Interpreting People and Interpreting Texts

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Interpreting People andInterpreting TextsWilliam ChildPublished online: 17 Feb 2007.

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International Journal of Philosophical Studies

Vol. 14(3), 423–441

International Journal of Philosophical Studies

ISSN 0967–2559 print 1466–4542 online © 2006 Taylor & Francishttp://www.tandf.co.uk/journals

DOI: 10.1080/09672550600858353

Interpreting People and Interpreting Texts

William Child

Taylor and Francis LtdRIPH_A_185767.sgm10.1080/09672550600858353International Journal of Philosophical Studies0967-2559 (print)/1466-4542 (online)Original Article2006Taylor & [email protected]

Abstract

What is the relation between interpreting a person’s speech and actions, onthe one hand, and interpreting a written text, on the other? That question isconsidered in connection with the theories of interpretation offered byDonald Davidson and Paul Ricoeur. There are some important similaritiesbetween those theories. However, it is argued that Davidson and Ricoeur aredivided on fundamental questions about the relation between meaning andintention, about the reference of texts, about the relation between themeanings of texts and the meanings of spoken words, and about the notion ofcorrectness that applies to interpretation. On each of these points, it iscontended, Davidson has the better of the dispute.

Keywords:

Davidson; Ricoeur; interpretation; text; meaning; action

What is the relation between interpreting a person’s speech and actions, onthe one hand, and interpreting a written text, on the other? I shall considerthat question in connection with the views of Donald Davidson and PaulRicoeur – a philosopher not widely read by those in the analytic tradition.As I shall show, there are striking similarities between Davidson’s andRicoeur’s views about the nature of interpretation. Furthermore, evenwhere their views diverge, the distance between them is sometimes smallerthan it first appears. However, whilst emphasizing what Davidson andRicoeur have in common, I show that they are divided on fundamentalquestions about the relation between meaning and intention, about thereference of texts, about the relation between the meanings of texts and themeanings of spoken words, and about the notion of correctness that appliesto interpretation. On each of these points, I argue, Davidson has the betterof the dispute.

1 Davidson on Interpretation and Texts

According to Davidson, we can achieve a philosophical understanding oflinguistic meaning and the propositional attitudes by reflection on the

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nature of interpretation. What underpins that way of proceeding is theprinciple that ‘what a fully informed interpreter could learn about what aspeaker means is all there is to learn; the same goes for what the speakerbelieves’.

1

That statement of the principle – like most of Davidson’s writingsabout interpretation – focuses on speech and the interpretation of speech.Those who have written about interpretation in the Continental traditionhave tended, by contrast, to focus on the interpretation of literary, histori-cal, and other texts – an aspect of interpretation about which Davidson hashad little to say. So I start by considering how Davidson’s views about theinterpretation of speech might be applied or adapted to the case of writtentexts. I proceed partly by drawing on some recent writings in which he doesdirectly consider that question, and partly by extrapolating from his viewsabout the interpretation of speech.

2

From Davidson’s perspective there is no deep, principled differencebetween the meaning of words in speech and their meaning in a text. Thebasic question, he thinks, from which all else must start, is what the authormeant by the words she used. He states that view, in the first instance, forthe case of speech. A speaker has numerous intentions in uttering the wordsshe does: the intention to utter those words, the intention to utter words thatwill be interpreted by a hearer in such-and-such a way, the intention to saysomething relevant or informative or witty, the intention to produce certaineffects on her hearers, and so on. But:

the first intention that has to do with what words mean, or areintended to mean, is the intention to speak words that will be assigneda certain meaning by an interpreter. I call this

first meaning

.

(LLL 300)

But Davidson is clear that the point applies in just the same way to writtenwords:

First meaning is

first

in two related respects: it comes first in the orderof the speaker’s

or writer’s

semantic intentions, and it is the necessarybasis of all further investigations into what words, as used on an occa-sion, mean.

(LLL 300–1; second set of italics mine)

So, at a first approximation, we understand a text if we understand how, inwriting those words, the author was intending her words to be understood.

3

There is a fact of the matter about that. So there is a fact of the matter aboutwhat the subject’s words mean – subject to the indeterminacy introduced bythe fact that different schemes of interpretation may be equally eligible in

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425

the light of all possible evidence. And the fact that the subject’s words meanwhat they do is not dependent on the occurrence of any act of interpreta-tion: interpretation reveals the meaning the author gave the text; it does notconstitute that meaning.

These claims about meaning and intention stand in stark contrast to adoctrine advanced by Ricoeur – that the meaning of a text, by contrast withthe meaning of spoken discourse, is independent of its author’s intentions.But we can reduce the apparent distance between Davidson and Ricoeur ifwe note two ways in which Davidson’s position goes some way to accommo-dating the kinds of consideration that lead Ricoeur and others to make theiranti-intentionalist claims. First, Davidson insists that intention alone is notsufficient for meaning. Second, whilst stressing the primacy of what he calls‘first meaning’, with its link to the author’s or speaker’s intentions, he makesroom for the existence of other levels or dimensions of meaning that are notsimilarly tied to intention. I shall say something about each of these points.

In Davidson’s view, ‘what [a speaker’s] words mean is (generally) what heintends them to mean’.

4

But the fact that a speaker intends a word to havea given meaning is not sufficient for that word, on his lips, to have thatmeaning. He must also make it possible for a reasonable interpreter tounderstand his use of the word as having that meaning.

