Rather than answer Patrick Frey’s latest “challenge” to intentionalism by explaining yet again how language functions over the life of a speech act, I have decided to try a new approach.
Frey and many of his commenters claim to be textualists. Frey has argued (or at least, implied) that textualism as an interpretive methodology is if nothing else practical (and therefore legitimate) — though on what basis this is so other than its apparent practicality he hasn’t detailed. This, then, will be his opportunity to detail the thinking behind textualism as he conceives it.
To prompt Frey and those who advocate textualism, let me ask a few question that I hope will draw out their thinking:
1) From the perspective of the textualist, what is a “word”? How are words made? How do they mean?
2) From the perspective of the textualist, what is a “text”? How are texts made? Can a text exist independent of intent?
3) Envision the following: you receive what looks to you like three identical “texts”, each appearing to say “pass the salt.” The first, it turns out, was created by a few egrets walking around in wet sand; the second was carved in a very old rock; the third was written on a slip of notebook paper. Are these three texts the same? How would you “interpret” each? Or would you even bother? Why or why not?
4) When you interpret, what exactly is it you believe yourself to be doing?
5) What is convention? How does convention come to supplant intent as the locus of meaning?
If we are going to debate the linguistic and/or conventional path language takes from its origin to its attempted decoding and re-encoding, it would help if we had some understanding of what is meant by the important terms being used to frame the questions.
I believe I’ve quite thoroughly described how an intentionalist conceives of words, texts, intent, meaning, and interpretation. If we are to continue, it is important that the textualists among us define their terms — rather than just coming up with yet more hypotheticals that may or may not illuminate the questions under consideration.
Mr Frey and his textualist coterie are encouraged to leave their responses here in the comments.
I like this approach. I think you’ve already explained the legal aspects of an intentionalism, as well as the non-legal aspects, completely. The cynic in me, however, thinks that you won’t get much direct response from the PF coterie. I predict something oblique, likely couched in condescension. I hope they prove me wrong. I also expect to be lumped in as a sychophant, which is something I can easily live with, considering the source.
I’m probably missing the boat (again), but I think these issues are easier to understand for those who have a background in multiple languages. There are certain linguistic structures in German, for example, which sound insulting or annoying to English speakers when they are translated into English. Stated differently, the text ‘says’ one thing; the speaker’s intent, however, is something else.
#2 – Wirklich? I am not sure you can use that as a proper example, since the “interpretation” would be the source of the problem…nicht wahr?
A translation that fails to signal the intent of the utterer is not a translation, it is creative writing. One must do more than just replace the signifiers with those from the target language. One must do one’s best to divine the original intent in the source language, and then reproduce that intent as best as possible in the target language.
I know, I’m Captain Obvious today.
Just admit defeat, Goldstein. I can keep this up all year. All. Year.
And the next, if necessary. Because I can keep producing as many variants on “what does yellow sound like?” as needed, and your inability to give a yes or no answer proves that you’re reluctant to admit that you’re a liar and a fraud.
And a liar. And a fraud.
The fact that I’ve been couching these hypotheticals in gracious language barely conceals my deep need to come out on top of this. Nobody corrects Patrick Frey in public. NOBODY.
FUCKING JEW FUCK FUCK WITH ME WILL HE GRUB GRUB JEW
A translation that fails to signal the intent of the utterer is not a translation, it is creative writing.
Every attempt to translate from one language into another involves a bit of creative writing. The important thing is that you attempt to the best of your ability to reproduce the meaning of the author and not replace it with your own.
There’s a reason translation, tradition and treason all share the same root.
cranky-d, can I be your side kick? Call me d’Oh! Boy!!!
I forgot to close the italics in number 7 there. Just when I thought I was getting some of this basic HTML stuff down. Sorry everybody. I shall now adminster myself a thorough thrashing.
You are, of course, correct, ES. The cold stress I have been enduring from flying back to rainy and cold Minneapolis from relatively sunny and warm San Diego has left my thinking muddled a bit. Or, it could just be I’m not that bright.
Even worse, the only people interested in interviewing me both called while I was away. I wonder if they’ll answer my delayed answer to their messages?
Sigh.
Here’s an italics close tag. From the goodness of my heart.
It didn’t take.
Italians!
Ernst broke the blog. Kill him!!
italics off now?
My intent here is to simply STOP THE ITALICISMS!
There’s no criticism of Mr. Frey implied. Really.
One more try: Italics ON Italics OFF
A try
Damn. This calls for teh Sky God thinger’s interventionalisms.
In further atonement for breaking the blog, I forthwith banish myself to feministing.com for a period of not less than 15 minutes during which I will allow Amanda Marcotte’s musings to insult my reason.
Didn’t know ‘musings’ came in a strap-on version, Ernst. But enjoy~!
I believe the problem stems from that odd HTML construction right after the first use of “it is creative writing.” in comment #7.
This [carry-over of an incomplete html instruction from comment panel to comment panel] is a new phenomenon here, though it has been a common problem at JOM for sometime now. I assume it has something to do with the newer version of WordPress, eh?
Tom has his comment sections paginated at some limit number (I think around 75), so a new page is their only relief, since Maguire doesn’t fix errors in html instructions. Anyhow, don’t expect any change until JG reaches in to comment 7 and fixes the broken instruction. Sad news, but there it is. On the other hand, I suppose we can expect that every subsequent broken close tag, whether for bold, or strike throughs or whatever it may be, will roll right on through every subsequent comment. heh.
No response?
That’s odd. I mean, I left a direct invite. Hardly a “GET OFF MY LAWN!” The precise opposite, in fact.
At any rate, I’m feeling ill, so I’ll be taking it easy today. Will check in from time to time to see if anyone claiming to be a textualist answers the questions. Perhaps after they group huddle? Consensus is, after all, a key.
Our ernest correspondent may just be a saboteur!
YOU KIDS GET THE HELL ON MY LAWN!
Ernst, use Firefox, get the Text Formatting Toolbar and set it to HTML. Works wonders.
Hey, how can I respond when I haven’t even had one drink yet?
I could copy and past a few chapters of Anna Karenina if you like…
I think that your punishment falls under “cruel and unusual,” Ernst. Your atonement has been noted, and I think you get a freebie for next time.
I apologize again for breaking the blog. d’Oh! Boy indeed (shame faced shuffling of feet). I try not to reason with my fundament, but sometimes the head gets stuck where it gets stuck.
No worries Ernst, we’ll all have done it sooner or later I reckon. Damn WordPress isn’t an intentionalist is all, so doesn’t supply ready fi[cks]es to typooos.
Jeff, it is hard to have a meaningful dialog with someone who argues in bad faith.
Odd that there STILL isn’t any response, here.
Now where would someone get an idea like this?
Intentionalism was invented to allow shallow minds to justify lying.
See? This is the crap he’s peddling. Interpretation was invented to allow shallow minds to justify lying? Really?
The proper response to the assertion that you’re asking the wrong question is “How so?” or “What’s the right question?” not “JUST ANSWER THE QUESTION!”
He’s getting too much milage out of misdefining “intentionalism” for him to ever stop. People with personality disorders are never very happy, though. They live in a world full of rat-bastages who are always screwing them over.
Sure: lying was impossible without intentionalism. It’s as if The Invention of Lying is happening inside of that commenter’s head.
Ask “AD” to explain intentionalism. That’d probably be a hoot.
Odds that “AD” read a single one of my posts? 9-1. Odds that he understood a single one of my posts? 1700-1. Odds that he’s taking his cues from Frey about what intentionalism is and why it was “invented”? 3-2.
Were I Frey, I’d greet such a conclusion as proof that I’ve poorly explained my position. And yet I suspect he greets it as proof he’s made his point.
By he way, where are all the responses here?
Did the textualists interpret my “you’re invited” to mean “stay away” or “please don’t answer the questions I’ve asked you in good faith”? If so, how did they manage that, I wonder? Plain meaning and all…
“…to allow shallow minds to justify lying.”
I think this is a projection of a genuine fear, based on a misaprehension of what Jeff is driving at, within the legal subset of Patterico’s readership. There’s this idea that placing the locus of meaning in the speaker’s imbues the phrases “that wasn’t my intent” and “you’ve misunderunderstood my meaning” with magical properties. I don’t get where they miss out on the a speaker meant what the speaker meant at the time he first spoke part of the argument.
“the locus of meaning in the speaker’s intent” Damn delete key. I’d blame Parkinson’s except I don’t have it.
