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Source: (consider it)
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Thread: Let's Create A Hermeneutic!
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Nigel M
Shipmate
# 11256
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Posted
On Evidence
On the question of evidence for authorial intent, this arises more from a “lesser of two (or three) evils” state. There may be an additional argument from moral ownership, but I haven't explored that to any great extent. So the question here really seems to me to be, Which approach has fewer risks or issues associated with it?
Given that the direction of travel is from text to somewhere else; interpreters are faced with a decision to take on which route to follow to find meaning. We identify or even infer intent from the text, which is in the public arena and can be used in evidence. Three actual direction of travel options have been given to us:
1] From text to authorial intention (behind the text)
2] From text to textual intention (in the text)
3] From text to audience (reader / hearer) intention (in front of the text)
I suppose for completeness we should add…
4] There is no such thing as intention
…but I haven’t come across an argument for that, so will leave to one side.
What this comes down to is whether we take the evidence to better support one or other of the above options. My argument is that the evidence better supports 1] above, over the others on the basis of risk.
Why not 2]? The New Critics from the 1940s onwards privileged the autonomy of the text over the author, by giving it life. This wasn’t an argument that stood for long; it was overtaken by the privileging of the audience over both author and text. I accept that privileging the text doesn’t work – no evidence has been produced to support the idea that a text can hold meaning independent of human interaction. So the issue here is that textual 'intention' collapses into either authorial or audencial meaning.
This doesn’t mean that there is nothing we can take from the New Critics. Their concern, for example, that the approach to authorial intention as it was practised up to the 1940s included too much inferring without reference to a text. Literary critics had been making calls on what was going on in the mind of an author before he or she put pen to paper. I think that the New Critics had a point here and that it’s fair to take that concern on board when it comes to biblical interpretation, even if we reject the alternative approach advocated by the New Critics (privileging an autonomous text with a life of its own).
So, for example, Paul could well have said to himself, “I must get around to writing a letter to the believers in Rome at some point.” That is an intention, but not a public one, in that no reference is made to it in the actual letter. It’s possible, or even highly probable, that he may have had that intention in mind at some point, but without the textual evidence in support such conclusion would be speculation.
Similarly, he could have then said to himself, “And when I do write, I must remember to address issues (a), (b), and (c).” Again, this is an expression of intent and although getting closer to the content of the actual letter, is still off limits for inference, because what he intended to write at an early point may not have ended up being what he intended at the actual point of composition. What we do have is the actual letter and we can identify intended meaning from it. Using the example I gave earlier, we could infer that one of Paul’s intentions was to confirm to his audience that he was indeed their appointed apostle, their ‘go to’ guy for guidance, their head in a covenant relationship.
So we could cede ground here, but I wouldn’t go so far with the New Critics as to throw the author out with the bath water.
What about 3]? Here I think the evidence also is weak. The privileging of audience autonomy has come under fire on two main fronts: from those who argue that the approach cannot provide an answer to the problem of validation in interpretation; and also the fact pointed out that proponents of the autonomy of the reader do not follow what they preach – if their works are misunderstood they are first in line to object that their intention had been misconstrued.
For biblical interpretation the question of validation is important. For this reason I cannot see that 3] is useful.
We are then thrown back on authorial intention. From what I understand on this thread thus far, there is also an argument in favour of ‘authorial intention plus [x]’. The additional factor [x] might be the interpretive grid of the community of believers, as expressed differently in differing Christian traditions. Or [x] could be the history of reception more widely. My quick answer is that [x] so far turns out to be either a constraint or an example of significances drawn in particular times and places, not an additional assistance for meaning.
Is there any other option? The risks associated with 2] and 3] seem much larger than those associated with 1].
Slavery and levels of intention
Of the options you have offered (A, B, or C), I can see an argument for taking A as an evidenced outcome, based on identifying authorial intention from the text. There is room here to take only one example: the discrepancy between Paul’s statement in Gal. 3:28 that “There is…neither slave nor free…”, and other texts where he supports retention of slavery, taking the book of Philemon as a case in point.
I am still arguing that we must take each of those texts individually on their merits first, otherwise we risk importing audience meaning and overriding the intention of the author as motivated in each case. What we would then understand is not the meaning of the text, but the significance imposed on it by a reader.