5

That is why, whenLewis Carroll’s Humpty Dumpty says ‘There’s glory for you’, he does notsucceed in getting his word ‘glory’ to mean ‘a nice knockdown argument’,despite intending the word to mean just that. For Humpty Dumpty doesnothing to reveal the intention with which he was speaking; no reasonableinterpreter, therefore, could interpret his word ‘glory’ in the way heintended. As Davidson writes:

[Humpty Dumpty] cannot mean what he says he means because heknows that ‘There’s glory for you’ cannot be interpreted by Alice asmeaning ‘There’s a nice knockdown argument for you.’ We know heknows this because Alice says, ‘I don’t know what you mean by“glory”’ and Humpty Dumpty retorts, ‘Of course you don’t – til I tellyou.’

6

Davidson holds the same view of writing: a writer only succeeds in meaningwhat he intends to mean if he can reasonably expect his interpreters tounderstand his words in the way he intends. Now, Davidson himself takes avery permissive view of what it can be reasonable for a writer to expect. Inhis discussion of James Joyce, he brings out the vast range of backgroundknowledge of all sorts – linguistic, historical, geographical, literary, Biblicaland so on – that we need to draw on if we are to reach Joyce’s intendedmeaning.

7

But however hard the task, he thinks (and he acknowledges that,with

Ulysses

and

Finnegan’s Wake

, the task is often very hard indeed), if itis possible for a reader to have this knowledge and to deploy it in order to

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recover the author’s intended meaning, then the words really do carry thosemeanings. But was it

really

reasonable for Joyce to suppose that his readerscould recover his intended meaning? I am inclined to take a less liberal viewthan Davidson; even if it is

possible

for a reader to recover the intendedmeaning, it does not follow that readers could reasonably be expected to doso on the basis of the information Joyce actually supplied. But however thatmay be, there is clearly no definite answer to the question of the reasonable-ness of the intention that one’s words should be understood in a certain way.So the implication of Davidson’s view is that there may be no definiteanswer to the question of what Joyce’s words mean. We can regard that asone more kind of indeterminacy of meaning or interpretation, to add to thevarieties of indeterminacy Davidson has catalogued elsewhere.

The second way of reducing the distance between Davidson’s emphasison author’s intentions and the anti-intentionalism of writers such as Ricoeuris to stress that there are different levels of meaning or significance. SoDavidson can acknowledge the existence of various notions of ‘meaning’ forwhich the ‘meaning’ of a text may diverge from its author’s intentions.Though the ‘first meaning’ of a text is a matter of the meaning its authorintended it to have, a text has other levels of meaning too; for some of thoselevels, the author’s intentions are less central.

For one thing, a speaker or writer generally uses words that belong to alanguage that is largely shared with others: English, Greek, Urdu, or what-ever. Suppose that (intentionally or not) she uses words in an idiosyncraticway. Then we can distinguish the meaning the author intended those wordsto have (the meaning they do have on that occasion, if she did enough tomake them interpretable that way) from the meaning they usually have inthe language. And there is a clear sense in which, as well as their ‘firstmeaning’, the speaker’s or writer’s words have a further meaning that isindependent of her intentions. Suppose that Humpty Dumpty had explicitlytold Alice that, in his idiolect, the word ‘glory’ meant ‘a nice knockdownargument’. Then, on Davidson’s view, when Humpty Dumpty went on tosay, ‘There’s glory for you’, his words really would have had the meaning heintended them to have; on his lips, on that occasion, the sentence ‘There’sglory for you’ would have meant ‘There’s a nice knockdown argument foryou.’ But for all that, the words he uttered would have had another mean-ing, too – their ordinary, English meaning – and their having that meaningwould have been independent of Humpty Dumpty’s intentions. Davidsonneed not deny that there is this second level of linguistic meaning: themeaning that the words used by a speaker or writer would normally betaken to have in her community. He simply insists that, from a theoreticalperspective, this level of meaning is secondary or derivative relative to ‘firstmeaning’.

Another way in which a text may have a meaning apart from its author’sintentions is by having a social or cultural significance. (Here we come

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closer to the kind of meaning that primarily interests Ricoeur.) Dante’s

Divine Comedy

, for example, has a meaning, a significance, in Italiancultural history that is not answerable to Dante’s intentions and to whichthose intentions may be largely irrelevant. That meaning is a matter of theuse that is (and has been) made of Dante’s text and the ways it is (and hasbeen) regarded: for example, its use in developing and transmitting a pan-Italian cultural identity; its role in educating Italian children; its place as acommon reference-point in Italian literature; and so on. When we areconsidering meanings of this kind, the author’s intentions will not bedecisive; and disputes about such meanings of a text need not involvedisagreements about what the author meant by it. Similarly, we talk aboutthe ‘meaning’ of a literary text in the sense of what it teaches us about life,about human emotions and motivations, and so forth. Again, the lessonsthat we draw from a text and regard as part of its meaning may be quitedifferent from those its author intended it to teach: what was, for the author,a paradigm of determination and resolve may seem, to us, a paradigm ofcruelty. Davidson happily accepts the existence, and importance, of suchfurther dimensions of meaning. But, he thinks, these other sorts of meaningare different from, and parasitic on, a text’s first, or literal, meaning.

I said at the outset that, from Davidson’s perspective, there is no deepdifference in principle between the meaning of words in speech and theirmeaning in a written text. But there are at least two practical respects inwhich the situation of a reader trying to understand a written text

does

differfrom that of an interpreter trying to understand speech.