Try this idea:
Communication is the process by which we transfer an “information nugget” from one person to the next. The transmitting side of the process is to encode the “information nugget” using either our own unique culturally based encoder, our perception of a common community encoder or our perception of an encoder that matches the decoder of the expected receiver. The receiving side of the operation is to select the appropriate decoder that matches the expected encoder.
I am sure that is perfectly clear so:
If you choose the decoder that matches your belief about the encoders choice then you are an “Intentialist”.
If you choose the community decoder regardless of your belief about the choice of the encoder than you are a “textualist”.
If you choose to use you own personal culturally based decoder without regard to your belief about the choice of the encoder than you are a “leftist”.
They need to keep that fiction alive. Otherwise they have no reason to pretend that intentionalism is evil, while textualism — which they recognize allows them to set the person who means straight about what he actually “said” (regardless of what he “meant”) — is empowering: the power belongs to them as receivers of the message. And therefore, they can’t ever be wrong, so long as they can show how the message means what it meant to them.
That this clearly plays into an epistemology whereby there is no basis for locating meaning outside of the collective will and dictate of the group who agrees upon what that meaning is, seems not to bother the “conservative” textualists. After all, it works for them. And how dare anyone point out that it structurally supports the entire project of leftism by making every truth contingent — and every proposition decided not by anything logically fixed, but rather by transient power arrangements.
I’d be careful using the word belief, because people can lie about that just as much as they can lie about anything else.
Intentionalism was invented to allow Satanists to justify corpse mutilation.
Just admit it already. Sheesh.
jls, it strikes me that you’ve left out the bit that seems to make everyone an intentionalist, whether they recognize that in themselves or no, and that is this: that the one you take as a decoder for the moment is also an encoder in the next. The question is, how, as an encoder, does that role switching communicator dissociate his own intent from his encoding, if he’s willing to do so with another’s encoding, insofar as he professes himself to be and his method to be “textualism”?
That information nugget is created how? Who is the “we” doing the transfering? Why?
What do you think it is you are decoding by choosing the community decoder?
Textualism is merely the belief that you can escape intent as the locus of meaning. Textualists never follow a “textualist methodology”. They either appeal to the intent of the original utterer, or they privilege their own intent — even when they disguise that privileging by saying that they are merely privileging the intent of the “community.” Because all they’ve done there is said that the way the group will most likely read something is what that something means. Or, to put it more succinctly, that they intend to privilege consensus (what everyone decides must have been meant) over the individual’s desire to mean.
Slartibartfast, they could but they would be lying to themselves.
And, if they’re doing the believing out loud, to others.
Intentionalism was invented to allow shallow minds to justify lying.
That’s pretty much what every argument he’s ever put up here has tried to show. That a person can lie without intending to lie. That a person can shit out a deliberate falsehood and then deny that’s what he intended his text to mean at a later date. “I said blue but I meant green..blah blah blah…” But unless the speaker/writer/Orkian egg farmer appears out of thin air and shouts the word “Blue!” then disappears only to return 2000 years later (as fortold by the Prophets of the Bluevian Dawn, may their spirits rest in peace with all blue and blueish-tinted things in the sky and below, with the exception of those things that were never meant to be blue in the first place, like food and/or pantyhose unless the food is Kool-ade or Sno-cones or Slushies (as they are mostly water and water is blue) and the pantyhose are really just shiny spandex tights like the ones Erin Gray wore on Buck Rogers) and tell us all that he really meant to yell “Green!” Which would mean that those assholes from the Reformed Church of Blue, Eastern Synod, 2011 Conference on Clorophyll (greenies) and the First Church of the Garbage Truck, Blue Reformed (trashies) were right all along. Which is interesting that those pricks managed to figure out his intent via signs and context (the color of the tree he appeared beneath and what was driving toward him at a high rate of speed) even though the greenies all have eighty wives and the trashies dress like Vic Tayback on Alice, while to the rest of us “reasonable people”, “BLUE!” meant blue.
That information nugget is created how? Who is the “we” doing the transfering? Why?
The “information nugget” is an idea or factoid that is conjured up as a result of homo sapien neuronal cogitation. The “we” is “us” i.e. You and i for example.
What do you think it is you are decoding by choosing the community decoder?
Those who choose the community decoder when they know that the encoding was done using a personal encoder are “make stuff up”. If they don’t know the appropriate encoder used then they use the community decoder as a default assuming that the transmitter also not knowing the appropriate decoder to be used also selected the community decoder.
Whatever drugs you’re on, LMC, I want some.
That last decoder should have been an encoder …I think!
Objection: passive voice.
Objection sustained:
I just threw that out there because i didn’t really understand the question.
That information nugget is created how? Who is the “we” doing the transfering? Why?
I assume we are thinking that in communicating we are trying to transfer an “information nugget” i.e. (state of mind)from one person to another so that the receiver has an accurate understanding of our intent.
“…of our intent.”
There it is again. Are we in Hegelian Weltgeist territory here? Volksgeist?
“…of our intent.”
How about “..state of mind.”
I think the answers are: created by the speaker, and transferred (or interpreted) by the listener.
Meanwhile, over at Patterico’s, someone named “libarbarian” seems to be arguing that intentionalism is exercised by the speaker.
Maybe I misunderstood him, though.
So they are hoping that he intended to signal using the most conventional signs, and that their selecting the most conventional meanings will best approximate what they hope he meant.
That both are using convention to help ease the movement of the message from one end of the speech act to the other just assures that the likelihood of the message being understood is increased if the audience is the kind that looks for conventional meanings, and the writer/utterer is hoping to be understood conventionally (assuming he is aware of the conventions to begin with).
None of which changes the fact the he need not follow convention to mean, nor that the receivers’ choice to decode conventionally, without regard to the writer/utterer’s original intent, is itself an intentional move deployed to resignify using one specific idea about what the socially-sanctioned available meanings could be.
I think the point sdferr is making is something like: do you have a mouse in your pocket? Who is “we”?
Penn State?
Where are all the textualists?
JUST ANSWER THE QUESTIONS!
Sure. But how is that intent codified and transferred?
State of mind, though appealing in some ways, comes bearing its own difficulties, pointing as it does to the “state” of a machine (Turing or otherwise) that we might choose to manipulate by stopping and examining to see what the “state” of the thing is. Not to say we should reject that idea out of hand, just that it quickly becomes harder and harder to pin down and that as we attempt to do so, we veer somewhat widely away from our initial object, which I take it, is to examine language as goes day to day for us.
“Textualism is merely the belief that you can escape intent as the locus of meaning. Textualists never follow a “textualist methodology”. They either appeal to the intent of the original utterer, or they privilege their own intent — even when they disguise that privileging by saying that they are merely privileging the intent of the ‘community.’”
I suspect that for some of the legalisticly-minded (again) “textualism” is a substitute for examination; the witness is dead and will not present himself before the bar until the zombie apocalypse comes, so that’s what they have to work with.
“So they are hoping that he intended to signal using the most conventional signs, and that their selecting the most conventional meanings will best approximate what they hope he meant.”
Exactly.
This becomes even more appropriate when communication flows from “one” to “many”. Given that the encoder of the information could not choose to match an expected decoder he must choose from his personal encoder or adopt the community encoder. Recognizing that a broad audience couldn’t be expected to understand his personal encoder he is defaulted to the community standard.
I do have a question: In “many” to “many” communication. Such as a legislative body where no single mind has formed an intent, where the choice of encoder is limited to the community encoder for obvious reasons. Why not adopt the convention of “community decoding” so that all understand the requirements going in?
Well, that depends on whether you wish to be conventionally understood, doesn’t it?
And yet…David Lynch.
That’s what is typically done — and in fact, it is rather insisted upon in legal writing. Or, to put it another way, It is a convention to privilege convention in the realm of legal decoding.
But for that to work, you have to believe that the original intent was to follow convention. Which makes you an intentionalist, because you are intepreting by appealing to what you believe is the original utterer’s intent. This is quite different than saying regardless of what the original utterer meant, I am choosing to read the signifiers conventionally.
We’ve already gone through this bit. You can find discussions in the recent posts. Now what we’re after is not a further examination of how intentionalism works, but rather some answers from the textualists about how textualism works.
So far, the closest we’ve come is that intentionalism was invented to justify lying or some such nonsense.
I meant what I said and I said what I meant:
“An elephant’s faithful one-hundred percent.”
Patterico’s now responding over at his place, FWIW.
Beyond what it exhibits all by itself, I’ll note that this made it past the rules that govern the proper affectation of civility.
Empty mocking!