An approach to the two texts could run like this:
In Galatians, Paul is rehearsing the history of faith to demonstrate the priority of faith over the mediated law. For Paul, what comes earlier in time takes priority. He takes the creation principle of equality and says that it applies in God’s Kingdom. God’s people are now joint-heirs, equal with the Messiah, so equality should be the norm in the body of believers.
In Philemon, Paul knew that Onesimus was a slave in law and that advising Philemon to set him free would not make him free in law. The believers had not the power to change that law, and letting Onesimus go would not change his status. He could very easily be taken back into slave ownership by someone else, with his lot ending up worse than before. So Paul asks Philemon to apply the equality principle at home – treating Onesimus as a brother (Philemon 1:16). That is a crucial term in the text, taking the slave-in-law as an equal (Brother, not even Son).
That would, I suggest, be to take the evidence of the text in Philemon on its own merits. Then we can look that text and Galatians to see if there is a discrepancy. I don’t think there is. The principle Paul takes from creation works as a meta-intention across his theology (supported by the fact that he uses this principle elsewhere). Philemon is a lower-level, local application, with Paul’s intention being to apply the creation principle in the face of the law and power of Rome at a particular point in space and time.
On this reading, perhaps only option A seems to fit. It can fit on the basis of authorial intention, because we are looking at two different levels: the meta-intention and the more specific local intention. There is consistency between them. Now of course that is just one topic (slavery) and one text to place against Galatians, but I would argue that it shows that is it important to take each text’s authorial intention individually first, and only then see whether there is any meta-intention that arcs over other texts. If we cannot identify one, or infer one, then we have to consider other options, such as the development of thought over time.
We are in somewhat of a unique situation with Paul, of course, because we have more than one instance of a text from him. Apart from John, perhaps, we would struggle to make similar comparisons elsewhere. Having said that, there are three wider issues:
[1] Systematic theology across disparate texts and indeed the whole biblical corpus
[2] A fuller, or more complete (or even full and complete), sense: the sensus plenior
[3] The question of God’s role as an author; this might overlap to an extent with the above two.
For these I would still say that we should start with the individual texts in context first, if we are to mitigate the bigger risks associated with audience meaning.
Posts: 2826 | From: London, UK | Registered: Apr 2006
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Dafyd
Shipmate
# 5549
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Nigel M:
Three actual direction of travel options have been given to us:
1] From text to authorial intention (behind the text)
2] From text to textual intention (in the text)
3] From text to audience (reader / hearer) intention (in front of the text)
This begs the question. You presuppose the identification of meaning with intention.
I don't talk about 'textual intention' for that reason. The direction of travel is variously text to world or to reader or to author, etc. But not to intention which is itself nothing but a direction of travel.
quote:
I accept that privileging the text doesn’t work – no evidence has been produced to support the idea that a text can hold meaning independent of human interaction.
That would be because a text as you define it is a form of human interaction.
You are repeating yourself here. I have already asked you to move the question on from textual meaning to the claim that the meaning of the text depends upon the shared culture and language, the communicative community into which the author addresses his or her text.
The point here is that interaction cannot be collapsed simply into the mental states of one side or the other.
If you have ever used a dictionary you have evidence for textual meaning.
Let's take the word 'cat'. That refers to, with some dependence on context, a feline animal: dependent on context either felis domesticus or any member of the Felidae.
Now that is a textual meaning. It's not an authorial intended meaning: if it were the task of the dictionary compiler would be impossible since the dictionary compiler is not reporting on their own intentions - dictionary writers are in terms of the use-mention distinction mentioning the words not using them. Nobody would buy a dictionary if it merely reported on the dictionary writers' mental states at point of writing.
It's possible for me to communicate my intentions directly. If I attract your attention and then stand by the side of the road looking both ways exaggeratedly you can infer that I intend to cross.
It seems to me that identifying meaning with authorial intention treats the words 'I intend to cross the road' as no different in kind from standing by the side of the road looking both ways. And yet it seems to me that the words are quite a different phenomenon. You can't mention standing by the side of the road looking both ways or put it in a dictionary. (Note the absence of quotation marks in that sentence, which refers to the action not the words.)
