Reply to John Searle
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 7932188 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Steven Knapp, Walter Benn Michaels |
| Year | 1994 |
| Volume | 25 |
| Issue | 3 |
| Pages | 669 |
| Publication date | 1994-01-01 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | New Literary History (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0028-6087 • E-ISSN: 1080-661X |
| Publisher | JSTOR (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.2307/469471 |
| OpenAlex | W2315069794 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 2 |
OHN SEARLE'S CRITICISMS of our account of interpretation all have to do with the distinction he draws between sentence meaning and speaker's or author's meaning-the distinction, that is, between the meaning a sequence of marks or noises can be said to have when treated as a token of a sentence type in a given language, and the meaning that same sequence of marks or noises acquires when someone intentionally produces it. We have argued that only the latter kind of meaning can plausibly serve as the object of any coherent practice of interpretation. Hence we have denied that interpreters could ever be faced with a serious choice between reading a text its sentence meaning and reading it its intended meaning. To explain why we denied this, we pointed out (in our 1982 essay Against Theory) how absurd it would be to try to interpret a set of marks that resembled a certain English poem but that had in fact been produced by accident (in our story, by erosion on a beach). Searle disagrees, asserting that it makes perfect sense an interpreter, when confronted with a set of marks that looks like an inscription in a particular language, to wonder what it means, no matter how it got there. On his view, the marks A slumber did my spirit seal can still be said to mean something even if they were produced by a natural accident. If this is true, then it is, of course, also true that the same marks, intentionally produced by Wordsworth rather than by nature, must also be said to have sentence meanings independent ofWordsworth's intended meanings; and so it makes sense to regard interpreters as having to choose between interpreting those marks as the token of a sentence type and as the products of Wordsworth's intentional action. And if that choice makes sense, then it also makes sense to tell interpreters which of these two interpretive methods they ought to prefer. For this reason, Searle defends (at least in principle) E. D. Hirsch's recommendation that interpreters choose the intentionalist option; according to Searle, we are mistaken in criticizing Hirsch for recommending .. . that interpreters should look the author's intentions (653). But on what grounds could such a recommendation be made? Suppose we could find an interpreter committed to ignoring intention
Art · Epistemology · Historical Linguistics and Language Studies · Law in Society and Culture · Philosophy · Pragmatism in Philosophy and Education
| Citations per year | 0.18 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 2015 - 2017 (3) |
| Highly cited | No |