Not to mention that circumscribing conventional instantiations of speech can itself get bogged down in complexity rather quickly. Here’s J. Scalia [my emphases], from his opinion for the Court in R.A.V. v St. Paul:
Is this conventional usage, to say that the city of St. Paul has added the First Amendment to the cross-burning fire? It isn’t hard to understand what J. Scalia means, is it? But our field of conventional usage is going to be very broad and possibly quite indistinct at the margins it appears to me.
“So far, the closest we’ve come is that intentionalism was invented to justify lying or some such nonsense.”
Anybody else appreciating the irony that the folks who set out to subvert language have so far succeeded as to make it difficult for anyone who hasn’t devoted some time and effort into understanding how language functions to identify who the ones doing the subverting actually are?
Having not taken proper notes, I’m not sure how many times we’re supposed to note that the questions have not been answered.
Another couple dozen times?
Best I can tell, Patterico is asking something like But what if the receiver chooses to completely ignore the speaker’s intent and simply interpret the words according to his/her own personal preference, or even according to his convenience? What then, bitches?
How’d that last bit slip out? I hate it when that happens.
I’m not sure what Patterico is asking, here. get around? No getting-around is required. This is just the audience deliberately misinterpreting what the speaker intended. Nothing about intentionalism prevents this, as I see it. Patterico seems to see intentionalism as some set of rules imposed, and is trying to pick holes in the workability of the rules.
Maybe I’m the last to see this, though.
“…I’m not sure how many times we’re supposed to note that the questions have not been answered.”
All the same, I’d like to acknowledge the good faith efforts of jls here to approach an answer to one (or answers to some) of the questions on offer. If this stuff were easy (as in, trivial), everyone would do it, but it isn’t and they don’t.
Wasn’t directed at jls, sdferr.
Just poking fun at someone’s oft demonstrated rhetorical techniques.
“Wasn’t directed at jls, sdferr.”
No, I knew that, I was just taking advantage of the occasion to say thanks.
“I’m not sure how many times we’re supposed to note that the questions have not been answered. [Lord, don’t let my tags break the blog AGAIN]
Patericco’s Intent anticipated your question about six hours ago bh.
And Frey’s unwillingness to engage Jeff over here after Jeff engaged him over there (albeit not to Frey’s satisfaction) kinda speaks for itself. Doesn’t it?
I’m unclear why this would be a useful thing to do, as opposed to recognizing the intent as intended, and then saying simply, we disagree with your conclusion and will pursue another course of our own devising? What’s the purpose in recasting “…his words as if he meant something different” when in acknowledging his actual intent one has already committed oneself to that and can only give oneself the lie in doing otherwise?
Say the Achaians hold their war council before the Gates of Troy, and Menelaus gets up and says “We should do so and so”: the assembled Kings say “Thank you Menelaus, we understand your “so and so”. Now we’re going to do thus and such instead, while we say you recommended thus and such, even though we’ve already pointed out you said no such thing.”?
sdferr: Thanks for the acknowledgment. Nice.
“Patterico seems to see intentionalism as some set of rules imposed, and is trying to pick holes in the workability of the rules.”
No offense to the lawyers here, but isn’t picking holes in the rules something that they JUST DO?
I think what I’m getting at is that intentionalism isn’t a set of rules and conventions, but that Patterico is treating it as if it is.
That’s how I see it, anyway.
“I’m unclear why this would be a useful thing to do…”
I think I want to add an exception to my thing there. What Obama was up to yesterday with Karzai was, more or less, precisely this sort of behavior. So in the arena of dipshitlomacy, it appears to have its uses when it comes to “saving face” or pretending the grim thing isn’t as grim as all that.
But, all too clearly, this is not my kind of thing.
sdferr, are you saying the Achaeans passed Briseis around like she was Lindsey Lohan or Paris Hilton before they made Agememnon give her back to Achilles?
And used her ill they did. Damn straight, the homos.
Slart,
I see it more or less the same way.
No doubt the little tramp asked for it. Those women from the Troad, no self-respect at all.
Would Patterico’s objection be, they made us complicit by making us watch? (Here, boy-o!) Or was it that we chanted for that fail too soon? (Oh, yeah, Menelaus, he’a good man.)
Yeah, I addressed this already. If a speaker means one thing and an audience knows what that is but decides to act on his words as if he meant something different, that audience has no claim to be acting on “his” words at all. I mean, how can the words be “his” if they no longer mean what he meant by them, but rather mean what the audience has decided they mean?
So yes, you are correct, Slart: “This is just the audience deliberately misinterpreting what the speaker intended. Nothing about intentionalism prevents this.” And yet, it matters that they acknowledge that that’s what they’re doing. They can simply say, what you meant is not clearly signaled. But if they know what it means, there’s really no further reason for the original utterer to amend the message, it having been understood.
Unless, that is, the worry is that others not privy to the author’s intent will have no way of discerning that intent from what the author has signaled. Saying that what you intended wasn’t signaled effectively is different from saying what you intended doesn’t mean what you meant by it — and instead it means what me and my buddies can do with the signifiers you used to signal your intent.
When the function of language is broken down this way — the audience recognizes that it is no longer dealing with the words of the utterer, but with their own resignification of the original utterer’s signifiers made into their own words — the whole thing looks rather shabby and suspect.
So they hide this maneuver by claiming that the “text” simply “says” — magically, no intent required.
I can’t say I’m surprised that Frey and his troops haven’t even tried to answer the questions here, where they could be immediately engaged. Patrick is very careful about how he goes about presenting his “case.”
Oh brother. This, only to note it.
Yes. Intentionalism invented the concept of intent (hell, let’s go whole hog: intentionalists invented the idea of agency!), the sign, the text, etc — all to allow people to get away with saying whatever they wanted with no rhetorical repercussions.
They nailed it.
…
Be honest. Is it really possible that I have been explaining things so poorly?
Nope.
What we seem to have here is a mind-reader of great back-casting power.
Slart and Ernest have key insights, I think: Frey sees intentionalism as something that can be lawyered — something that can be argued about.
Jeff and I see it as an integral part of the text. Look at a coin. Does it have another side? Of course it does. Flip it over. There’s the other side. The intent and the text are obverse and reverse of the same “thing”.
Which at least answers the question: “What’s a textualist?” A textualist is somebody who sees the intent and the text as two separate things that can be individually regarded — as if you could flip the coin over and see nothing.
——–
OT: For the lighting fixtures we build where I work now, we need shallow bowl-shaped glass globes. It turns out the easiest way to get them (and the cheapest) is to buy complete light fixtures and take the parts we need out. So today I’m unpacking light fixtures and separating the parts. These are pretty simple, really just the globe, the light socket, and a round thing that attaches to the electrical box.
It comes with an owner’s manual. Truly the Twenty-First Century is a strange country.
Regards,
Ric
I love the “Court of Convention” imagery — particularly juxtaposed against the supposed irony of raising the specter of leftism’s fondness for just such a collectivist attitude to meaning and “truth.”
And yet the lightbulb simply won’t go off.
That depends on if we’re using Patterico’s definition of honest, Jeff. 8-)
Seriously, no, you haven’t.
And still no visits from the textualists to provide answers to my questions.
Bad form, considering my willingness to deal with lumps of coal and penetrating questions about whether intentionalism “sanctions” fraud.
OT: neo-neocon tells a story about her own infant son today, in relation to the study on the moral intuitions of babies. It’s worth a read.
Michael Totten notes an example of a rewriting on public display today:
What was re-written? This:
Unless, that is, the worry is that others not privy to the author’s intent will have no way of discerning that intent from what the author has signaled.
Case in point, the AZ law that they amended to fend off misinterpretation.
instead it means what me and my buddies can do with the signifiers you used to signal your intent
Also known as finding loopholes in the law, which is what a lawyer’s job is.
Cripes, no wonder he refuses to give up: he’d destroy his whole craft.
It seems that the entire intentionalist philosophy came about in order to alleviate its adherents of any responsibility to take care in choosing their words, even when they know they may be reasonably misinterpreted – because that would be a LIBERAL HIJACKING OF INTENT!!!1!!
And thus we return to “I hope he fails.”
This is PatCorps’s problem: they’re using “reasonably” and “leftist” in the same sentence, forgetting that the actual problem is that there is naked malice involved when the left “interprets” our words, to the point that they’re not even ashamed to make stuff up and attribute it to us, such as the racist stuff that Rush “said” to the alleged racial epithets on the capitol steps.
It comes with an owner’s manual.
And thus I am employed. All hail the Tech Writer.