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For biblical interpretation the question of validation is important. For this reason I cannot see that 3] is useful.
This I think dismisses the entire tradition of audience devotional reading.
Problems of validation are not I think going to be solved by recourse to authorial local intention, since what is to be validated is often a construction from local meanings whose local meaning is not in doubt.
quote:
In Galatians, Paul is rehearsing the history of faith to demonstrate the priority of faith over the mediated law. For Paul, what comes earlier in time takes priority. He takes the creation principle of equality and says that it applies in God’s Kingdom. God’s people are now joint-heirs, equal with the Messiah, so equality should be the norm in the body of believers.
You say this is an 'evidenced outcome'. I am not seeing any evidence for this reading. In particular I am not seeing any evidence that Paul intended anything corresponding to the phrase 'creation principle' nor is 'what comes earlier in time takes priority' put forward as a general principle.
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In Philemon, Paul knew that Onesimus was a slave in law and that advising Philemon to set him free would not make him free in law.
Manumission did make slaves free in law - what do you mean by setting a slave free if you
don't mean setting the slave free in law?
If we want to believe that Paul intended that Christians should never interact with each other as slave and master we can. But as he never says so, it is an open question as to whether he intended a spiritual equality with material consequence, or a purely "spiritual" equality with no material consequence. The latter may not make logical sense but is has been advocated by many people down the centuries so is by no means an impossibility. The general rule looking at human nature is that people from privileged classes who advocate equality at a "spiritual" level generally
intend something less radical at a day-to-day level, and there is no evidence otherwise for Paul.
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It can fit on the basis of authorial intention, because we are looking at two different levels: the meta-intention and the more specific local intention. There is consistency between them.
Your reading seems to me to presuppose that there must be consistency. There can be no grounds for doing so if authorial intention determines meaning, since some inconsistency of intention is a pretty much universal in our experience of humans. (To which indeed Paul draws our attention.)
[ 17. February 2018, 15:38: Message edited by: Dafyd ]
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we remain, thanks to original sin, much in love with talking about, rather than with, one another. Rowan Williams
Posts: 10567 | From: Edinburgh | Registered: Feb 2004
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Nigel M
Shipmate
# 11256
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Dafyd:
This begs the question. You presuppose the identification of meaning with intention.
I don't talk about 'textual intention' for that reason.
‘Meaning’ is a wide-ranging word, I agree, and can cover a number of definitions, but I am using it in Hirsch’s sense of ‘intention’. Or perhaps better, meaning is to found in intention (authorial of course, from Hirsch’s point of view), rather than in significance, which is found in the world of the audience.
quote:
Originally posted by Dafyd:
I have already asked you to move the question on from textual meaning to the claim that the meaning of the text depends upon the shared culture and language, the communicative community into which the author addresses his or her text.
Well, as I said before, a shared culture or language can have no ‘meaning’ without human interaction. Calling on a shared culture of language does not add to the essential factor that there is an intention, expressed in words (and upwards to the discourse level).
An understanding of the culture and worldview influencing the author is helpful to determining the context of the words the author used, and as such forms part of the interpretive process. The existence of a shared culture with the audience, though, does not impact that process; the reading of the audience is – again said earlier – a significance not a meaning (defined as intention). The biblical interpreter can not be interested in how a text has been received unless the study is being done to determine the history of reception. How is that relevant, though, to the author’s intention as expressed in the words used?
The best I can come up with is that the shared culture may produce a trigger that motivates the writing of a text, or it may also act as a constraint on the writing, but the shared culture can only still be either: [1] identified in the text as the author’s intention, or [3] identified in the history of reception, the significance / application at a later date. It isn’t [2], the text, independently of the human.
I looked the issue of authorial competence earlier, and also at the question of whether the audience’s interpretation of a text impacts the biblical interpretation process I am advocating. The fact that texts can go awry compared to the author’s intention can only be relevant here if the text was indeed at variance with that intention, but not the fact that an audience can mis-interpret the text. My point earlier here is that the context of the production of the biblical texts that have come down to us is one of more constraint than we have in other, more informal, contexts where the risk of going awry is much higher.
