, I conclude that if Brandomian scorekeepers were to adopt it, they could become Gadamerian hermeneuts, but once they did, they would not be able to go back to their scorekeeping practices as described by Brandom. (shrink)

A mutual interpretation and theoretical transplant of ethical-economical concepts is a process of the dialogue and discussion on its “meaning,” and also a process of the transmission and interaction of values. However, over-interpretation, which is inevitable in “understanding” “meaning,” and the plight of the “hegemony of values,” bring potential risks to value dissimilation in the interpretation and transplant. Value migration—value hegemony—value dissimilation is its general process of development. The academic reasoning behind overcoming the risk of value dissimilation is value ecology. (...) The essence of value ecology is to enable the meaning-dialogue and value interlocutions of ethics-economy follow the rules of ecology. Therefore, the process of mutual interpretation and transplantation becomes a process of the ecological interlocution of ethics-economy, creating a new value, eco-value. (shrink)

Attempts within sociolinguistics to model the African American speech community require a sound account of what a competent participant knows when they give correct interpretations of utterances made within such a community, a phenomenon any larger theory of language use ought to address. To provide this account, I reconstruct a line of argument from the philosophical history of discussions on African American speech communities. I give this history in terms of pragmatic arguments, that is, in terms of the ability of (...) vernacular speakers to manage the "slip" between speaker meaning and conventional meaning so as to effectively communicate, and thus be interpretable to competent auditors. ;In the writings of African American philosophers Alexander Crummell and Alain Locke especially, the general pragmatic strategy is to take the regulative background of speech acts to play a central role in vernacular interpretation, particularly as it relates language use to patterns of interpretation available to a speech community and to communicative aspects of the socialization of members of that community . In terms of meaning, interpretation is seen by Crummell as a function of publicly accessible meaning; he endorses the claim that the content which a word expresses is an idea in the mind of a speaker--what I call the Semantic Identity Thesis. Locke's insight, however, that cognitive meaning and content-bearing linguistic vehicles can be assessed independently provides him with the leverage to treat speaker meaning and symbol meaning as distinct components of a speaker's competence to successfully interpret utterances--what I call the Semantic Distance Thesis. ;Using these accounts to model inferences in communication, I argue that a complete account of interpretation will show how a speaker accesses inferential, conventional and social knowledge. These sorts of knowledge are tied to the prevailing norms emerging from a regulative background for communication within the language use of a speech community. In this way, the slip between conventional meaning and speaker meaning can be understood as structuring the communicative context of vernacular speech, in that social knowledge plays a central role in effective interpretive inference. (shrink)

This essay clarifies and defends the methodological multidimensionality and improvisational character of Clifford Geertz’s account of interpretation and explanation. In contrast to accounts of power analysis offered by Michel Foucault and Talal Asad, I argue that Geertz’s work can simultaneously attend to meaning, power, identity, and experience in understanding and assessing religious practices and cultural formations.

This paper distinguishes two projects in Davidson's theory of meaning, an initial project of providing a compositional meaning theory for a natural language for which a Tarski-style truth theory is pressed into service and an extended project that aims to illuminate the basis of meaning in its relation to the neutrally described behavioral evidence in terms of which an interpretive truth theory for a language can ultimately be confirmed, and then argues that having distinguished the two projects we can see (...) that the goal that the radical interpreter sets himself cannot be achieved given the limits on his data. (shrink)

The authors argue that while meaning holism makes massive error possible, it does not, as Donald Davidson fears, threaten interpretability. Thus they hold, in opposition to Davidson, that meaning holism need not be constrained by an account of meaning according to which in the methodologically most basic cases the content of a belief is given by the cause of that belief. What ensures interpretability, they maintain, is not that speakers' beliefs are in the main true, but rather that beliefs have (...) the contents they do because of events others can in principle identify and describe. (shrink)

In theories of interpretation, the artwork's “surface” is frequently cast as something to be looked past in our quest for meaning. As such, the “surface” has also understandably been the focus of several polemics against the excesses of interpretive criticism – in film scholarship and beyond. This article explores what role concepts of the “surface” and “surface meaning” might fruitfully play in the interpretation of fiction films by thinking about a particular kind of expression-by-implication available to the medium: irony. An (...) under-theorised phenomenon, filmic irony could seem to require interpretation in order to grasp meanings that reside precisely elsewhere than the “surface”. Yet, can we even distinguish between a “surface meaning” and an “implied” meaning in a non-linguistic medium like film? This article addresses such questions by exploring the possibility of separating the explicit and implicit, as well as interpretation and comprehension, in a medium whose very capacity for ironic expression h... (shrink)