But I agree with you: if a speaker knows that his words may be reasonably misinterpreted, he ought to choose different words or risk falling victim to the Court of Convention
Yes, I know that dicentra admitted that it was her own stupid fault if someone passed her the pepper when she wanted the salt but accidentally said “pepper.” And I know that Jeff has always said that it’s possible to signal one’s intent poorly.
But this point must be hammered home repeatedly in such a way that it looks like I’m refuting Jeff’s points so thorougly and completely that he can’t even answer a simple interrogative.
Or address perfectly reasonably hypos. What a loser!
Man, this feels good! I haven’t felt this empowered since I Google-bombed Jeff’s site last winter.
EXCELSIOR!
But I agree with you: if a speaker knows that his words may be reasonably misinterpreted, he ought to choose different words or risk falling victim to the Court of Convention
Yes, I know that dicentra admitted that it was her own stupid fault if someone passed her the pepper when she wanted the salt but accidentally said “pepper.” And I know that Jeff has always said that it’s possible to signal one’s intent poorly.
But this point must be hammered home repeatedly in such a way that it looks like I’m refuting Jeff’s points so thorougly and completely that he can’t even answer a simple interrogative.
Or address perfectly reasonably hypos. What a loser!
Man, this feels good! I haven’t felt this empowered since I Google-bombed Jeff’s site last winter.
EXCELSIOR!
One way, at least to begin, would be to read the serious writings of the advocate on the subject. Another, where that advocate has invited one to come and engage on these questions, one might then do just that.
Damn textualists, not only do they not seem interested in learning anything from another mind by dedicatedly trying to discern its intent, but so far it also seems that they don’t want to teach me anything about textualism either – by at least trying to answer Jeff’s questions.
“…so far it also seems that they don’t want to teach me anything about textualism either – by at least trying to answer Jeff’s questions.”
It’s a scary proposition J. Peden:
the actual problem is that there is naked malice involved when the left “interprets” our words, to the point that they’re not even ashamed to make stuff up and attribute it to us…
And some folks on the right who, in their malice, are stripped down to their thongs and pasties.
Is it really possible that I have been explaining things so poorly?
Nope. Pat and company have a vested interest in pretending intentionalism as a “philosophy” they can reject … as with many lawyers, the lawyering in court has ceased to be the seeking of truth as officers of the court and is more like creative writing to pick and choose among many “truths” in order to Win The Case(tm).
I know some fine and honorable DDAs AND defense attorneys. And I know some who want to win by any means necessary.
I believe I know which camp Frey falls into.
I didn’t know you’d posted this because I don’t frequent your blog. I’m pissed off at you and your goons for the disingenuous accusations of anti-Semitism you leveled at Patterico the last time you two had a spat; and the way you threatened Scott Jacobs and then pretended nothing happened was as chickenshit a thing as I’ve ever seen on the Internet. I’ve refrained from discussing these matters on Patterico’s blog because Patterico has made it a point to restrict his intentionalism posts to discussions of ideas. Since there is no similar policy on this blog, consider the my objections to your behavior noted. I will not make it a habit of posting here. Also, I do not speak for Patterico in any sense, and do not consider myself to be a textualist.
That said:
“1) From the perspective of the textualist, what is a “word”? How are words made? How do they mean?
2) From the perspective of the textualist, what is a “text”? How are texts made? Can a text exist independent of intent?
3) Envision the following: you receive what looks to you like three identical “texts”, each appearing to say “pass the salt.” The first, it turns out, was created by a few egrets walking around in wet sand; the second was carved in a very old rock; the third was written on a slip of notebook paper. Are these three texts the same? How would you “interpret” each? Or would you even bother? Why or why not?
4) When you interpret, what exactly is it you believe yourself to be doing?
5) What is convention? How does convention come to supplant intent as the locus of meaning?”
– Jeff G
1). A “word” is a medium of communication; a “word” is created when a given community decides that a particular mark or sound means a certain thing – otherwise it would have no utilitarian value; a “word” has meaning if it conveys a given message to a reasonable segment of a given community.
2). A text is a deliberate construction of words. A text cannot exist independent of the constructor’s intent, but the constructor’s intent is not the end-all be-all of utilitarian meaning.
3). I would laugh at the birds for their lack of opposable thumbs, wonder whether or not rock carving was the most efficient form of dinner-table communication, and ask around to see who was looking for the salt, respectively.
4). When I interpret, I’m trying to figure out what a given individual was saying when he spoke/wrote his words/committed his actions/whatever so I can move on from there, do deciding what to do about it.
5). Convention is the reasonable common understanding of the meaning of words. It comes to supplant intent as the locus of meaning in situations where a given speaker knows of the conventional understanding of a given word, knows of any potential problems use of that word may cause, and uses that word anyway.
This is the big difference between the two schools, I think: I see language as fundamentally communicative. Such an understanding necessarily puts some power in the hands of the listener, and puts some onus on the speaker to be deliberate in his construction of texts. It does NOT justify the communicative hijackings which you fancy yourselves guardians against – hence “reasonable” (i.e. good faith) standards for interpretation.
Make of that what you will. I know this post is going to get ripped apart, being the lone response to the question posed, and I don’t really care. But I hope you note that I’ve attempted to provide STRAIGHTFORWARD answers to your questions, instead of endless nit-picking evasive bullshit designed to wriggle out of a tight hole into which I’ve wedged myself as a matter of policy.
Peace out.
Repeat:
Daleyrocks writes:
Fritz introduced himself here by calling me a cunt. And how shabbily he was treated by me after innocently doing so!
Yes. No “Jeff Goldstein plays the race card!” preceded that. At all.
Listen: if they don’t want to answer the questions, or visit the sight to engage, that’s on them. I believe a number of us have gone over there and at least tried to continue the discussion (such as it is). I’m not “a little sideways” because Frey’s readers haven’t ventured over here. In fact, I fully expected they wouldn’t.
As for “liberbarian,” let me go point by point:
I believe I’ve done so, repeatedly, dating back to well before I ever became embroiled with Frey. The answer is, you use everything at your disposal — from convention to historical situatedness to specific context to inter- and intra-texts to biography to formal and structural cues, ranging from punctuation to syntax to narrative stance to ironic / parodic cues. Or, to put it more simply, you use all the tools of intepretation, because to interpret is to try to reconstruct intent.
What evidence is used to determine what something means without recourse to intent? Authors are dead and unavailable all the time. And yet we still believe they can send us a message through writing, or else we wouldn’t engage them.
Except that I haven’t done that. But even so, saying authorial intent is the only thing that matters when it comes to deciding where meaning rests in a speech act that you claim to be interpreting is hardly “useless.” It establishes where the meaning is and why it is there, and as a result it points the interpreter to the spot he should look should he wish to recover that intent.
I can’t speak to your personal experience. I can only argue how language works and why — and how institutionalizing a bad idea of how language functions leads to the kinds of abuses I have pointed out here frequently.
But the careful reader will recognize that I am equally hard on those on the left or the right who advocate for a faulty view of language. Liberatarian is not one of those types of readers — but he does appear to be someone who is looking for acceptance for pretending I have been derelict in my arguments concerning language over the years. All, like, thousand of them.
I’m pissed off at you and your goons for the disingenuous accusations of anti-Semitism you leveled at Patterico the last time you two had a spat
Poor baby.
man where’s my penumbra
“Jeff G seems a little sideways that people have not taken him up on his gracious invitation”
On the assumption that there’s probably some lurkers from Patterico’s Pontifications around, I think it’s worth pointing out a fact universally recognized in this Chinatown called the internet: if you argue like a whiny bitch, you’re going to get slapped around like one. And I don’t think it’s any worse here than there. So, forget it Jake. As they say.
kind of OT, but why the heck is Frey’s place taking so effin long to load??
cuz I’d like to challenge libarbarian about MY cartoon.
Geez Louise… I created it, why won’t people actually ADDRESS me about it??
can you express a coherent thought?
There’s your problem… you believe the receiver deserves some “power”.
The communicative act at its most basic IS NOT ABOUT POWER. It’s about meaning created in the mind of one person and as close as possible recreating that meaning in the mind of the receiver.
And the meaning is always the “property” as it were of the creator.
A lot of things can happen to corrupt that meaning as it leaves the mind of the creator and makes its way into the mind of the receiver – but those myriad of scenarios don’t remove the reality that meaning is CREATED and then RECEIVED.
That you and Frey wish to change that reality, to grant some undeserved “power” to the receiver is the kernal of your problems with “intentionalism”.
But you are okay with the way Frey used my name, I bet. Reread my posts. They were designed to make a point. And they were clearly tongue in cheek.