The dictionary analogy doesn’t help us either. The meaning of a word as derived from a dictionary and applied to a text is still the work of a human interpreter. The human looks at the text, refers to the dictionary, and then imposes the meaning on the text. This was, to an extent, the problem caused by biblical word studies, critiqued notably by J. Barr in 1961 (The Semantics of Biblical Language, Oxford, OUP). The text still has no meaning independently of human interaction.
On your example of gestures (crossing the road), I see no problem with the idea of para-linguistic cues operating apart from words. For biblical interpretation though, of course, we are cut off from those unless an author describes them (e.g. taking off a shoe as part of a business deal – Ruth 4:8).
Audience devotional reading also has no impact on an author's intention. It, too, is independent of it. What are we trying to get out of devotional reading? I would say that it is – again – in the domain of significance, the area of application in a different time and place to that of the author.
I’m not writing off devotional reading, but I am saying it cannot really have a place in biblical interpretation, where the aim is to validate different, and sometimes mutually incompatible, interpretations.
quote:
Originally posted by Dafyd:
I am not seeing any evidence that Paul intended anything corresponding to the phrase 'creation principle' nor is 'what comes earlier in time takes priority' put forward as a general principle.
Paul relies on the fact that the law was introduced later (Gal. 3:17), which fact did not in his view undermine the earlier promise. If the promise was not removed by the law, then it has priority – loyalty is on the basis of faith, whether or not someone lives by the subsequent mediated law. Earlier than law is creation, even if disurbed by rebellion. As Paul demonstrates prolific dependence on his Jewish Scriptures, it is possible to infer his intention there.
quote:
Originally posted by Dafyd:
Manumission did make slaves free in law…
It wouldn’t apply to a runaway slave – unless you think Onesimus was not actually a runaway? That could be right; though Pauls’ description of him as useless (ἄχρηστος) in v.11 suggests a parting of the ways that was not conducive to manumission. If manumission was indeed possible, then I can see the argument made by some commentators that in v.21 Paul is hinting to Philemon to apply the legal change in status.
quote:
Originally posted by Dafyd:
Your reading seems to me to presuppose that there must be consistency.
No – I would say that addressing individual texts on their own merits first is a way to avoid just that presupposition.
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Dafyd
Shipmate
# 5549
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Nigel M:
quote:
Originally posted by Dafyd:
This begs the question. You presuppose the identification of meaning with intention.
I don't talk about 'textual intention' for that reason.
‘Meaning’ is a wide-ranging word, I agree, and can cover a number of definitions, but I am using it in Hirsch’s sense of ‘intention’. Or perhaps better, meaning is to found in intention (authorial of course, from Hirsch’s point of view), rather than in significance, which is found in the world of the audience.
Hirsch uses 'intention' to mean something like the internal mental object of an intentional attitude, where an intentional attitude is something like a belief or desire or wish. This is at best a piece of philosophical jargon: it's not common English usage.
When you write that the interpreter should be:
quote:
paying attention to what an author did in using the words he or she used, in the way he or she used them, to effect an affect on an audience.
you are talking about intention in the ordinary English sense and not in Hirsch's sense, although I don't doubt that Hirsch may have fudged the issue when it came up (Hirsch seeming to me to be ever ready to fudge issues to support his position).
Hirsch's distinction between meaning and significance is driven by his contention that meaning must be determinate in order for interpretation to count as knowledge, since knowledge must have a determinate object. But I find it implausible to suppose that mental attitudes can be sufficiently individuated for their objects to be determinate in that sense. (For example, does the belief that the Queen of England and Scotland is not bald distinct from the belief that there is a Queen of England and Scotland? Or that the current Queen is Elizabeth Windsor and Elizabeth Windsor is not bald? Does the 'intention' include my rather sketchy mental image of Elizabeth Windsor or not?)
quote:
quote:
Originally posted by Dafyd:
I have already asked you to move the question on from textual meaning to the claim that the meaning of the text depends upon the shared culture and language, the communicative community into which the author addresses his or her text.
Well, as I said before, a shared culture or language can have no ‘meaning’ without human interaction. Calling on a shared culture of language does not add to the essential factor that there is an intention, expressed in words (and upwards to the discourse level).
