Thanks so much to GeoffB, who was able to locate the .pdf of some of my old course notes, which — as background for my students — dealt with many of the issues of interpretation that we’ve been discussing here (and elsewhere) over the past few days. Many of the following observations on meaning and hermeneutics were made by Walter Benn Michaels and augmented by me for my own pedagogical purposes. From pages 8-14 of the notes (footnotes and original emphases removed):
For hermeneutics, a text means what its author intends but also necessarily more, acquiring new meanings as readers apply it to new situations. For deconstruction, an author can never succeed in determining the meaning of a text; every text participates in a code that necessarily eludes authorial control. Since both these projects are committed to the view that a text can mean something other than what its author intends, they are also committed to the view that a text derives its identity from something other than authorial intention. The text is what it is, no matter what meaning is assigned to it by its author and no matter how that meaning is revised by its readers. What gives a text its autonomous identity? On most accounts, the answer is linguistic convention—the semantic and syntactic rules of the language in which the text was written. One of the aims of this course, then, is to question the notion that there can be any plausible criteria of textual identity that can function independent of authorial intention. Because there can be no such criteria, I’ll argue, nonmethodological versions of interpretive theory are as incoherent as methodological ones and, like the methodological ones, should be abandoned.
For Paul Ricoeur, because “objective meaning is something other than the subjective intention of the author,” a text “may be construed in various ways.” Thus, for hermeneuticists, intention is surpassed by meaning, freeing interpretation from its dependence on an authorial intention which, hermeneutical theorists will claim, is “often unknown to us, sometimes redundant, sometimes useless, and sometimes even harmful as regards the interpretation of the verbal meaning of a work.” A text thus divorced from its author’s intentional claims upon it is understood here as a text which exists in the nonpsychological and properly semantic space” outside of the “mental intention of its author.”
In writing, for Ricoeur, the author’s intention and the meaning of a text cease to coincide: and because intention and meaning come apart, the “text’s career escapes the finite horizon lived by its author. What the text means now matters more than what the author meant when he wrote it.” For Gadamer, likewise, “what is fixed in writing has detached itself from the contingency of its origin and its author and made itself free for new relationships.” And it is this step, the text’s becoming available for new relationships, that opens the possibility of hermeneutics to begin with. The text takes on a life of its own and henceforth can be understood “only if it is understood in a different way every time.” For Gadamer, then, “the real meaning of a text does not depend on the contingencies of the author . . . for it is always partly determined by the historical situation of the interpreter and hence by the totality of the objective course of history.”
The force behind these claims though is not the epistemological commonplace that understanding is always contextual; what is really at work here is the ontological claim that a text’s interpretive history is part of the meaning of the text itself—that our interpretive experience (and the interpretive experiences of those who came before us) are requisite variables not only in determining a text’s meaning but in the “actual” meaning of that text—in its ontological identity. The claim that a text “has detached itself from the contingency of its origin” and therefore that its meaning always in principle goes beyond its author is similar to the claim of Wimsatt and Beardsley in their seminal essay, “The Intentional Fallacy”: a poem “is detached from its author at birth and goes about the world beyond his power to intend about or control it.” Here, the meaning of a text is determined by semantics and syntax—by the “public” features of language.
But where for American formalism the meaning of the text itself, once detached from authorial intention, is permanent and unchanging, for hermeneutical theory the detachment of meaning from intention shows “that a text is understood only if it is understood in a different way every time.” For hermeneuticists, interpretation goes beyond the mere reconstruction of the author’s intention; the changing situation in which the text must be understood is itself part of the text’s meaning. Thus, Gadamer’s “problem of application”can be understood as the problem of adapting the meaning of a text to a specific interpretive instance—to the concrete historical situation of the interpreter.