“Pretended nothing happened”? I announced when I’d be in Chicago. And where specifically I’d be.
I can’t do much else. I’ve made it quite clear that if I ever run into Scott Jacobs I will allow him to call me Jeffy and whatever else he’d like. But I very much doubt he would once I was standing there in front of him. So there’s not much more to say on the matter.
Yes. If only this blog was as serious and high brow as Patterico’s. I feel your pain.
Sucks for the first people who had to communicate. I mean, they had no community convention to appeal to! Also, where do new words come from? Does a given community create them, or are they created in some other, less collective way…? READER POLL!
“Utilitarian meaning”? Who says meaning has to be “utilitarian”? Can you make meaning without the community sanctioning it? What does it mean that the “constructor’s intent is not the end-all be-all of utilitarian meaning” if not “we as a community will decide what it is you mean, in addition (or at odds) with what you meant”? How does that work? Whose meaning is being recovered at that point? How does it work, specifically?
So you’d dodge the question and go on doing what your doing. ANSWER THE QUESTION!
So you are an intentionalist.
So nonconventional speech doesn’t mean? How do conventions change?
There aren’t two schools.
Assuming the speaker wishes his intentions readily understood, or conventionally understood, he has to signal his intent clearly. But what he means doesn’t change simply because you can’t figure it out.
There is nothing “good faith” about saying that you are going to dismiss what the original writer intended and still somehow interpret his text. Given that you have already said that when you interpret, you try to figure out what the author meant, how can you claim good faith interpretation on the part of those who, by your own definition, aren’t interpreting?
I have explained my position on this: “sometimes the speaker’s intent is irrelevant to the practical problem of what to do with his words.”
How bout you just fuck off?
What are you gonna do with those words, besides fuck off with them of course?
“Nit-picking” is required when you are talking about very specific points of language — and when you are discussing it with people who have strange ideas about what a sign, a signifier, a word, a text, and intepretation all are.
If you know what “his” words mean, where’s the practical problem of what to do with them?
I’m pissed off at you and your goons for the disingenuous accusations of anti-Semitism you leveled at Patterico the last time you two had a spat
Duly noted Leviticus. In response I would like to point out that perhaps Patrick should have taken more “responsibility… in choosing [his] words so as not to “risk falling victim to the Court of Convention.” The simple truth of the matter is that Patrick got schooled, that you can’t be so careful as to avoid the risk (not if you want to say anything outside of the politically correct bromides approved by the Court) of falling victim), and that the Court of Convention is a Stalinist show court run by Roy Bean. It was a good lesson for those with the humility to learn.
STOP THREATENING ME!
Why won’t Leviticus answer question number three?
Surely this proves something in itself. And will prove even more the next forty times I repeat myself.
Did you see him threaten me? Did you?
Not sure what to make of Patrick Frey’s dogged determination to do…what, exactly? What’s his deep intent here, to reduce this horse to it’s component atoms?
Is this what DDAs do when they aren’t under the firm control of a sitting judge; they continue a nibbling sort of annoying attack as if possessed of the soul of a piranha? You’re lucky he’s not very well schooled.
Oh Slarti baby! you know your Ernie loves you! But when you turn into a snively little bitch I GET SO GODDAMNED ANGRY!!!
I haven’t gotten all the way through this thread, just to the “information nugget” comments by jls which cause me to post this comment I made at the very end of the a previous “textualism” thread*
“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 think we need a safe word.
Did I interrupt something here.. ? I’ll back out of the room slowly… )
Now I’m feeling both physically and sexually threatened.
Honestly, this place is a cesspool!
“If you know what “his” words mean, where’s the practical problem of what to do with them?”
But what if his words don’t ANSWER THE QUESTION
Not to pile on Patrick.
He deals with lying weasels who misuse “intent”.
Like Polanski, who evidently was intending to comfort a 14 year old girl with a quaalude and who even went so far as to assuage her concerns about getting pregnant by drilling her backdoor. What great intentions!
But everyone knows that is a counterfeit version of “intent”.
I wonder if he lost a case because “intent” wasn’t there and it eats at him.
I remember another “answer the question” exchange that seemed like a litmus or purity test.
A snapshot of a piece of text was ripped out of it’s context and intent and then force fed to the utterer.
It was like an attack ad run by a prosecutor who is running for DA.
Which reminds me that here in Santa Barbara County we have two prosecutors who hate each other running for DA.
Honestly, this place is a cesspool!
I’m doing the breast stroke.
At least Leviticus was not niggardly in his response though he may wish to use a different more “community” approved term for his comment.
Not if the word(s) you initially chose are mild, meek and mellow sorts of words so cravenly ordered that even a so-called “Good Man” who’s looking for to twist ’em ’round could not do so. But try to use loaded, dangerous or especially edgy words, in a sequence that allows for blatant misinterpretation of your intent, and they’ll be sent back to you as a noose for your own hanging. It’d be like you brought your own tree.
Which reminds me that here in Santa Barbara County we have two prosecutors who hate each other running for DA
This is unusual? Which ever one wins, the other will have to leave else the new DA will make his/her life a living hell.
BTW, out my way a DDA who was appointed as a judge made a real boneheaded decision which cost the life of two people (a child murdered by the father who then took his own life)…and another DDA is running to unseat him.
Ooooo….the animosity that is flowing…!!!
the safe word is papoose
…is mind-rape an appropriate image for this action?
ZOMG!! You didn’t post a TRIGGER ALERT!!
‘feets! Good to see ya. Be sure to read the linky above to neo-neocon, where I found an especially cogent comment…
replace “fetuses” with papoose if that works more better for you.
I love fetuses they’re cute and they have tiny little fingers I saw NG’s fetus just the other day
he likes his thumb
Ultrasound is cool like that. I remember my daughter in ultrasound view, what, 21 years ago? give or take 3, 4, 5, or 6 months of course.
It’s a natural progression thing…
SEXIST!! Why would you bring up boobies on this thread, you self-hating woman!?
At your higher quality cesspools, they have drinks with umbrellas and chunks of fruit.
Just throwing that out there.
It comes to supplant intent as the locus of meaning in situations where a given speaker knows of the conventional understanding of a given word, knows of any potential problems use of that word may cause, and uses that word anyway.
Say that I call out to a black man “Hey n*gger!” and then claim afterward that I didn’t intend anything racist.
Guess what? “Intentionalism” doesn’t mean I can get away with that kind of nonsense.
Because if you and I were in the same meatspace, you would see that I am a native speaker of American English and that I’m old enough to know what constitutes a racial epithet; ergo, you’d be well within your rights to call bullsplat.
And you’d be right.
But not because of “textualism” or any other theory of language. You call BS because there’s no other explanation for my using such a term in such a context except racism. (And except Tourettes and other brain disorders wherein my ability to use language is physically compromised.)
That’s called deduction, using one’s brain pan, excercising the little gray cells, figuring it out, not being born yesterday. It has nothing to do with a theory of language.
Being an “intentionalist” ONLY means that you don’t treat a text like a Rorschach blot, imposing any meaning you want on it, as if the fact that a sentient being wrote it with the intent of communicating something specific.
I recall the whole “is PF a racist” series of posts warmly, because they were an obvious performative on what happens when the utterer’s intent is subsumed by the receiver’s “intent.” Anyone who couldn’t figure out what was going on has a deficit of reading comprehension skills.
Di is a Poroit fan.
CANNONBALL!!!
I didn’t know you’d posted this because I don’t frequent your blog. I’m pissed off at you and your goons for the disingenuous accusations of anti-Semitism you leveled at Patterico the last time you two had a spat; and the way you threatened Scott Jacobs and then pretended nothing happened was as chickenshit a thing as I’ve ever seen on the Internet.
My, my, my. Things sure looked different from this side of it, oh yes they did. Very, very different.
But that’s not linguistic theory, either, it’s Rashômon.
In other news, Law & Order will not renew for a 21st season.
Whatever shall we do? Wherever shall we go?
Di is a Poroit fan.
Or at least I saw it on PBS recently. It was set on the isle of Rhodes. The people spoke Greek and the officials spoke Italian. I was impressed, because during the time of the novel, Rhodes belonged to Italy.
I love it when they pay attention to detail.
Clean your cesspool, gov’ner? I’m a cesspool cleaner, I am.
Ah, so you’re here to assess the sityation then?
I have fond memories of watching Poroit on PBS. The network isn’t bad at finding good British dramas to import, and the Brits produce well-written television, though the production values of their science fiction suffer most of the time.
the production values of their science fiction suffer most of the time.
Except with the revived Doctor Who. The old one was laughably lame with the FX.