The distinction between a concept and its different conceptions plays a prominent role in debates about constitutional interpretation. Proponents of a dynamic reading of the Constitution-espousing interpretation of constitutional concepts according to their contemporary understandings typically rely on the idea that the Constitution entrenches only the general concepts it deploys, without authoritatively favoring any particular conception of them-specifically, without favoring the particular conception of the relevant concept that the framers of the Constitution may have had in mind. Originalists argue, to (...) the contrary, that fidelity to the Constitution requires an understanding of its provisions according to the particular conception of the abstract concepts prevalent at the time of enactment, and not those we may now favor. My main purpose in this essay is to put some pressure on the linguistic considerations that are presented in this debate, arguing that they are much more problematic than the proponents of both positions assume. I will try to show that the debate here is actually a moral-political one, mostly about the main rationale of a constitutional regime and the conditions of its legitimacy. It is, primarily, a debate about what constitutions are for, and what makes them legitimate. But I will only get to this moral issue at the end. The main part of the essay will strive to show that the semantic considerations employed in this debate are inconclusive; the way concepts are used in a given context depends on various pragmatic determinants, and those, in turn, depend on the nature of the conversation in question. The moral disagreement is, ultimately, about the kind of conversation that constitutional regimes are taken to establish. (shrink)

'What is the meaning of a word?' In this thought-provoking book, Hagberg demonstrates how this question—which initiated Wittgenstein's later work in the philosophy of language—is significant for our understanding not only of linguistic meaning but of the meaning of works of art and literature as well.

The paper is an attempt at a logical explication of some crucial notions of current general semantics and pragmatics. A general, axiomatic, formal-logical theory of meaning and interpretation is outlined in this paper.In the theory, accordingto the token-type distinction of Peirce, language is formalised on two levels: first as a language of token-objects (understood as material, empirical, enduring through time-and space objects) and then – as a language of type-objects (understood as abstract objects, as classes of tokens). The basic concepts (...) of the theory, i.e. the notions: meaning, denotation and interpretation of well-formed expressions (wfes) of the language are formalised on the type-level, by utilising some semantic-pragmatic primitive notions introduced on the token-level. The paper is divided into two parts.In Part Ia theoryof meaningand denotation is proposed, and in Part II - its expansion to the theory of meaning and interpretation is presented.The meaninga wfe is defined as an equivalence class of the relation possessing the same manner of using types (cf. Ajdukiewicz [1934], Wittgenstein [1953]). The concept of denotation is defined by means of the relation of referring which holds between wfe-types and objects of reality described by the given language. (shrink)

This article addresses the relationship between understanding and believing from the cognitive perspective of information-processing. I promote, within the scope of the Critical Discourse Analysis agenda, the relevance of an account of belief-fixation sustained by a combination of argumentative and cognitive insights. To this end, I first argue that discursive strategies fulfilling legitimization purposes, such as evidentials, tap into the same cognitive mechanisms as arguments. I then proceed to examine the idea that the most effective arguments are the ones that (...) manage to obscure or make irrelevant counter-evidence and propose, from a cognitive pragmatic perspective, a formulation of rhetorical effectiveness as a constraint on information-selection taking place at the interpretation stage and decisively influencing the evaluation stage responsible for belief-fixation. (shrink)

I argue that when we interpret a literary work, we engage with at least two different kinds of meaning, each requiring a distinct mode of interpretation. These kinds of meaning are literary varieties of what Paul Grice called nonnatural and natural meaning. The long-standing debate that began with Beardsley and Wimsatt's attack on the intentional fallacy is, I argue, really a debate about nonnatural meaning in literature. I contend that natural meaning has been largely neglected in our theorizing about literary (...) interpretation and that this comes at a serious cost, resulting in an inadequate account of what interpretation involves. I argue, first, that by recognizing that literary meaning includes both nonnatural and natural meaning, we are better placed to understand the interpreter's relationship with the author, and, second, that recognition of the distinction between nonnatural and natural meaning advances the established debate about literary meaning, offering support for actual intentionalism. The more inclusive view of literary meaning helps resolve an apparent difficulty raised by Noël Carroll. (shrink)