In legal hermeneutics, for instance, laws may be produced by particular legislators on particular occasions, but they only function as laws insofar as they can by applied to contexts very different from the ones in which they are produced. It is the role of judges to work out the relations between the original meaning of a law and its application to each new case. And insofar as the context in which the law was produced differs (at the very least historically) from the context in which the law must be applied, the judge is “entitled to supplement the original meaning of the text.” In so doing, Gadamer writes, “he is doing exactly what takes place in all other understanding,”
To see what “application” involves, consider an example: A law is passed restricting traffic in a park much frequented by joggers. The text of the law reads, “No vehicle shall be permitted in the park.” A bicyclist is arrested for riding in the park; a judge must decide whether the law applies to bicycles. On the same day, someone else is arrested, this time for pushing a baby carriage in the park; the judge must decide whether the law applies to baby carriages. Reasoning that the legislators only intended to exclude dangerous vehicles (ones most likely to injure joggers), the judge rules that bicycles are prohibited but baby carriages are not.
Is this the sort of example Gadamer had in mind when he claims that “a text is understood only if it is understood in a different way every time?” After all, the text of the law explicitly mentions neither bicycles nor baby carriages; in deciding that the law refers to bicycles but not baby carriages, isn’t the judge interpreting the law by supplementing it—that is, bringing out a meaning that the legislators never intended? The answer, I’ll argue, is no. Because what happens here is simply this: the judge didn’t mean to go beyond the legislator’s intention but rather s/he meant to decide what that intention was; when the legislators said “vehicles,” this judge decided, they meant “dangerous vehicles.” The only “problem of application” was to decide what vehicles were dangerous. But this cannot be application in Gadamer’s sense, since for Gadamer, application is part of interpretation, whereas here the judge only applies the law after first figuring out what it means (what its “writers” intended it to mean).
Suppose, though, that the judge determines that the legislators intended to prohibit all vehicles, including baby carriages, but decides that prohibiting baby carriages is unreasonable and thus rules that they are permitted. This seems closer to what Gadamer has in mind when he writes that a judge “cannot let himself be tied by what, say, an account of parliamentary proceedings tells him about the intentions of those who first worked out the law.” Interpreting the law in such a way that it permits baby carriages, and thus going beyond what the legislators intended, the judge now seems to perform the “work of application” that, according to Gadamer, “is involved in all forms of understanding.” That is, here the judge appears to go beyond the legislator’s intention in an act of “creative supplementing” that gives the text a new meaning.
But why, the question becomes, should “application” in this sense count as “interpretation”? The judge, in going beyond the legislators’ intentions in order to make the text mean something more than they meant, is changing the text, not properly interpreting it. The act of “creative supplementing” is thus an act of creative writing, producing not a new interpretation of the legislators’ text but a new text entirely. In Gadamer’s view, however, not only is the judge still interpreting, but the discrepancy between what the legislators intended and what the judge interprets the text to mean points to the “true centre of hermeneutical enquiry,” since “the task of an historical hermeneutics” is “to consider the tension that exists between the identity of the common object [the law] and the changing situation in which it must be understood.” Instead of two different texts, Gadamer sees one text (the “common object”) with two different meanings.
But why are these two different meanings of the same text? What is common is Gadamer’s “common object”? Obviously not intention, since the judge’s interpretation and the legislator’s intention no longer coincide. What is required for the hermeneutic notion of application to work, then, is the criterion of textual identity that will allow a text to remain the same while its meaning changes.
But in what circumstances might it seem plausible to say that the verbal “meaning” of a text or utterance transcends the author’s intentions—that a text can mean more than it was intended to mean? For hermeneutics, the answer rests with the circumstances of linguistic convention, in that such convention provides a criterion of textual identity (ontology) that enables the interpreter to give a text a meaning that goes beyond the author’s intended meaning. Thus, the meaning of a text can seemingly be altered by the interpreter while the text itself remains (materially) unchanged.
But such a claim, I’ll argue, is theoretically unsupportable; because if intended meaning is altered (which it can never be, in the sense that “altering” is changing what is theoretically unchangeable—a completed intention) so too, then, is the text. Instead, what we as interpreters are left with is a “meaning” of the text that we have created, one which is different from the “meaning” of the original text as it was “performed.” We—like the judge who went beyond what he thought the legislators’ meant—are no longer concerned with “interpretation” as such; rather, we are engaged in an act of creating our own text, having incorporated our experiences as interpreters into what we subsequently claim is the ontological identity of the text itself. What we have done is conflated what a text means with what it can be shown to do. And once we conflated “meaning” with a notion of linguistic conventions that no longer appeals to what makes “convention” conventional in the first place—intention—we have simply privileged our intentions over the intentions that made the utterance/text linguistic in the first place—the intentions of its author.