Interesting, given the topic. Chris Christie decides not to mince words. Also interesting is Ace’s comment:
Complaints about “tone” drive me up the wall too, because they’re made only when the other side is winning in a heated exchange.
“Aren’t you concerned about the tone?” means “Stop making us look bad with your pointed arguments.”
See what I did there? See?
we looked at the 3-D kind on line but they were kinda ooky and spensive we thought
Righty-o, guv! That, an’ spread around me ‘orrible accent.
Very good, I’ll leave you to the a-cessing then.
Interesting…………….
A Textualist is an Intentionalist if:
“It is a convention to privilege convention”
And:
“you have to believe that the original intent was to follow convention”
My lesson for the day.
jls, I’m still wondering about the question I formulated for you earlier today about the presumed textualist, namely, ” … how, as an encoder, does that role switching communicator dissociate his own intent from his encoding, if he’s willing to do so with another’s encoding, insofar as he professes himself to be and his method to be “textualism”?”
Me: “When I interpret, I’m trying to figure out what a given individual was saying when he spoke/wrote his words/committed his actions/whatever so I can move on from there, do deciding what to do about it.”
Jeff G: “So you are an intentionalist.”
Me: “No. I would be an “intentionalist” if I had no concern at all with ever moving on and deciding what to do with ascertained knowledge of a speakers intent.”
Whether you like it or not, intentionalism is an interpretive philosophy, just like textualism: one privileges the abstract, the other the concrete. You say there aren’t two schools – I think Patterico’s hypotheticals have shown quite clearly that there are. Your problem is that you’re treating this as a question of interpretation rather than communication. The word interpretation is loaded – it begs the question, as you are so fond of saying. Of course one must try to ascertain the speaker’s intended message if the goal is interpretation – that’s what interpretation is. But if the goal is communication – which is almost always the case – then convention becomes much more important, and rightfully so, and there’s nothing wrong with a judge or a listener or anyone else assuming that a speakers words mean what convention says they mean. “Good faith” is allowing the speaker to clarify his message if he feels he’s been misinterpreted.
Why haven’t you answered the third question? This speaks volumes.
Or, not. It’s just a trick I learned really.
See, this is why people can be forgiven for thinking you’re confused.
But, more importantly, answer the (third) question!
I just saw this from earlier.
A perfect question that deserves the mu answer. Or perhaps just a “Sir have you stopped beating your wife yet? Yes or no?”
So, though it isn’t entirely clear, the goal of communication seems to have been posited as moving on to do what you want to do, nevermind the fixedness of the indeterminate source of an intent. Which, is odd, all in all.
jls:
Seriously now, your take away from Jeff’s:
“It is a convention to privilege convention in the realm of legal decoding.
“But for that to work, you have to believe that the original intent was to follow convention. Which makes you an intentionalist, because you are intepreting by appealing to what you believe is the original utterer’s intent. This is quite different than saying regardless of what the original utterer meant, I am choosing to read the signifiers conventionally.” [my emphases]
is your:
“A Textualist is an Intentionalist if:
“‘It is a convention to privilege convention’
“And:
“‘you have to believe that the original intent was to follow convention’
My lesson for the day.”?
I think you need to reread Jeff’s 65, because you haven’t grasped the lesson.
The “text” is no more concrete, nor less, than the intent which causes the text to be “text” in the first place. Without it, intent, all that there is is some scratches in the sand, blotches of ink on paper.
One must try to divine the speaker’s intent in the utterance if there is to be any communication. If that intent is disregarded then there is no communication only two separate minds. The speaker attempting and failing at communication and the receiver talking in an internal dialogue to himself while thinking he is talking to another. One is a failure the other is in some ways insane.
The other possibility, of course, is that you just don’t give a damn about misrepresenting other people’s words. In which case, your kind of proving the point.
Uh, no. You are an intentionalist because you decided to interpret.
Whether you like whether I like it or not, you’re wrong.
They’ve done no such thing. Intent is privileged in each instance. The decision to ignore original intent is a decision to turn the text into your own text and then pretend you are still interpreting it.
Actually, my problem is that I decided to try to discuss how language works with people who have no interest in any more than what they can do with language.
Convention becomes much more important to whom? Why? Answer those questions, and maybe the light will go off for you. Though I don’t hold out a lot of hope, because you appear to me to be way out of your depth, but almost aggressively unwilling to admit as much.
Since you say you never read my site, perhaps you should take a look at this, if you haven’t already.
Or don’t. Frankly, were you in my position you’d realize you are dealing with people who simply aren’t equipped to have this discussion — and worse, they are determined to make both that and their unwillingness to learn evident each time they comment.
Here’s the thing, though. When somebody like Stanley Fish is telling you that intentionalism isn’t a “philosophy” about how to interpret, but is rather interpretation itself, he is not begging any questions. He is describing how language works.
How it doesn’t work is the way those who would very much like to control the language of others pretend it does.
What shall become of those who won’t answer the question?
Rivers of blood
Winding
Pouring
Gushing
Through the streets of Troy.
Shout out to my boy, Euripides.
Suck it, bh.
One more question for Leviticus:
Communication can happen without interpretation? Where? Star Trek? In my kitchen when the wife is mad at me and won’t say why because I’m just supposed to know?
We’ve certainly sung alot about the rage of Achilleus and of the anguish of the Achaians lately.
“The word interpretation is loaded”
Hey Jeff, isn’t every word loaded, including “and” and “the”?
“We’ve certainly sung alot about the rage of Achilleus and of the anguish of the Achaians lately.”
That’s only because manly Odysseus, the liar extraordinare, abused the poor fella, pretending he’d said “I would rather be a paid servant in a poor man’s house and be above ground than king of kings among the dead.”
Okay. You all take over for me from here. I have a movie to watch and I’m convinced that no one from Frey’s site has any desire to continue this examination in good faith.
If a text is what I’ve argued it is, and a sign is what I’ve argued it is, it makes no sense to deny that intent governs meaning — and that discerning intent is interpreting. You can “interpret” by not appealing to original intent, but to do that you have to supply those signifiers you are engaging with an intent of your own in order to turn them into language. So you are now “interpreting” your own text/
The very idea of textualism relies on an idea of the text that no one on the textualist side has wished even to describe, much less defend. It also relies on the strange notion that an audience can decide that an intended text can mean more or other than what the person who actually intended it meant by it — even as they acknowledge that that person didn’t mean by it those other things they now claim “his” text can be shown to mean.
If an audience understands a speaker’s intent, they have interpreted the speaker. If they decide that they don’t like what the speaker has to say and wish ignore it, that’s fine: but they are ignoring it because they have rejected the speaker’s text; when they pretend they are going beyond what the speaker meant because his text allows them to do so, they are saying, in effect, “we know what he meant, but we want him to mean something else, and therefore that’s what he means.” And then they are justifying such a maneuver (of privileging their own intent to go beyond what they know the speaker to have meant) by saying “convention” allows them to do so — and that the speaker’s text means more than the speaker meant by it.
They have replaced the speaker’s meaning, which they admit to knowing, with their own, which they know is not the speakers. And yet they are claiming that they are dealing in each instance with the speaker’s same (intended) text.
The mind, it boggles.
I sing of Achilles and his sunny disposition because I’m a know-nothing intentionalist who wants to justify lying.
Stupid sock puppets.
sdferr,
You’ve got me. I don’t recognize the line. I could humble myself and ask you to elaborate, but then I might lose face with a bunch of people I don’t really know. So I’m going to pretend like I know what you’re talking about and usurp your meaning.
Yeah. And wasn’t that cool when, right after, Gurney Halleck whipped out his kris knife and gutted him like a fish?
sdferr:
You asked ” … how, as an encoder, does that role switching communicator dissociate his own intent from his encoding, if he’s willing to do so with another’s encoding, insofar as he professes himself to be and his method to be “textualism”?”
I find it hard to get my mind around your formulation but I will give it a shot. The short answer is that the encoder doesn’t “disassociate his own intent from his encoding”. He simply chooses to express his intent through an alternate encoding scheme. As a textualist he would chose the “community standard” encoding scheme when transmitting and assume the “community standard” decoding scheme when receiving.
Further, If the “community standard” was the privileged encoding scheme and the textualist believed that the transmitter had used the privileged scheme then the “textualists” search for meaning would be indistinguishable from an “intentialists” search. (At least that was my lesson from Jeff.. And it seems right to me)
Here you go, Ernst.
It was from that bullshite story Odysseus made up about traveling to the Unterwelt and chatting up alla the dead peoples. He’s a twisty one, he is. That is all.