8

First, a central tenet of Davidson’s view is that in assigning meaning tospoken sentences, a key part is played by cases where the subject’s willing-ness to assent to a sentence, or to hold it true, is keyed to observable changesin his environment. The sentence ‘That’s a horse’ is an example. Finding outwhat causes a subject to assent to an ‘occasion sentence’ like this one helpsus to determine what he means by it; an interpreter’s working hypothesiswill be that, if a subject normally assents to the sentence ‘That’s a horse’only in the observable presence of horses, then that sentence, on his lips,reports the presence of a horse. By contrast, a subject’s willingness to assentto the sentence ‘Horses have four legs’ is not so directly keyed to observablechanges in his environment; he will be willing to assent to it whether or nothe can currently see any horses. In telling what a subject means by asentence like this, we shall need to consider its relations to sentences thatare more directly linked to observable circumstances; without such links,there would be no telling what he was talking about. So occasion sentencesplay a primary role in interpreting a speaker’s language; they are whatDavidson calls the ‘plainest and methodologically most basic cases’.

9

Now, an occasion sentence is one that is differentially produced orassented to in response to observed environmental conditions. But a writtentext is eternal and unchanging. Once produced, its sentences are set down

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for all time; so there is no relation for us to detect between the author’s will-ingness to produce them and observable changes in his environment. Thatmeans that we cannot exploit links between sentences and the environmentin interpreting the text, in the way that we can exploit links between spokenoccasion sentences and the environment in interpreting spoken language. Insome cases, that means that it will be difficult or even impossible to under-stand elements of a written text. Ancient Greek texts, for example, containdescriptions of the sea as ‘wine-dark’. We think we know that, in so describ-ing the sea, the Greeks were describing its colour. But, not knowing whatstate of the sea led them to assent to the sentence ‘the sea is wine-darktoday’, we do not know what colour they were talking about. In general, wemust approach the interpretation of a written text on the basis of someexisting understanding of the way in which the subject’s words and sentencesare related to things and kinds in her environment – which is to say, someexisting understanding of their meanings. Even where a written text reportsthings that were going on in the author’s environment as she wrote, wecannot ourselves observe the events and circumstances she was respondingto. So such written sentences about the author’s immediate environmentcannot play the role in our interpretation of the text that occasion sentencesplay in the interpretation of speech. That is not to say that writing could

never

play the basic role in interpretation that is normally played by speech.There could be people who used writing exactly as we use speech: toconverse with one another in the presence of mutually salient objects andevents, to pose and answer questions about events and circumstances in theirimmediate environment, and so on. (Indeed, we occasionally do soourselves; when unable to speak, we write the sentences we would otherwiseutter.) If we could observe these people’s conversations-in-writing, interpre-tation of their written sentences could play just the kind of basic role in inter-preting their language that is normally played by the interpretation ofspeech. But that is not the position we are in when we confront a written textat a point temporally and spatially remote from its composition.

This first difference between interpreting speech and interpreting textsreflects the physical and temporal distance between the writer and the inter-preter of a text. A second, and related, difference flows from the samefeature. Suppose someone utters a word I do not understand. I can ask herto give a verbal or ostensive explanation of what she means. Of course, thereis no guarantee that I shall understand her explanation either. But I may do,and it may be only via her explanation that I know the meaning of her orig-inal word. For a written text, there is not normally the same chance to quizthe author. And even if I can ask the author what she meant, the explana-tion she gives will have less authority, since she may not remember how sheunderstood the words at the time she wrote them down. So one resourcethat we often use in interpreting speech is generally lacking when weinterpret written texts.

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These differences between speech and written texts are important. Theycan make it easier or more straightforward to interpret a subject’s speechthan to interpret a text. And they mean that the interpretation of speech is(normally) the methodologically more basic case. But they are differencesin degree rather than differences in kind. Spoken language does not consistentirely of occasion sentences; so the interpretation of speech alreadyinvolves interpreting uses of language that are not directly linked to observ-able circumstances. And, whilst the possibility of questioning a speaker cangive us crucial evidence for favouring one interpretation over another, it isonly one source of evidence amongst others. So, in Davidson’s picture,speech and written texts are parts of a continuous whole. The same canonsof interpretation apply to both. The interpretation of at least some speechis methodologically more basic than the interpretation of most or all writtentexts; but the cases of speech that are basic in interpreting a subject’slanguage shade off into the less basic cases, which themselves shade off intothe interpretation of written texts. As we shall see, this idea – that there isno fundamental discontinuity between the interpretation of speech and theinterpretation of writing – is a key difference between Davidson’s views andRicoeur’s.

2 Ricoeur on Texts and Actions

I shall focus on the views Ricoeur sets out in ‘The Model of the Text: Mean-ingful Action Considered as a Text’.

10

That paper was originally publishedin 1971; so it is broadly contemporary with Davidson’s early work on inter-pretation. The central thesis of the paper is that there is a significant analogybetween the nature and meaning of written texts, on the one hand, and thenature and meaning of human actions, on the other. Correspondingly,Ricoeur thinks, there is a significant analogy between the

interpretation

oftexts and the kind of interpretation and explanation characteristic of thehuman sciences. His aim is to substantiate a view of interpretation thatavoids both the ‘scepticism’ on which any interpretation of a text or actionis as good as any other and the ‘dogmatism’ on which a text or action has justone correct interpretation. An intermediate view is necessary, he thinks, ifwe are to preserve the idea that there is something genuinely scientific aboutthe human sciences (avoiding scepticism), whilst doing justice to what distin-guishes the human sciences from the natural sciences (avoiding dogmatism).