PEDAGOG!
hey, teach,
is there like a popquiz next week??
:-)
“is there like a popquiz next week?? ”
Weirder yet, there’s a popquiz at every interpretive moment.
Seriously, though —
Instead, what we as interpreters are left with is a “meaning” of the text that we have created, one which is different from the “meaning” of the original text as it was “performed.” We—like the judge who went beyond what he thought the legislators’ meant—are no longer concerned with “interpretation” as such; rather, we are engaged in an act of creating our own text
for me that is the kernal of debate. There are those that want to be able to avoid intentionalism because such avoidance gives them the power to create text rather than interpreting and then holding the original creator responsible for things they never meant. And removes the responsibility of the faux-interpreter for rewriting the text. “OHNOES, you may have said ‘You lie’ but I heard ‘You lie, boy’, you racist YOU!”
Geez. All I did was accidentally say “pepper” when I wanted salt.
Sure. But it need not have been accidental. If you wanted to signify salt using the signifier pepper, you could. It’s just that convention would make it difficult for a listener to understand what you meant (a less confusing example, but one that illustrates the point just the same, would be if you wanted to signify salt but you used something like “shoe” or “reindeer” or a nonsense signifier; the fact that there is no reindeer around, and asking for a shoe at dinner is unusual, might suggest to the listener that you are trying to mean unconventionally. Convention doesn’t hold; intent does).
Still, if you succeeded in getting someone to pass you the salt — even after signifying it as pepper — you will have succeeded in communicating what you meant.
Well, yes, because I was gesticulating wildly at the salt and looking at it directly. People knew what I wanted.
In other news, legislatures intend to pass a law. The verbal diarrhea that results is the fruit of that intention.
What they intended the law to DO is another question entirely, ranging from “fix a problem” to “set up a sweet deal for my donors” to “make myself re-electable.”
True dat. All of which is part of the signification at the time the law passes, only some of which will be reconstructed during the process of interpretation. Doesn’t mean you aren’t interpreting, though. It just means that in a communication chain that uses arbitrary signification, some things can get lost.
There’s a young woman (late 20’s) at my work who suffered a massive stroke last year. She returned to work a couple of months ago, physically fine except she is still suffering from aphasia.
Of course, we are all invested in what she intends when she speaks and will be patient as she comes out with a partial sentence or the wrong word and will go back and forth until she agrees with our interpretation of her speech.
The meaning still remains with her, even if she can’t come up with the most appropriate signifier.
I’m curious, Jeff. How did the majority of your students generally react to your lectures on intentionalism? I can imagine some reacting strongly against it as you took away the foundation of the wacky stuff they thought they knew from other classes. And, I can imagine some reacting strong for it as they realized, hey, this doesn’t all have to be obvious bullshit.
I generally taught this stuff in honors / advanced courses. Most students reacted very positively; because let’s face it: deep down we don’t have to know a thing about how language functions to suspect that laundry baskets and tampons aren’t nefarious tools of a patriarchal conspiracy, or that Curious George isn’t a post colonialist how-to book luxuriating over the captivity of the Other — and my courses gave the students tools to be able to justify their suspicions intelligently and on point.
That’s how I would have reacted.
My basic argument at that age was an eyeroll and a shrug. “You gotta be kidding me.” Which, obviously, isn’t an argument at all. So I just avoided those classes whenever possible.
I still wonder at the Wimsatt and Beardsley types, and just how they would think to defend their own teaching from an attack by itself.
link
Reality is Reality. Descriptiion of reality is linguistic. A baseball bat to the jaw of newrouter’s Decconstructionist lady-friend will still shatter it, even if I call it the kiss of peace (ironically meant, of course).
These were arbitrary labels.