Damnit, I hate having to answer my own questions. Excuse me while I go beat of Slarti a bit.
Damnit, I hate having to answer my own questions. Excuse me while I go beat on Slarti a bit.
Where, pray tell, does he acquire such a thing (is it a boxed set?), and not having it to start with, how, in god’s name, is that done?
Papoose.
And the talking to too.
On Slarti, Beating ON Slarti, Jerking him around not jerking him oooh nevermind. As Jeff says, intent can miscarry, and a joke like this is too good for people not to resignify my signifiers. Damn dial up connection, I see bh has already pwned me.
He believes the transmitter intended to use the most conventional language available. Which would make him an intentionalist.
Which isn’t surprising, because everyone is. Some merely try to promote an idea of language in which they disclaim the importance of intent — and in so doing, hide the maneuvering that allows them to replace original (or transmitted, if you prefer) intent with their own intent under the guise of appealing to “community standards” (whichis just another way of saying that the text can “mean” whatever they can do with the signifiers, a dictionary, and an author’s meaning safely out of the way).
J. Scalia expresses his sense of textualism (CUA ’96):
The question is, how does the textualist treat his own intent as alienated from his language product ab initio, as he professes he will do with the language production of other intenders? This is not a simple matter, I think: indeed, he would seem to me never to alienate his own intent from his language product, and therefore, to chase the argument down, would appear to behave on the basis of two entirely different principles in regard to language (though I believe he cannot in good faith).
Now that I’ve wiped some of the EGG off my face:
Every word is loaded. Hell, every keystroke is loaded. They’re loaded with signification. And it was the signifier who did the loading. This will come as no surprise to anyone who’s been paying attention. And yeah sometimes they blow up on you.
Is your question “How do we acquire language, syntax and idiosyncratic expressions”. That would be the most common encoding scheme. Or perhaps if we were communicating with pictographs “How do we learn to draw an apple”?
Do I understand the question?
And sometimes you get a happy ending.
Hi, Pat. Leviticus won’t answer the third question. How many times should I note this to properly play to the crowd?
Thanks in advance.
actual conversation last week…
MK: alright, you caught me, I’m a big fat liar.
RTO: no, you just failed to signal your intent correctly.
MK: intentionally.
RTO: um, I guess technically that would be lying.
I feel you’re being too cryptic with MK and RTO. Who are these people?
And, more importantly, has Mr. Kitty shivved anyone from an opposing animal gang lately?
Why, he pleads, don’t we accept the con artist’s fraud just as he intends it — as a fraudulent double dealing — and reward him with the gains he intended to come by fraudulently? S’matter with you people?
I don’t think Mr. Kitty has shivved anyone lately, although we did get an offer to have him come over and teach Sophie (the new stupid dog) a lesson.
The real life maggie died the 2nd and there’s some question as to how involved the dogs were. No signs of trauma, nothing broken, but she’d been slobbered on. Hence the offer of Mr. Kitty’s services.
I have not followed this whole discussion since I am new to this site and Patterico, but I think Patterico is right that the practical application of this dispute boils down to a miscommunication about what a judge is doing – whether he is interpreting or enforcing. (From a practical legal standpoint, it also matters whether the text is a contract, a statute, or a constitution, but that is a whole other discussion)
For example, in contract disputes, courts typically take a textualist, plain-meaning approach and only look at the 4-corners of the document when “interpreting” (as that term is typically used by non-linguists) the contract. Courts focus on the plain text not because the parties’ intent is unimportant, rather that the plain text is the most reliable evidentiary proof of the parties’ intent. Only if the text used is ambiguous (based on a reasonable person standard) do most courts consider extrinsic evidence as to the parties intent.
Based on my limited reading of Jeff G, I think he would say that a judge that only looks at the plain text is not interpreting at all but creating – privileging his own intent to that of the contracting parties. I can agree with Jeff but still think a judge should take a textualist approach when “enforcing” the contract. It goes back to evidentiary proof of the parties’ intent. If courts routinely looked past the text of contracts to extrinsic evidence of the parties’ subjective intent, it would encourage fraud and reduce reliability in the sanctity of contract. Textualists judges are not saying that the text defines meaning; they are saying that they cannot rely on extrinsic evidence of the parties’ subjective intent if that intent directly contradicts the plain meaning of the text (based on an objective reasonable person standard). Simply put, they will give more weight and credibility to the textual evidence than the extrinsic evidence when enforcing contracts.
Other legal conventions must be taken into account when a judge decides whether to enforce criminal statutes. Again, the text is the starting point because it is the most reliable indicator of the legislature’s intent. But if the plain meaning of the statute does not match the legislature’s intent, then the judge should disregard the legislature’s intent and enforce the statute based on the plain meaning of the text. Doing otherwise would violate a citizens due process rights. As the SCOTUS as said, “no one may be required at peril of life, liberty, or property to speculate as to the meaning of a penal law. Everyone is entitled to know what the government commands or forbids.”
Can we agree that the judge in such a case is not “interpreting” since he is ignoring the legislature’s intent, but that he is correct in refusing to enforce a statute where the legislature did a poor job in signaling its intent (because doing otherwise would violate a defendant’s due process rights)?
No, we cannot agree to that at all. You need to do more reading here.
Any particular reason you used as your example, “Pass the salt,” because that is one of the two “conversations” Jack Aubrey had with his hero, Lord Nelson. So when I read it I was thrown into a Patrick O’Brien reverie.
How it doesn’t work is the way those who would very much like to control the language of others pretend it does.
And that really is the crux of this debate all along. As Leviticus revealed above, he and others aren’t as interested in how communication works as much as they want to vest the listener/receiver with power to do things besides “interpreting”, yet still label it “interpreting” in order to avoid any responsibility for their own intent in rewriting the words of the original creator of the communication.
Power without responsibility — for some, what’s not to lust for?
Liblaw — The whole point, linguistically speaking, is that there is no such thing as a “plain meaning” that doesn’t exist outside of some intent to signify. Whose intent you privilege matters, which is why I’ve been arguing not that you can’t enforce laws where the intent was poorly signaled, but that it matters how your reasoning for that enforcement works. Since you are new to my site, I’ll point you here, because that post dealt specifically with the questions you raise.
I can agree that a judge is not interpreting when he ignores intent, and have made that a central point to my own argument; I can even agree that he is correct in enforcing a statute where the legislature did a poor job of signaling its intent. But as I’ve said, it matters how that reasoning goes, and to say […] “I know what you meant, but what you meant is signaled in such a way that it couldn’t possibly be interpreted as consonant with your intent unless [the receiver of the message] also knew beforehand what you meant […]” is different from saying “I know what you meant, but what you meant doesn’t matter, because convention says you meant something else, and your intentions are irrelevant when it comes to determining what you meant.”
If what we are debating here is the viability of “textualism” as an interpretive methodology, it matters that textualism describes itself as operating like the latter. Textualism interprets using intent; there is no way around that. It also then enforces intentionally. How it justifies doing so is what is important here, because when it gets the description of what it is doing wrong, that serves to legitimize an idea of language that is incoherent.
Irrespective of what Frey may be telling his readers, intentionalism doesn’t commit a judge to ruling badly. It simply shows how meaning is created and how and where that meaning is located and privileged at any given time along the path of a speech act.
Conversation Between an Egret and an Intentionalist, 1…
Egret: [writing in tracks on wet sand] “PASS THE SALT” Intentionalist: “Look. A meaningless set of marks left by a bird lacking intent.” Egret: [writing in tracks on wet sand] “I’ll abandon the block printing for ea….
Conversation Between an Egret and an Intentionalist, 1…
Egret: [writing in tracks on wet sand] “PASS THE SALT” Intentionalist: “Look. A meaningless set of marks left by a bird lacking intent.” Egret: [writing in tracks on wet sand] “I’ll abandon the block printing for ea….
When did Pat learn to read Egret?
And did he have to teach the egret how to write?
Jeff, this power you have, to make men lose their minds; try to use it only for good. Okay?
Let me restate it this way and see if it makes a difference: the standard used by the textualist is “what can a ‘reasonable man’ make out of a given set of signifiers?” But for purposes of application, the correct question we should be asking is “what part of the text’s intent can a ‘reasonable man’ not possibly glean from the way it has been signaled.”
To go back to an earlier example. If dicentra says “pass the salt” and means “pass the pepper,” then when you pass her the salt she will let you know that she didn’t intend you to pass her the thing you passed her. If then you pass her the pepper and she thanks you, you will know that, for dicentra, “salt” means “pepper.” That is, you will understand her signification, and so understand her signs and consequently what she intended.
