'Proper' interpretation
Quoting Bitter Crank
Are you trying to say that a person should not complain if he or she is misunderstood?
Surely being understood and contributing what it is that the poster wishes to be understood is the entire reason behind posting something.
If posters want their texts to be read in a very specific way, then they better write precisely structured posts so that errant "misreadings" are nigh unto impossible. We cast our bread on the water. If gulls rather than swans swoop in and snatch it... well, that's life in the big city.
Are you trying to say that a person should not complain if he or she is misunderstood?
Surely being understood and contributing what it is that the poster wishes to be understood is the entire reason behind posting something.
Comments (24)
True. And they can also be useful if they are corrected.
There can be a lack of understanding someone, of course, and people can agree or not on how to paraphrase something, say, but there are not correct or proper interpretations.
If your reason for posting is to be understood then it seems to me entirely reasonable to expect that you to do everything in their power to ensure that you cannot be misunderstood. How is it my responsibility to make sense of something you wrote badly or ambiguously? All I have is the words on the page. If there is a disparity between what they say and what you thought you were saying then who should take responsibility for that if not you?
Yes.
I am at least as likely as you are (maybe more so) to write something that falls short of precision and clarity. It is the writer's job to eliminate as much ambiguity and vagueness as they can from their compositions. It is the reader's job to read as carefully as they can, and I am as likely (maybe more so) as anyone else to fail at this task.
Now, it is possible to write with perfect clarity and precision and have people reject one's statement. Rejection isn't the same as misunderstanding.
If it wasn't clear to you that I was rejecting some of what you wrote, and wasn't merely confused, then that is my fault, not yours.
Troll Or when we are a pro-inflammatory hypocrite, or an uninsightful disturber of serious discussion.Troll
It's not entirely the reader's responsibility. In fact I did not intend to say that. The misunderstanding was probably fault this time.
I wanted to hear from people who believe that what the poster intends to say doesn't matter.
Oh. To what were you trying to convey a rejection?
Ok, but wouldn't you say that some interpretations are better than others. More informed, able to demonstrate more solidarity with the text. Hermeneutics has a methodology.
I certainly prefer some interpretations to others, some resonate with me more, etc.
But unless it's a context where someone is trying to utter paraphrases that the author would agree with, I don't feel that an interpretation is better just because the author would agree with it. I rather agree with the gist of what's known as the intentional fallacy.
Ok, but how do you read someone like Plato and not get involved in that fallacy. Plato works are each separate they stand on their own, yet in many ways they seem to depend on one another. How would irony be possible if we didn't read intent into what we are reading.
The intentional fallacy doesn't say or recommend to necessarily not read authorial intent into something. It rather says that authorial intent does not amount to a correct interpretation.
On what grounds would we demand that there is one and only one "proper" method of interpretation, suitable for all texts and for all exegetical purposes?
Can interpretations of authorial intention be useful in exegesis? Of course they can. Must accounts of authorial intention be decisive in determining all interpretation or all correct interpretation? Of course they need not.
I'd emphasize, however, the difference between interpretation, construed as an interaction with a text, and conversation, construed as an interaction with another speaker.
I'm not sure what it would mean -- I'm not sure it's possible -- to converse with another person without taking into account his intentions in speaking, what he means to say, his reasons for saying what he says. I might say that one must take an interlocutor's intentions into account responsibly in order to converse responsibly. To converse is to make oneself responsible to the intentions of an interlocutor.
Misunderstanding is inevitable. Why complain about being misunderstood, when you can take the opportunity to express yourself more clearly, for the sake of conversation, in a manner adapted to another's point of view?
We exercise the same sympathy in conversation, speaking so that our speech is understood by others, and listening so as to understand the speech of others.
Both author and interpreter are obliged to comply to the rules and vocabulary of the language that they use.
An interpretation is proper or acceptable when it complies to what is actually there to read, regardless of whether it deviates from the author's alleged intent.
An interpretation is improper or unacceptable when it does not comply to what is there to read, and regardless of whether it would comply to the author's alleged intent.
Likewise, the author's published text can be either proper or improper, acceptable or unacceptable, depending on whether it complies to the rules and vocabulary of the language s/he is using.
Misunderstandings happen, of course, because of mistakes, insufficient language skills, or egocentrics, relativists, or ideologues who might attempt to redefine our language as it suits them.
Truly? :-}
In a world where nobody believes in shared truths only the powerful reign, and the wise with uncomfortable truths are easily dismissed as having inferior perspectives. Perspectivism has become an ideology in favour of the powerful, ignorant, and careless; their actions would never be wrong, their statements never false, at least not in any way that would make them change their actions or statements.
No, because in ordinary speech a word such as 'cat' truly means the feline animal, regardless of your power. If some mad military who happens to hate cats would, by force, manage to change all speakers' use of the word's meaning, there would still be other words that mean the same feline animal. The meaning ain't in the word, nor in people's heads, nor in what they're told to think about, but in what they actually interact with: the feline animal.
Nobody says there would be a universal cat. The cat is whatever it is that we interact with and thereby refer to as 'cat', a 'feline animal' etc. (the words are arbitrary, not their meaning).
Ah. That old subjectivist dogma was decisively refuted in 1976, 1982 etc. by Putnam.
???
Quoting Calimero
I don't think this issue has anything to do with idealism.