Well, they are. There’s nothing about the sun to provoke a particular sound to describe it. That’s what all language is.
And, BTW, if you’re orbiting the sun in a spaceship, the sun does not rise at all, let alone in the east.
the shuttle orbits the earth and sun and the sun “rises and sets”
but there’s no “east or west”
Reminds me of my favorite Wilco lyrics (from “Jesus, Etc”):
Here’s another.
I now have no idea what he’s arguing about. If it’s actually the practical effect of intentionalism, I’ll give up football.
I’m done reading those posts. Total waste of time.
If I were a griefer, I would bring up spelling bees over there and watch Pat’s head explode.
However, if his hypos ever begin to wander into gratuitous sex or violent dystopian future worlds, someone give me a heads up.
bh, not a hypothetical, but listening to various Holst type stuffs today, I ran into this (No, not the St. Paul’s Suite, but the Sachsenring Paddock Girls link over there on the right). Heads up.
Hot women with hearing protection. Gotta like it.
There’s both ein untertext und ein übertext in them thar hills.
Something not OT but sideways about this.
It is a wonderment that all these different ways of looking at text, language, come into play and that the ones that focus on other than the primacy of authorial intent should become so widespread at this time. For myself the rise of these schools of interpretation that rely on other than author’s intent stem from outside forces acting upon the realm of the academe and it’s own peculiar institutions.
The main outside force would be the “Baby Boom” (which I am part of the leading edge while my wife is part of the trailing edge) which has led to distortions everywhere as this large cohort of similar age moves through life. There is quite fierce competition for societal slots that “fit” with your age if you are in this group. That competition alone is not distorting but in areas where positions are, for the most part, lifetime such as tenured, civil service or unionized there develops an increasing clog of personnel at the higher end.
Where the private sector has this problem the solution is early retirements, permanent layoffs, companies moving operations to non-union areas, and bankruptcy. In public service where money is not the huge limiting factor the idea is to expand the number of positions. In the academe this means new schools of thought, new “Studies” programs.
In the area discussed here if interpretation is limited to finding the intent of the author it bottoms out and then there is no more room to have more and more positions for staff. If on the other hand there is no limit to how a given text may be interpreted then the scope of the field and the number of possible thesis for degrees becomes unlimited. This is as I see it one of the factors that has pushed these schools of thought. They may start to fade as my cohort retires and dies off.
bh
Pat begins from a rather bullshit position:
To the intentionalist, each of these is a vote for Al Gore — as long as we assume that the ballot was actually cast with the intent of voting for Gore.
but as I said over there, why would anyone assume that prior to engaging in any interpretive process? It’s like declaring a numerical answer to an algebra problem before any of the variables are declared.
Maybe we should have a contest on the most outrageous hypothetical we can think of.
Did anyone say that it could? Or should?
I suppose the new internet version of “people who buy ink by the barrel” is “people who absolutely will not drop it, no matter what.”
This has become deeply stupid, but to his credit, Patrick hasn’t drifted into psychosis this time. Yet.
Okay, D:
A man murders his entire family, including their exceeding cute new puppy.
When questioned by police, he says he was just trying to ask for the salt.
How should the judge rule?
bh
Excellent!
A man hypothesizes his hypothetical has the power to make him disappear, when, *pop*
Where did he go?
Un.fucking.believable.
Yar. Frey creates his hypotheticals by positing the intent, then criticizes intentionalists for “interpreting” something that ISN’T PRACTICAL.
Fooey. I’d forgotten why I quit going there in the first place. I suppose I should be grateful to him for reminding me</irony>.
Regards,
Ric
Let me put it another way: Posts like Frey’s latest may as well directly ask, “what is the practical effect of having your meaning misunderstood — and does it follow that the possibility of being misunderstood, regardless of what you’ve intended, justify our acting as if intent doesn’t matter?”
And the answer of course is that pretending intent doesn’t matter merely moves the place where intent holds in the process of decoding the speech act.
I see what Ric’s saying. In fact, Frey actually had to go to great lengths to remind people that he was positing that intent.