2.i Texts

We can start with Ricoeur’s theory of texts. Ricoeur begins with an accountof some differences between the meaning of spoken discourse and themeaning of a text. He identifies two crucial contrasts.

11

The first concernsthe relation between meaning and intention. In speech, Ricoeur thinks, ‘the

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subjective intention of the speaking subject and the meaning of thediscourse overlap each other in such a way that it is the same thing to under-stand what the speaker means and what his discourse means’ (MT 200). Ina written text, by contrast:

the author’s intention and the meaning of the text cease to coincide …the text’s career escapes the finite horizon lived by its author. What thetext says now matters more than what the author meant to say, andevery exegesis unfolds its procedures within the circumference of ameaning that has broken its moorings to the psychology of its author.

(MT 200–1)

Ricoeur’s second contrast concerns reference. ‘In spoken discourse’, hewrites, ‘what the dialogue ultimately refers to is the

situation

common to theinterlocutors. … In oral discourse, we are saying, reference is

ostensive

’ (MT201). But:

in the same manner that the text frees its meaning from the tutelage ofthe mental intention, it frees its reference from the limits of ostensivereference. For us, the world is the ensemble of references opened upby the texts. Thus we speak about the ‘world’ of Greece, not to desig-nate any more what were the situations for those who lived them, butto designate the non-situational references which outlive the efface-ment of the first and which henceforth are offered as possible modesof being, as symbolic dimensions of our being-in-the-world.

(MT 201–2)

(Note, incidentally, that Ricoeur’s claims concern the meanings of all texts.He derives them from theses about the character of writing in general, notfrom theses about literary or fictional writing in particular. So the claims arenot confined to literary or fictional texts.)

What should we make of these two claims? On the face of it, the claimthat a text’s meaning is independent of its author’s intention directlyopposes Davidson’s account. But whether or not there is a genuinedisagreement depends on the kind of meaning Ricoeur has in mind. As Isaid above, there are different levels or kinds of meaning, and there areperfectly good notions of the meaning or significance of a text that are nottied to the author’s intentions. Dante’s

Divine Comedy

, I said, has a culturalmeaning that need not have been intended by Dante. Similarly, part of thesignificance we attach to Conrad’s

Heart of Darkness

lies in what it tells usabout nineteenth-century colonialism and European racism, via its pictureof Africa as elemental, uncivilized, and untameable. But Conrad’s text can

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manifest the views we regard it as typifying without its author havingintended it to do so. If Ricoeur’s claim that text-meaning is independent ofauthor’s intentions is confined to this sort of meaning, it is unobjectionable,and the disagreement between Ricoeur and Davidson is merely apparent.

However, there are two reasons to be cautious about accepting thiseirenic conclusion. In the first place, even though there are kinds of meaningthat are not traced back directly to the author’s intentions, such meaningsare obviously dependent on the fact that the words that make up the texthave the meanings they do. If Conrad had used the name ‘Africa’ to refer toEurope, or if he had used the word ‘darkness’ to refer to lightness, his textcould scarcely tell us what it does about colonialism or about images of race.And if the basic meanings of the words in a text depend essentially on itsauthor’s intentions, as Davidson argues, the kinds of secondary meaning wehave been discussing cannot be independent of

all

of the author’s intentions.Secondly, Ricoeur actually shows no signs of wanting to restrict his anti-

intentionalism to the secondary meanings of texts. On the contrary, hisaccount strongly suggests the more radical view that there is

no

level of atext’s meaning that is tied to the author’s intentions. Indeed, he says explic-itly that ‘

the verbal meaning

of the text’ (MT 200, my italics) is ‘dissociatedfrom’ the author’s intention. So, though a Davidsonian can be concessive tosome of what Ricoeur says about text-meaning and interpretation, thereremains a fundamental disagreement. Davidson, I think, occupies the moreplausible side in that disagreement.

What of Ricoeur’s second claim – about reference? He starts with a goodpoint. Reference in speech is heavily dependent on the context of utterance,via ostensive and indexical devices, including ‘demonstratives, the adverbsof time and place, and the tense of the verb’ (MT 201). ‘In oral discourse’,he says, summing up, ‘reference is ostensive.’ By contrast, Ricoeur notes,literal ostension has no place in a text. Davidson makes the same point:‘Ostension, which often serves to relate names and faces, or to helpintroduce a new colour or sound or category, has no immediate analogue inwriting’ (LLL 304). But it is a mistake for Ricoeur to move from this pointto the claim that words in a written text refer in a way that is entirely inde-pendent of the context of their production, or that they somehow refer to a‘world’ that is wholly independent of any actual ‘situations’.

The devices by which reference is tied to context form a continuum. Atone end, there are the purest cases – explicit demonstratives such as ‘Thatman’ or ‘This colour’. Such devices, as Davidson says, have no immediateanalogue in writing. But there are numerous other ways in which thereference of words is dependent on the context of production; and most ofthese apply to texts in exactly the same way that they apply to speech. Weare familiar from the writings of Putnam and Burge with the idea that thephysical and social character of our environment affects the contents of ourwords for kinds of thing. That point is not confined to speech; it applies

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equally to texts. A similar point applies to singular terms: when I use theproper name of someone I know, my reference depends on the complexrelations in which I stand to that person, and not to other people with thesame name; the successful use of the name by others is dependent on theirbeing part of the same name-using practice as those who do know theperson named. These are contextual matters. Again, the point applies totexts as much as to speech; when someone reads in a report of the corona-tion of George II that the anthem ‘O Lord, grant the King a long life’ wascomposed by William Child, they need to know that that use of the name‘William Child’ refers to a seventeenth-century musician, not to the authorof this paper. Similarly, if I read that St Paul’s Cathedral is ‘amusing, awfuland artificial’, I need to know

when

the words were produced if I am tounderstand the opinion being reported. Those words, produced today,would express the view that St Paul’s is funny, bad, and contrived; whenthey were produced in the 1700s, they expressed the view that the Cathedralwas inspired, impressive, and skilfully built.