You did say it before and I responded:
quote:
The point here is that interaction cannot be collapsed simply into the mental states of one side or the other.
Hirsch-intentions are determinate mental objects. They therefore are not interactions. An interaction between a Hirsch-intention and something else is on Hirsch's scheme a significance not a meaning.
quote:
the reading of the audience is – again said earlier – a significance not a meaning (defined as intention).
No - it's a Hirsch-intention just as the author's Hirsch-intention is. Hirsch's view requires the audience to be able to reproduce the author's meaning in its determinacy. Significance for Hirsch is not what goes on in the audience but the relationship of the meaning (that is, the Hirsch-intention) to something else.
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The dictionary analogy doesn’t help us either. The meaning of a word as derived from a dictionary and applied to a text is still the work of a human interpreter. The human looks at the text, refers to the dictionary, and then imposes the meaning on the text.
It's not an analogy. If a human using a dictionary imposes a meaning on the text then the enterprise of compiling a dictionary is pointless.
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On your example of gestures (crossing the road), I see no problem with the idea of para-linguistic cues operating apart from words. For biblical interpretation though, of course, we are cut off from those unless an author describes them (e.g. taking off a shoe as part of a business deal – Ruth 4:8).
I may not have expressed my point clearly; however, you have missed it. There is on your scheme no important distinction to be made between para-linguistic cues and words.
quote:
quote:
Originally posted by Dafyd:
I am not seeing any evidence that Paul intended anything corresponding to the phrase 'creation principle' nor is 'what comes earlier in time takes priority' put forward as a general principle.
Paul relies on the fact that the law was introduced later (Gal. 3:17), which fact did not in his view undermine the earlier promise. If the promise was not removed by the law, then it has priority – loyalty is on the basis of faith, whether or not someone lives by the subsequent mediated law. Earlier than law is creation, even if disurbed by rebellion. As Paul demonstrates prolific dependence on his Jewish Scriptures, it is possible to infer his intention there.
(As an aside, Paul also argues that faith comes after the law, the law acting as a tutor until we come of age. That image gives priority to the more mature reading.)
Let's grant that Paul Hirsch-intended your claim that faith takes priority over the law because it comes earlier. You can logically deduce from that that creation is earliest of all and creation order therefore takes priority over everything. That is irrelevant to Paul's Hirsch-intentions unless you can show that Paul Hirsch-intended all the additional premises and the conclusion. Otherwise, you would have to say that everyone who Hirsch-intends Euclid's axioms and postulates Hirsch-intends the entirety of Euclid. The important feature of intentional objects is that logical consequences do not necessarily apply, since people do not invariably draw all relevant logical consequences of their intentional states.
On a Hirschian-schema the logical consequences of what can be inferred cannot be included within the meaning of the text, but are at best part of the significance.
This is part of my reason for thinking that the meaning-significance distinction upon which so much of Hirsch's scheme relies does not hold up.
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we remain, thanks to original sin, much in love with talking about, rather than with, one another. Rowan Williams
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Nigel M
Shipmate
# 11256
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Posted
On those para-linguistic cues, my point was that from the perspective of biblical interpretation there can indeed no important distinction. We have no access to them.
A dictionary does not evidence textual meaning save in a (at best) secondary sense; it describes the use of a term in public discourse – how humans use those terms with intent to communicate something. The record is based on a synchronic cut of practical usage, perhaps taking a series of such cuts to demonstrate usage across time. If I see the word ‘cat’ in a text it is there because a human being intended to put it there for a reason, and it is that intention that is worth chasing down. It is this aspect that leads to the argument that, in biblical interpretation, intention can reside only in the author or the audience. It cannot reside in the text independently of that human factor (hence it must collapse into one side or the other). The risk of associating the dictionary description of a word-meaning with the text independently of the specific author’s intention is rather too great, in my experience. It leaves the interpreter / reader open to a number of fallacies, the etymological fallacy being just one.
quote:
Originally posted by Dafyd:
Hirsch uses 'intention' to mean something like the internal mental object of an intentional attitude, where an intentional attitude is something like a belief or desire or wish. …
This may be taking us down a rabbit hole or two, but Hirsch goes wider than that. His opening gambit on this was that verbal meaning is determinate, by which he meant “…that it is an entity which is self-identical. Furthermore, I also mean that it is an entity which always remains the same from one moment to the next - that it is changeless” (Hirsch, Jr., E. D. Validity in Interpretation, New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 1967, p. 46). The difference between Hirsh and the New Critics (e.g. M.C. Beardsley) on this is not that there is a determinate meaning (they agree there is), but whether there is an authorial will. Hirsch argued that verbal meaning is a willed type. Meaning is an affair of consciousness and not inherent to texts themselves or, I think he would argue, para-linguistic cues.