What I don’t understand is why he thinks there is a rhetorical payoff to any such hypos.
He even had to remind Levi in the chat.
Apricot, with no possibility of pie.
He’s a lawyer, and as any other salesman will tell you: Always be closing.
The idea is that you can’t lose unless you quit, which doesn’t hold, but there it is. It’s what nishi would be if she cleaned her act up.
Okay, that makes sense, it’s ABC.
Second prize is a set of steak knives, Pat.
Patrick hasn’t drifted into psychosis this time. Yet.
Given that I stayed up until 4 a.m. Mountain time engaging Pat and Leviticus, and Jeff another half-hour after that, we should probably reconsider who gets the psychosis prize this time.
On the other hand, I can rightly claim to have taken one for the team, so I can officially bow out of the rest of this round.
Pablo, the crucial thing is that Frey is not just a lawyer, he’s a prosecutor.
One of the most seriously f*ed-up aspects of our <irony>legal system</irony> is that the process of Masonization (as in Perry) is pretty much complete. In the ideal case, participants in a trial are officers of the Court charged with determining truth and establishing such justice as a legal system can provide. As things are, the objective of the lawyers is to win — for defenders, to get their client off regardless of the facts or law; for prosecutors, to get the accused convicted; in both cases, their won-lost record pretty well controls their future prospects.
The sympathies of juries being pretty much with scofflaws these days, the only way a prosecutor can manage a really good batting average is to depend on on the letter of the law — “when the facts are in your favor, pound the facts; when the facts are against you, pound the Law; when both are against you, pound the table.” If he continually emphasizes the letter of the law as written, which is mostly much clearer than his hypotheticals even when obscure, he can browbeat the juries into improving his point score.
Keep in mind that he’s already rejected the fundamental common-law basis of juries as being not only ridiculous but apt to promote “disrespect”.
Regards,
Ric
Not only that, Ric, but he also demonstrates that if you ask a question enough times (witness the live chat), you can get people to come around to your side, as long as you insist that the question be answered on your terms.
“What is the absolute meaning of the word at the time it is uttered?” he kept asking. I didn’t want to give him the answer that the question was gunning for because I could see where it was going (the diamond ring and coal hypo), and the whole point of the exercise was not to get there.
Uy. Not doing that again.
A man hypothesizes his hypothetical has the power to make him disappear, when, *pop*
Where did he go?
sdferr wins the thread.
What I found so funny was Pat’s clear (illogical) desire to discredit intentionalism by finding disagreement between two of its advocates.
I almost delurked to mention how silly it was.
And, yes, I noted the continual badgering. Answer the question, di. Make Jeff answer the question, di. Does salt mean pepper, di.
And, perhaps it’s the Perry Masonization, but does he not see how his numerous ploys might suggest to an intelligent observer that he has a weak hand? Is it simply that smart people get kicked off juries so he’s not used to arguing in front of them?
I didn’t come around to his side. Did you?
When Frey asks (based on a hypothetical that posits a judge who knows the actual intent) “does a failure on the part of the utterer to signal intent allow the judge to interpret the text as a reasonable man, without consideration of intent, might?” and goes by that standard, the flaw is in the question as phrased. Were he to ask “can a reasonable man be expected to know the author’s intent from what’s been signaled?” he is asking a different question, and basing his reasoning for ruling a particular way on a different standard: to wit, he isn’t ruling that because intent is unknowable, we can dismiss intent and rule on the basis of convention; instead he is ruling that because intent wasn’t signaled, a reasonable man couldn’t possibly reconstruct the intent.
A distinction with a big difference. Discuss among yourselves.
I didn’t come around to his side. Did you?
No, but that’s what he was trying to achieve. I was not amused when he implicated that our “inability” to answer Yes or No indicated a shortcoming on our part, as if we knew damn good and well that he was right but didn’t want to admit it.
It did no good to point out that he was asking the wrong question. Both he and Levi acted as if no such thing were possible.
Oh, here’s a hypo. You want the witness on the stand to establish where he was at the time the crime was committed, so you ask him if he thinks the Lakers will make it to the playoffs this year.