I draw two conclusions from these reflections. First, even if explicit osten-sion to things or kinds in the context of production plays no role in the refer-ence of the words in a written text, the reference of such words remainsthoroughly dependent on the original context of production in the kinds ofways just indicated;

pace

Ricoeur, the reference of a text is never ‘freed’from the context of writing. Second, though the reference of written wordscannot be directly ostensive, that does not mean that the meanings of thosewords are not determined by their links to the ostensive uses the authormakes, or would be prepared to make. In this respect, there is no significantdistinction between speech and writing. In most contexts where I utter theword ‘squirrel’, I am not, at the moment of utterance, in a position toidentify a squirrel ostensively. Still, my word ‘squirrel’ has the meaning itdoes in part because of the ostensive identifications I have made or couldmake. Similarly for my use of the proper names of people I know. So eventhough not all reference in speech is directly ostensive, the reference ofmany spoken words depends ultimately on ostension. The same pointapplies to writing.

I have focused thus far on Ricoeur’s account of the nature and meaningof texts. I turn now to his account of the

interpretation

of texts. Ricoeur distin-guishes two elements in the process of interpretation: the process of reachingan interpretation, and the process of defending or justifying it. The processof reaching an interpretation of a text, he insists, is not rule-governed: form-ing an interpretation is like making a guess, and ‘there are no rules formaking good guesses’ (MT 211).

12

But that does not mean that any interpre-tation is as good as any other, or that the process of reaching an interpreta-tion is a mere matter of choice, unguided by reasons. On the contrary, a‘guess’, an interpretation of a text, can be defended by reasons. And thereare canons of good reasoning that govern the defence, or justification, of an

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interpretation; it is just that such defence or justification can never amountto a proof of the correctness of one’s interpretation:

the procedures of validation by which we test our guesses … are closerto a logic of probability than to a logic of empirical verification. Toshow that an interpretation is more probable in the light of what isknown is something other than showing that a conclusion is true. Inthis sense, validation is not verification. Validation is an argumenta-tive discipline comparable to the juridical procedures of legal inter-pretation. It is a logic of uncertainty and qualitative probability…. [If]it is true that there is always more than one way of construing a text, itis not true that all interpretations are equal…. The logic of validationallows us to move between the two limits of dogmatism and scepti-cism. It is always possible to argue for or against an interpretation, toconfront interpretations, to arbitrate between them, and to seek for anagreement, even if this agreement remains beyond our reach.

(MT 212–13)

We can distinguish two themes in the views Ricoeur is expressing here.The first concerns the character of the justification and explanation of aninterpretation. Here, his main point – that the canons of interpretation arenot susceptible of codification, and that the correctness of an interpretationis not susceptible of proof – is sound. There is an obvious parallel betweenthese views of Ricoeur’s about text-interpretation and Davidson’s viewsabout the interpretation of a speaker’s words:

there are no rules for arriving at [a correct interpretation of aspeaker’s words], no rules in any strict sense, as opposed to roughmaxims and methodological generalities. [An interpretation of aspeaker’s words] is derived by wit, luck, and wisdom from a privatevocabulary and grammar, knowledge of the ways people get theirpoint across, and rules of thumb for figuring out what deviations fromthe dictionary are most likely. There is no more chance of regularizing,or teaching, this process than there is of regularizing or teaching theprocess of creating new theories to cope with new data in any field –for that is what this process involves.

13

This is one point at which there is a significant measure of agreementbetween Ricoeur’s theory of interpretation and work in the analytictradition.

14

The second theme in Ricoeur’s discussion concerns the notion of truth orcorrectness in interpretation. Here is Ricoeur developing that theme, apply-ing it to actions as well as texts, and developing the analogy between

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disputes about the correct interpretation of texts and actions, on the onehand, and legal disputes, on the other:

In front of the court, the plurivocity common to texts and to actions isexhibited in the form of a conflict of interpretations, and the finalinterpretation appears as a verdict to which it is possible to makeappeal. Like legal utterances, all interpretations in the field of literarycriticism and in the social sciences may be challenged, and thequestion ‘what can defeat a claim’ is common to all argumentativesituations. Only in the tribunal is there a moment when the proceduresof appeal are exhausted. But [that] is because the decision of the judgeis implemented by the force of public power. Neither in literarycriticism, nor in the social sciences, is there such a last word. Or, ifthere is any, we call that violence.