By this, however, he is not backtracking down the route to locating meaning entirely in internal mental states devoid of external expression. Although he may have included internal mental states in his scope, he is clear that this will can be shared and understood by an audience. Hence his: “Verbal meaning is whatever someone has willed to convey by a particular sequence of linguistic signs and which can be conveyed (shared) by means of those linguistic signs” (p.31).
I don’t think this is a total fudge. He is, after all, reacting to two camps: the nineteenth-century notion that determination of textual meaning is to be located in the author’s state of mind at the time of a text’s production; and the New Critical response that meaning lies only in the text. His argument is that an author is necessary for there to be a will to communicate (and so interpretation cannot ignore that factor), and that the expression of that will in a text is shareable (and therefore capable of multiple significances).
I am not sure how far we should push the idea of a determinate object. If it is being taken in a Kantian sense, then there would need to be a clear link between symbol or image and thought, with one representation to rule them all. Hirsch might come close to this with his understanding of significance, in that shareability includes something greater than meaning and Identity is what makes that something shareable. I get the impression from Hirsch, though, that he is hanging determinacy off authorial intent, rather than the other way around. In other words, the determinacy argument is there because of the context within which Hirsch found himself in the 1960s, but that authorial intention stands independently and prior to it.
Equally, significance is treated more widely in Hirsch than simply a coherence with the author’s intention. Hirsch allows for significances apart from that intention, but argues that significances ought to be located by interpreters in a fixed meaning, not that they can only ever be. An interpreter could try to ground a significance in an author’s determinate meaning in the Kantian sense, but I am not arguing that a biblical interpreter must follow that route.
The criticisms that have been levelled at Hirsch have some merit. It is likely, for example, that Hirsch underestimated the number of possible alternatives to a determinate meaning. I am not advocating the taking of Hirsch’s scheme warts and all, indeed I am keen to do something more along the lines of Paul Ricoeur in his analysis of the debate between Hirsch and Gadamer (e.g., the opening up of ‘worlds’ in discourse). Hirsch himself modified his scheme as a result of the exchanges (Hirsch, E. D., Jr. “Meaning and Significance Reinterpreted,” in Critical Inquiry Vol. 11, No. 2, Dec., 1984, pp. 202-225), not to abolish the distinction, but to deal with the special case of exemplifications. I still do not see that there is a good reason to blur the distinctions between meaning and significance, with ‘meaning’ taken in connection with the will of an author to change something. Will, in this case, being accessed through the communicative action of the author. Significance is then being taken from the side of the audience.
Posts: 2826 | From: London, UK | Registered: Apr 2006
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Dafyd
Shipmate
# 5549
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Nigel M:
On those para-linguistic cues, my point was that from the perspective of biblical interpretation there can indeed no important distinction. We have no access to them.
If we have access to words and we don't have access to non-linguistic cues that is an important distinction.
In any case, you're missing my point. The sense in which words mean something is distinct from the sense in which non-linguistic actions mean something.
quote:
A dictionary does not evidence textual meaning save in a (at best) secondary sense; it describes the use of a term in public discourse – how humans use those terms with intent to communicate something.
I'll note that the intention to communicate something is not a Hirsch-intention. If you say that someone's intention is to communicate a Hirsch-intention you are committing a pun. Or else committing a fallacy of equivocation. Talking about 'with intent to communicate something' if you're trying to equate meaning with Hirsch-intention does nothing to establish the case.
Intending to communicate something is not the same as actually communicating something.
The condition of possibility of the term having a use in public discourse is that the use in public discourse is not reducible to whatever the speaker intends to do on any given occasion.