The other big stumbling block was the idea that intentionalism is an interpretative theory instead of interpretation itself, that there is no way to interpret without appealing to or recognizing intent. I hypothesized that the form of the word “intentionalism” might have been a problem, because the “-ism” implies one theory among many, when instead it’s just a convention (yes, we do use those) to describe something that contrasts what the Left does in academia these days.
“Discuss among yourselves.”
I asked my other selves if they wanted to take a stab at it and they’ve given me the thumbs down, which I’m going to interpret as a “meh, do what you want to do” sort of signal. ‘Til they join in, of course, then it’s back to the ice cream denial for them, pricks.
sdferr, I took that to mean that Jeff was signaling his intent to step away from the babble box (21st Century version, interactive) and do something constructive, like drinking. I endorse that without reservation. In fact, I think I’ll go by the stop&rob for a sixpack of Shiner Bock. I’ll be as clear as possible, but I reckon I won’t have any trouble communicating my intention to the clerk.
Regards,
Ric
To be honest, he’s practically a nishi to me now. I care less and less about what he’s saying but desperately want to know why he’s saying it. Let’s put them into the machine and see what parts of their brains light up while they’re carrying on.
It’s really the only way to move forward.
thanks pat:
On Frey. I said all I have to say on his “hypos” on the previous thread at #82. HICA but I don’t BO. That gets me kicked off juries.
It seems to me what Frey is doing is arguing that a failure to signal your intent through signs acceptable to him results in your meaning being lost to the ether. This is what he means by “unexpressed intent,” i.e. you may have wanted salt, or offered to sell a lump of coal, but what you said was “pass the sugar” or “buy this diamond ring?” Since you failed to signal what you meant correctly, your intent fails and he is justified in filling the void left by intent unexpressed; resignifying your signs in order to come to some kind of meaning he can understand, using whatever convention(s) (e.g. “what would the reasonable man understand you to have said” as are acceptable to him. Thus, you’d better like your french fries sweetened; or, even though you’re from Fubar, where coal is more valuable than gold, and the Fubarsi word for coal is “diamond ring,” buddy, you’re in Patrick Frey’s jurisdiction, and he don’t take kindly to people what call lumps of coal diamond rings. This is no different from what leftist New Criticism/Critical Theory academics or activist justices do EVEN IF, using the “reasonable man standard” gets you an aproximation the author’s or speakers intent. Since Frey cares more about what he thinks you intended to mean than what you actually meant, he’s vulnerable to having his convention supplanted. After all, why should we defer to the “reasonable man” standard, if someone can persuade us that the “philosopher king” standard is superior.
Or, to put it plainly:
“You believe that reality is something objective, external, existing in its own right. You also believe that the nature of reality is self-evident. When you delude yourself into thinking that you see something, you assume that everyone else sees the same thing as you. But I tell you, Winston, that reality is not external. Reality exists in the human mind, an nowhere else. Not in the individual mind, which can make mistakes [like leaving your intent “unexpressed”] and in any case soo perishes; only in the mind of the Party [or the Court], which is collective and immortal. Whatever the Party holds to be the truth is truth. It is impossible to see reality except by looking through the eyes of the Party.” (George Orwell, 1984).
Frey thinks he’s Winston Smith, defiantly fucking Julia in the Ash grove. What he doesn’t realize is that O’Brien and the Party already have him in their sights, and he’s halfway down the road to a life of Victory Gin and love for Big Brother.
“The idea is that you can’t lose unless you quit.”
Which works until someone introduces you to the business end of a shotgun. At that point, you will lose. Most people instinctively know this, which is why Shakespeare’s comment on killing all the lawyers has resonated down through the centuries. It’s the only way to shut one up.
Also the idea behind doubling your bet every time you lose. Which can work until you hit that really bad streak that wipes you out completely and more.