A few minutes go by. Once again, dicentra asks you to pass her the salt. What do you do? You know that by “salt” dicentra means “pepper.” You also know that dicentra is signaling her intent in a manner that runs counter to conventional signification. Do you pass her the salt, because convention tells you that’s “allowed”? Or do you pass her the pepper because you know that’s what she means?
One thing you may wish to do ultimately is to point out to dicentra that, conventionally, “salt” doesn’t equate to the pepper she wants. You might explain to her that, in order to signal her intent more clearly, it is important that she try to adhere to conventional usage, particularly if she wishes to be immediately understood. But you have also just proven that convention doesn’t dictate what she meant. Her intent does.
In this interpersonal instance, you were able to solve the problem of application by trial and error: eventually you came to understand what dicentra meant, and so you were able to give her what she wanted. But the problem arises in those situations where you cannot further query the intender, and yet you are impelled to act.
Most likely, you’ll do exactly what you did when you were first asked to pass the salt. But you will have done so because you believe that’s what was being asked of you — not by convention, but by the person signifying. You believed, in other words, that you were honoring an intent.
In those rare theoretical instances where you know the intent at play (dicentra says salt, but she means pepper, and you haven’t had the time to inform her as of yet that she is signaling in such a way that will confuse those who rely heavily on convention to help glean intent) — and you are in the interim forced to rule on whether or not a third party (who doesn’t share your interpersonal experience with dicentra, and so doesn’t know her intent beforehand) is justified in believing she meant salt, no intentionalist would deny that the third party is indeed justified in believing exactly that.
But that’s not because dicentra meant salt, or because her text also means salt. It is because there’s no way a third party could possibly know from her text alone that she meant pepper.
She has failed to signal her intent to that third party, even though she was able earlier to signal it to you. She still means what she means; but because the third party couldn’t possibly know what she meant, you find that they are justified in having misinterpreted her.
Particularly in the realm of legal language, where it is conventional to write and read in a way that intends first and foremost to appeal to the most conventional usages of terms, problems of the kind Frey raises in his hypotheticals are rather unlikely.
Even so, the meaning of a text hasn’t changed simply because it doesn’t adhere to convention.
Maybe I’ll just make that last a new post if I have time to put anything up today.
The trackback proves that he still doesn’t get it.
Do piranhas often eat egrets ?
“The trackback proves that he still doesn’t get it.”
The density is thick with this one.
Egret’s can be very beautiful birds. And we’ve seen the move to a claim of a specialized use of a term before (this time it’s interpretation, last time it was intent): it wasn’t any more persuasive then than it is now, Pat.
[…] I to answer a certain egret’s concerns, I would say that we are not talking past each other, and that I know that even though we started off speaking about […]
“Convention becomes much more important to whom? Why? Answer those questions, and maybe the light will go off for you. Though I don’t hold out a lot of hope, because you appear to me to be way out of your depth, but almost aggressively unwilling to admit as much.”
– Jeff G
Convention becomes much more important to everyone, because without it we’d all be spewing perfectly intended gobbledygook into the Aether. The “light” you’re referring to has “gone off”. I understand your overblown little truism: you meant what you meant. Language is the attachment of a signifier to a signified, in order to operationalize meaning. There is no “interpretation” without an honest assessment of a speaker’s true intent. To ignore a speaker’s intent is to replace it with the intent of someone else. I’ve understood all these things from Jump Street. And I ask you: SO. FUCKING. WHAT?
Interpretation is indeed necessary for communication, but it’s not sufficient for it. Communication requires convention.
And please: don’t overestimate your own “depth”. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out “intentionalism” – just an assessment of the conventional meaning of the word “interpret”. That Patterico and I and others treat that as an empirical reality rather than a normative one is step in the direction of pragmatism, nothing more.
How do two or more people arrive at a conventional understanding? How do they communicate a convention that does not yet exist because they haven’t yet communicated, because they don’t yet have a convention, because they haven’t yet communicated…?
How does a single-celled organism become a fish, which becomes a frog, which becomes an egret? It’s an evolutionary process – it takes a while, I’d imagine. But does it make any more sense that the first communication stemmed from an intention signified by some caveman in such a way that none of the other cavemen understood? Even a Grunt ‘N Point has to be understood by Caveman #2 as “pass the meat” – which makes it conventional communication. And it spreads from there.
Communication also takes place between single-celled organisms; they respond to on anothers’ chemical secretions. Does your definition of convention apply there?
And when the first single-celled organism secretes a chemical with the intent of telling the second one to stay away, and the second one interprets it as “eat me, I’m delicious,” which one is right?
Given that if said organisms secreted the wrong secretion they’d get the wrong response, I suppose it does – albeit on a less conscious level.
“Right”, how? The first one meant what he meant; and the second one might eat him miscommunicating it.
This is why Patterico keeps saying the two sides are talking past each other: we understand what you are saying regarding intent, and understand that “interpretation”, in the strictest sense of the word, goes hand in hand with an attempt at honestly assessing intent. But communication – which does indeed require interpretation – also requires an adherence to the rules of convention. And maybe that’s the big difference: you guys seem to attach a negative connotation to “convention”, and we don’t.
“That Patterico and I and others treat that as an empirical reality rather than a normative one is step in the direction of pragmatism, nothing more.”
How many steps in the direction of pragmatism are you prepared to take before you say, “this far and no further”? How then do you respond to somebody prepared to go further than you, and who justifies his doing so by refering to your own progress?
Leviticus, how do you resolve the problem of multiple conventions operating simultaneously?
For example, I ask my three year old, “would you like a knuckle sandwich?” and he says, “yes!” What do you think I should do? What would you do (if different)?
“How many steps in the direction of pragmatism are you prepared to take before you say, “this far and no further”? How then do you respond to somebody prepared to go further than you, and who justifies his doing so by refering to your own progress?”
– Ernest Schreiber
Who knows? That’s life, isn’t it? I mean, you seem perfectly alright with adhering to convention in order to communicate with me. Isn’t that a good rule of thumb?
You resolve the problem of multiple conventions operating simultaneously by using a reasonable man standard – which is problematic if you read “reasonable man standard” as “Leftist tool of oppression”, but I can’t help you there.
“…requires an adherence to the rules of convention”
But it doesn’t require any such thing.
Convention isn’t negative, so much as incomplete where we’re trying to account for language and interpretation as a whole. Hence the refusal of an over-reliance on or de-emphasis of it, if we wish to reach the intentions of an originating agent of speech, who won’t necessarily be filtering his communicative efforts through a reasonable man standard.
That’s a legal standard. My kid says he wants a knuckle sandwich for lunch. Am I gonna give it to him or not? What does your “reasonable man” tell you that I meant? that he understood? What would your reasonable man tell you to do differently? Let’s be specific so we can stop talking past each other (if that’s what we’re doing).
“…you seem perfectly alright with adhering to convention in order to communicate with me. Isn’t that a good rule of thumb?”
If I’m adhering to convention, and I would agree that I am, it is because I intend to be understood, to participate in a free exchange of ideas, to, as you say, communicate. But what would happen if one or both of us were interested not so much in the free exchange of ideas, but rather more so in the exercise of power, in controlling what was and wasn’t acceptable language? Or worse (in the sense of being vain and foolish) performing in a manner intended to win the applause of an audience of strangers on some blog’s comment page? What becomes of convention then?
“[it becomes] problematic if you read “reasonable man standard” as “Leftist tool of oppression”
What happens if/when we live in a world where leftist tools are seen as reasonable men? Does the reasonable man standard then become oppressive? I think it so.
And for the record, I am interested in exchanging views with you Leviticus. My knuckle sandwich hypothetical isn’t meant as a debating trick.
Fish didn’t evolve into frogs, and frogs didn’t evolve into egrets.
A frog can become an egret through the process of ingestion, followed by digestion.
But communication – which does indeed require interpretation – also requires an adherence to the rules of convention. And maybe that’s the big difference: you guys seem to attach a negative connotation to “convention”, and we don’t.
This statement confirms to me that, contra your declaration upthread, Leviticus, you do not “get” intentionalism or understand the arguments reiterated ad nauseam by Jeff. No one, least of all Jeff, has denied that convention can aid interpretation. Neither is there a negative connotation attached to using convention to devine meaning. Convention is merely one of many approaches utilised in attempting to determine intent.
That’s like saying a cow can become a rocket scientist via a similar process, McG.
Or, you know, wheat became Jesus. Literally, it art God.
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