(MT 215)

Ricoeur may be right that in questions of interpretation, there is never a lastword; it is always in principle possible that someone will come up with newevidence, or a new way of looking at things, that will make us give up oneinterpretation and adopt another. But what does that show? Ricoeur thinksthat we can get no further than a never-ending process of arguing for an inter-pretation and defending it against challenge. He seems tempted to concludethat there can be no

true

or

correct

interpretation – that all there can be is aset of interpretations (albeit a limited set) that are

warranted

or

assertable

.In assessing these claims, we must distinguish between the case where

different interpretations of a text are compatible and the case where theyare not. (Ricoeur does not sufficiently acknowledge this distinction.) If thedifferent interpretations we are considering are on different levels, andconcern different kinds of meaning, they will normally be compatible; thereis then no need to choose between them, for both may be correct. But if twointerpretations offer different accounts of a text’s meaning at the same level,they compete with one another and cannot both be right. Now, Ricoeur’stalk about

confronting

different interpretations and

arbitrating between

them suggests that he is thinking of competing interpretations; if two inter-pretations are compatible, there is no need to arbitrate between them. Butin that case, he is wrong to characterize as ‘dogmatic’ the view that only oneof these interpretations can be true; applied to competing interpretations,that view is not dogmatic but simply common sense. Naturally, when inter-pretations compete, it may be impossible to show which (if either) is correct;perhaps our best interpretations are always vulnerable to challenge anddefeat in the light of new evidence. But it would be a crude error to movefrom that epistemic point to the metaphysical conclusion that, in matters ofinterpretation, there is no truth, only warranted assertability.

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What really would be dogmatic, and mistaken, would be the view thatonly one of a number of intuitively

non-competing

interpretations can becorrect: a view that insists on seeing competition between interpretationswhere there is none. If there are dogmatists about interpretation who holdthat view, then Ricoeur is right to oppose them. But in his keenness to avoiddogmatism of this kind, he risks falling into the scepticism that gives up theidea that an interpretation may be, simply, true. Had he distinguished moreclearly between the case where interpretations compete and the case wherethey do not, he would have avoided that risk. On this point Davidson, whodoes insist on the distinction, has the issues more clearly in focus: whereinterpretations do not compete, more than one can be right; where they docompete, at most one is correct:

I take Freud to have been right in a sense he may not quite haveintended when he wrote in

The Interpretation of Dreams

that ‘all genu-inely creative writings are the product of more than a single motiveand more than a single impulse in the poet’s mind, and are open tomore than a single interpretation’. Should we then agree with Hans-Georg Gadamer when he says that what the text means changes as theaudience changes: ‘A text is understood only if it is understood in adifferent way every time’? I think not. There can be multiple interpre-tations, as Freud suggests, because there is no reason to say one rulesout others. Gadamer has in mind incompatible interpretations.

(LLL 307)

15

2.ii Actions

Ricoeur develops an analogy between the meaning and interpretation oftexts and the meaning and interpretation of human actions. As we haveseen, his key claims about texts are (i) that the meaning of a text is indepen-dent of its author’s intention, and (ii) that the reference of a text is indepen-dent of the situation in which it was produced. We can, he thinks, makeanalogous claims about human actions – or at least, about the kinds ofactions that form the subject-matter of the human sciences.

The analogue for actions of the first claim about texts is this: ‘In the sameway that a text is detached from its author, an action is detached from itsagent and develops consequences of its own’ (MT 206). In a text, it is the factthat words are written down that gives them an existence independent oftheir author, an existence that does not even require the continued exist-ence of the author; that is what allows a text to take on a meaning of its ownthat does not refer back to the author’s intention. In a similar way, Ricoeurargues, actions leave a trace on

history

: ‘an action leaves a “trace”, it makesits “mark” when it contributes to the emergence of … patterns which

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become the

documents

of human action’ (MT 206). And the existence ofhistory allows the actions that make it up to take on a meaning that is inde-pendent of the agents’ intentions:

Could we not say that history is itself the record of human action?History is this quasi-‘thing’ on which human action leaves a ‘trace’, putsits mark…. Before the archives which are intentionally written downby memorialists, there is this continuous process of ‘recording’ humanaction which is history itself as the sum of ‘marks’, the fate of whichescapes the control of individual actors. Henceforth history may appearas an autonomous entity, as a play with players who do not know theplot…. [H]uman deeds become ‘institutions’, in the sense that theirmeaning no longer coincides with the logical intentions of the actors.

(MT 207)

The analogue of Ricoeur’s second point about texts is this:

a meaningful action is an action the

importance

of which goes ‘beyond’its

relevance

to its initial situation. This … is very similar to the way inwhich a text breaks the ties of discourse to all the ostensive refer-ences…. An important action, we could say, develops meanings whichcan be actualized or fulfilled in situations other than the one in whichthis action occurred…. [T]he meaning of an important event exceeds,overcomes, transcends, the social conditions of its production and maybe re-enacted in new social contexts.

(MT 207–8)

What should we make of Ricoeur’s analogy between texts and actions? Inthe case of language, we saw, he distinguishes between speech and texts. Forspeech, he recognizes a core notion of meaning on which the meaning ofspoken words is closely tied to speaker’s intentions. He rightly argues that awritten text can have various other sorts of meaning or significance, forwhich the author’s intentions are not central. But, I argued, he is wrong tosuggest that, where a text has such further meanings or significance, it doesnot also have a basic linguistic meaning to which the tie to author’s inten-tions is as central as it is in the case of speech. There is a charitable readingof Ricoeur’s account of action that presents it as having the same fundamen-tal structure as this view of language, and as containing a large measure oftruth – though also as sharing the errors of his view of language. I firstdevelop the charitable reading; then I offer a reason for thinking thatRicoeur’s actual view may be less plausible than the charitable readingpresents it as being.