Jeff Goldstein Makes My Point About Intentionalism and Legal Interpretation…
In my posts on intentionalism and legal interpretation, I have tried to make this point: sometimes the speaker’s intent is irrelevant to the practical problem of what to do with his words. I ran across an example that makes my point perfectly ……
Jeff Goldstein Makes My Point About Intentionalism and Legal Interpretation…
In my posts on intentionalism and legal interpretation, I have tried to make this point: sometimes the speaker’s intent is irrelevant to the practical problem of what to do with his words. I ran across an example that makes my point perfectly ……
I’m not going to respond any more to Frey’s posts, because frankly there’s not much more to say. What to do with “his” words — and who gets to decide if they are “his” words — is what this is all about.
I see.
Answer the question!
He’s referencing the chat. He has no self-awareness. Zero.
Does salt mean pepper?
You can’t handle the truth!
No wingdings I guess.
My responses on Frey’s new thread, so I don’t have to write a separate post here.
And finally:
Answer the question!
/ bad faith off
I give up.
We’re in the wilderness for a reason.
Well, as long as he gets to argue how he wants to argue, that’s a price he’s willing to pay.
That old admonition about teaching a pig to sing comes to mind, except in this case the pig likes it.
Seems to me that anone who has ever trained a dog has to have understood intent osn some level.
And the answer of course is that pretending intent doesn’t matter merely moves the place where intent holds in the process of decoding the speech act.
This is… well…. true.
So… yeah. That.
But from a purely practical standpoint (which will of course, be the framework for evaluation for people who only care about practical results) there is also that whole other problem that once you do that, it does not decrease the potential absurdities (and inconsistencies) that arise from misunderstanding. It may very well increase them.
Even within the law.
Take.. Oh I don’t know.. ALL the judicial activism ever.
The redefinition of “public”, and the redefinition of “public use”, the new meaning of what constitutes “interstate commerce”, and penumbras or emmanations of privacy.
“…from a purely practical standpoint…”
Talk about pretending, does such a thing (or person embodying it) ever exist? A man totally without theory who is yet fit to act in the world? WVO Quine points and laughs.
Heh. sdferr…
http://minx.cc/?blog=86&post=301379#c9650736
Perhaps it could be more aptly state as a “I find these results tolerable within my own sense of what’s viable and not f’n crazy” framework.
Ie: This methodology has produced a result that is the same as what I actually think is true (via whatever method I used to determine it) and therefor, the methodology is ‘correct’, practically speaking.
And that is relevant perhaps only because so often, with so many, with so much, we’re completely unaware of how we actually come to our assumptions and merely assert them as fait accompli.
We have our (sometimes subconcious) initial evaluations, but often no critical evaluation, and a total lack of introspection.
Metaphysics is often neglected. What with coming after physics, many people who do not like abstract thinking do not make it that far. Often the very concepts of it, when applying it to something someone is not used to applying it to, is recieved as utterly confusing, futily inaccessible, and possibly jibberish.
That being said, the appeal to the practical can also be simply an appeal to empiricism. Let’s try it out – does it work? Or does it give us absurdity? And there’s nothing wrong with that.
So… at times you can take any mention of being practical as a cop-out demand to favor one’s preconceptions without further evaluation, or a statement that one’s preconcieved assumptions are off limits and not open to critique. But at other times you can take it as simply an appeal to be practical.
Coincidentally (having linked an article about avoiding caricatures), that I have seen, I have not seen Patterico yet restate intentionalism in a way any intentionalist I’m aware of might agree with it.
Before you speak or write a word. Before even a muscle twitches to make a sound, draw a line, press a key, there is a thought. A thought that causes the muscles to move to express yourself.
The intent of that thought, the intent that drives making an expression, that chooses the precise form of the expression, is to place a thought, an idea, an image, into a mind. Perhaps a different mind displaced in time and space. Perhaps your own mind but displaced in time.
Strip out that personal intent and the sense of an “I” is gone. If thoughts from my mind, the expression of which is about as personal as anything gets, are to be twisted, re-conceived, re-imagined, re-born as the thoughts of another, then projected back onto my mind for public consumption, is mind-rape an appropriate image for this action?
[…] I know that even though we started off speaking about interpretation and have now moved on into application or enforcement or implementation, the principle of intentionalism are still […]
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