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The charitable reading starts with Ricoeur’s distinction between ‘simple’and ‘important’ actions, which is intended to parallel his distinction betweenspeech and writing. The distinction Ricoeur wants is best treated as adistinction between kinds of meaning that an action may have: a simplemeaning, on the one hand; and a higher-level meaning, or ‘importance’, onthe other. Then an ‘important action’ will be one that has both simple mean-ing and ‘importance’; a ‘simple action’ will be one that has only simplemeaning. In the case of simple actions, Ricoeur says, the action’s having themeaning it does is tied to the agent’s intention: ‘with simple actions, themeaning (noema) and the intention (noesis) coincide or overlap’ (MT206).

16

To view something as an intentional action at all is to view it ashaving a kind of meaning or significance; and its having the meaning it doesis partly a matter of the agent’s intention. Ricoeur then argues that thereare, in addition, other dimensions of the meaning or significance of humanactions that are not to be understood or explained by reference to theagent’s intentions. That is exactly right. The Charge of the Light Brigade atBalaclava in 1854 has an iconic status in British history, and a significance inthe history of warfare, that does not depend on any intention on the part ofthe participants to perform an action with that status: the horsemen andcommanders of the Light Brigade certainly did not intend their actions toexhibit the tragic futility or the disastrous bungling and incompetence theyhave come to represent. For a notion of meaning or significance of this sort,Ricoeur’s comments seem entirely appropriate. The ‘meaning’ of theCharge of the Light Brigade – what it has come to symbolize to subsequentgenerations – does indeed transcend the conditions of the performance ofthat action. This meaning may, as Ricoeur says, be reinvented or recon-strued by each succeeding generation. And the meaning may be ‘actualized’or ‘fulfilled’ in other situations: we are interested in the Charge of the LightBrigade in part because we are interested in the particular actions and moti-vations of particular individuals on a day in October 1854; but, to the extentthat the Charge of the Light Brigade has come to represent a particular

kind

of military and organizational disaster, we are interested in it for the generallessons it teaches about leadership, decision-making, obedience to ordersone sees to be catastrophic, and so on, lessons that can be applied tosituations other than those of a cavalry charge in the Crimean War.

No doubt Ricoeur overstates his case when he suggests that agents’ inten-tions are simply

irrelevant

to this kind of meaning or significance – just as, Iargued, he overstates his case when he suggests that a writer’s intentions areirrelevant to the higher-level meanings her text may possess; and for muchthe same reason. We could not accord the Charge of the Light Brigade theiconic status we do unless we believed what we do about the participants’intentions. If we thought that the commanders were intending not to attackthe Russian battery at the end of the valley, but to retreat by a route theybelieved led safely away from the battle, our view of the event’s significance

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could not survive. But, correcting for this exaggeration, Ricoeur’s analysisseems fundamentally right, provided that (i) it is confined to the dimensionof meaning or significance he appears to have primarily in mind – namely,the meaning associated with an action’s historical or cultural significance;and (ii) it is combined with the view that the basic meaning of an action – itsstatus as the intentional action it is – is essentially dependent on the agent’sintention.

There is much in Ricoeur that is compatible with this charitable interpre-tation. But it conflicts with some of what he says about the most basic kindof interpretation or explanation of action, where an action is explained byshowing how it seemed worthwhile to the agent – by giving the agent’sreasons for performing it. For Ricoeur seems sometimes to apply the ideathat the meaning of an action is independent of the agent’s intention evento simple action-explanations of this kind. But that application of the ideamust be wrong: the most basic explanation of an action is precisely one thatappeals to the agent’s own reasons. (It is also in tension with Ricoeur’s owncomment, quoted earlier, that the meaning of a ‘simple action’ coincideswith the agent’s intention.) Nonetheless, it does seem to be what Ricoeurproposes in the following passage. Suppose I am trying to explain an actionI have performed, he says:

I may have to answer the question,

as

what do you want this? On thebasis of [the] desirability-characters [associated with different wants]and the apparent good which corresponds to them, it is possible to

argue

about the meaning of an action, to argue for or against this orthat interpretation…. And could we not say that the process of

argu-ing

linked to the explanation of action by its motives unfolds a kindof plurivocity which makes action similar to a text? What seems tolegitimate this extension from guessing the meaning of a text toguessing the meaning of an action is that in arguing about the mean-ing of an action I put my wants and my beliefs at a distance andsubmit them to a concrete dialectic of confrontation with oppositepoints of view.

(MT 214)

But if we are trying to explain my action by giving my reasons, we cannot‘put my wants and my beliefs at a distance’: on the contrary, we mustfocus on my wants and beliefs; they are what make up my reasons. Ofcourse, I may be wrong about what my wants and beliefs are, or aboutwhich of them were relevant to my performing this action. So, in explain-ing or interpreting my own action, I may need to consider other viewsabout what my reasons were: as Ricoeur says, there is room for argumentabout the meaning of my action; and others may have a more accurate

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view of my reasons than I have myself. But in considering other views,and arguing for a given interpretation of my action, I am not consideringmy action in a way that ‘puts aside my wants and beliefs’; all I am ‘puttingaside’ is my own first impressions about which wants and beliefs led me toact as I did.

Ricoeur’s mistake is to overgeneralize the claim that the meaning of anaction is not tied to the agent’s reasons for performing it – from kinds orlevels of meaning for which it is entirely plausible to kinds of meaning forwhich it is not. But what he goes on to say about the character of the reason-ing involved in interpreting and explaining action is more convincing. Thestructure of ‘guess’ and ‘validation’, he argues, applies in the field of actionjust as it applies to texts: reaching an interpretation of an action involves akind of judgement that cannot be codified in any system of rules; andjustifying such a judgement involves a process akin to the juridical reasoning‘by which a judge or a tribunal validates a decision concerning a contract ora crime’ – ‘reasoning [that] does not at all consist in applying general laws toparticular cases’ (MT 215). On this point, Ricoeur and Davidson are, oncemore, in accord.

3 Concluding Comments

Where Davidson and Ricoeur disagree, I have sided with Davidson. Thatis not from any partisan loyalty to my own side in a dispute betweenanalytic and Continental philosophers. It is simply that, when oneexamines the points of disagreement in detail, Ricoeur’s views often seemexaggerated or implausible. Sometimes he has started from a good pointbut has pushed it too far. At other times, he has paid insufficient attentionto a crucial distinction. Nonetheless, I think that the journey has beenworthwhile. For one thing, getting to grips with Ricoeur forces us tobroaden our view from the case of interpreting speech, which looms solarge in the analytic tradition, to the case of texts. That is a helpful shift ofemphasis; for, at a minimum, a successful theory of meaning and interpre-tation must have something to say about written texts as well as speech.Similarly, Ricoeur draws our attention to the many levels of meaning andsignificance beyond the literal meanings of words or the basic status of anaction as the intentional action it was. That is, again, a healthy broadeningof emphasis.

Of course Davidson has done as much as any analytic philosopher tocast light on the areas to which Ricoeur directs our attention; he sharesRicoeur’s vision of the range of phenomena with which a theory of mean-ing and interpretation must deal. That is a final, and significant, point ofagreement.

17

University College, Oxford

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Notes

1 Davidson, ‘A Coherence Theory of Truth and Knowledge’, in

Subjective,Intersubjective, Objective

(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), p. 148.2 The recent writings in which Davidson comments directly on literature and the

interpretation of texts are: ‘James Joyce and Humpty Dumpty’, in P. French, T. E.Uehling, and H. Wettstein (eds)

Midwest Studies in Philosophy

, 16 (Notre Dame,IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1991) (hereafter JJHD); and ‘Locating Liter-ary Language’, in R. Dasenbrock (ed.)

Literary Theory after Davidson

(UniversityPark, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1993) (hereafter LLL).

3 It does not follow from the view that a speaker’s (or writer’s) intentions arecrucial to the meaning of her words that linguistic meaning can be

reductivelyanalysed

in terms of speakers’ (or writers’) intentions, or that the content ofthese linguistic intentions can be spelled out in a way that does not employ theconcept of linguistic meaning. So there is no tension between Davidson’s stresson the central role of linguistic intentions and his oft-expressed view that theinterpretation of a speaker’s words, on the one hand, and the ascription of inten-tions and other attitudes, on the other, are conceptually and methodologically ona level – so that neither is prior to the other. (For the oft-expressed view see, e.g.,pp. 143–4 of ‘Belief and the Basis of Meaning’, in

Inquiries into Truth andInterpretation

(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984).)4 Davidson, ‘First Person Authority’, in

Subjective, Intersubjective, Objective

,p. 14.

5 See LLL 305–6: ‘the intention by the originator that an utterance or writing beinterpreted in a certain way is only a necessary condition for that being thecorrect interpretation; it is also necessary that the intention be reasonable’. AndJJHD 4: ‘In speaking or writing we intend to be understood. We cannot intendwhat we know to be impossible; people can only understand words they aresomehow prepared in advance to understand.’

6 ‘A Nice Derangement of Epitaphs’, in E. LePore (ed.)

Truth and Interpretation:Perspectives on the Philosophy of Donald Davidson

(Oxford: Blackwell, 1986),p. 440.

7 JJHD

passim

.8 For Davidson’s remarks on these differences, see LLL 303–5.9 ‘A Coherence Theory of Truth and Knowledge’, p. 151.

10 Paul Ricoeur, ‘The Model of the Text: Meaningful Action Considered as a Text’,reprinted in his

Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences

, ed. and trans. John B.Thompson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981) (henceforth MT).

11 Ricoeur himself lists four contrasts: I focus on the two most significant.12 Ricoeur credits the point to Eric D. Hirsch, whom he quotes with approval:

‘The act of understanding is at first a genial (or a mistaken) guess and thereare no methods for making guesses, no rules for generating insights’ (E. D.Hirsch,

Validity in Interpretation (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1967),p. 25).

13 ‘A Nice Derangement of Epitaphs’, p. 446.14 In fact, Ricoeur himself draws on work in the analytic tradition to make his point.

He compares validating an interpretation of a text to justifying a legal interpre-tation, and quotes H. L. A. Hart on the non-demonstrative character of juridicalreasoning. (See MT 212–15, where Ricoeur cites Hart’s paper ‘The Ascription ofResponsibility and Rights’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 49 (1948),pp. 171–94.)

15 Davidson’s quotations come from: Sigmund Freud, ‘The Interpretation ofDreams’, The Standard Edition, Vol. 4 (London: The Hogarth Press, 1958),

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p. 266; and Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method (London: Sheed & Ward,1975), pp. 275–6.

16 See also the first of the two long quotations above. Ricoeur says there that, whena human deed becomes an institution, its meaning ‘no longer coincides with thelogical intentions of the actors’. That implies that a deed that has not yet becomean institution (or never becomes an institution) has a meaning that does coincidewith the actors’ intentions.

17 An earlier version of this paper was presented at a conference on Translationand Interpretation in Paros, in March 2006, organized by the European Centreof Translation and the Department of Philosophy and History of Science,University of Athens. I am grateful to the participants for many helpfulcomments.

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Documents

Interpreting People and Interpreting Texts