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If I see the word ‘cat’ in a text it is there because a human being intended to put it there for a reason, and it is that intention that is worth chasing down. It is this aspect that leads to the argument that, in biblical interpretation, intention can reside only in the author or the audience. It cannot reside in the text independently of that human factor (hence it must collapse into one side or the other).
It might lead to the argument, but I haven't seen the argument in any convincing form.
One is perfectly at liberty to think that the author's intention is worth chasing down. There are many purposes for which that might be true. That is not to say that there are not other things that might be worth chasing down. (For example, the author might unintentionally or without intention reveal things about themselves or the world.)
If it must collapse into one side or the other that can only be if there is no overlap between the two sides. But without overlap between the two sides there is no communication.
Imagine trying to use the word 'cat' to mean 'to communicate' without explicitly setting up a code. You can't do it. You can't meaningfully intend a sentence to mean something if there can be no uptake of that meaning by the audience.
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The risk of associating the dictionary description of a word-meaning with the text independently of the specific author’s intention is rather too great, in my experience. It leaves the interpreter / reader open to a number of fallacies, the etymological fallacy being just one.
To what extent are they fallacies and to what extent are they merely you disagreeing with the conclusion?
The meaning of a word is the meaning current in the author's community in the relevant context(and is open to change via various linguistic phenomena), not necessarily the meaning it may have had in the past.
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we remain, thanks to original sin, much in love with talking about, rather than with, one another. Rowan Williams
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fletcher christian
Mutinous Seadog
# 13919
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Posted
Isn't part of the problem of chasing down an authorial intent an attempt in some way to narrow the field of interpretation to one thing? I know you can say, well we can layer on readings over that, but to fix an authorial intent also fixes the readings within that narrow frame. Perhaps I'm misunderstanding this, but I suspect that is a modern and specifically western obsession.
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'God is love insaturable, love impossible to describe'
Staretz Silouan
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Nigel M
Shipmate
# 11256
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Dafyd:
If we have access to words and we don't have access to non-linguistic cues that is an important distinction.
In any case, you're missing my point. The sense in which words mean something is distinct from the sense in which non-linguistic actions mean something.
It is probably my fault, but I still cannot see the force of your argument here. Non-verbal cues probably add value to a verbal communication and thereby increase the chances of success. But non-verbal cues in the absence of verbals are in the same camp as any other type of communication: they are also subject to authorial competence and trustworthiness, and to the success of audience perception. A non-verbal cue may be intended, yet never actually transmitted. And so on…
Similarly, non-verbal cues in tandem with verbal communication do not guarantee effective communication (from an author’s point of view). An author may consciously intend to communicate one thing, but unconsciously betray another intention by the non-verbal cues used.
Despite these factors, humans with normal communication capacity do not need non-verbals in order to understand what an author intended. We can get by without them. What non-verbals do do, though, is show why texts are inert; humans infer intention from things other than texts, so there is no requirement to view texts are holding a meaning, or intention, in the absence of human interaction.
It is not impossible to compile a dictionary of (non-verbal) gestures. The Highway Code (in the UK) has images of authorised persons gesturing and an explanation of what those gestures mean. The intention was, I assume, by policy officers in the appropriate Government Department to inform readers how to behave when confronted by the cue. It was a human intention that put the images there, and they were there because they were used in real life. The authorised person on the ground has intention to effect an affect in an audience.
But even allowing for all that, with the world of biblical interpretation we are operating in a written environment where non-verbal cues are absent. They can only be irrelevant, therefore, for a hermeneutic. The fact of their being irrelevant, however, does not prevent an interpreter from discerning an author’s intent.
I avoided using the term ‘non-linguistic’ here because I think some argue that a non-verbal cue can also communicate and therefore be linguistic. Some hedge their bets (like me, I guess) by using the term ‘para-linguistic’ more often than not.
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Originally posted by Dafyd:
Intending to communicate something is not the same as actually communicating something.
In part I agree, and that is why there is a need to distinguish between internal mental states that do not make it to the transmission stage and those that do, and then to consider the constraining factors surrounding different discourses that impact at the point where intention coincides with the act of encoding and transmission. A biblical hermeneutic should, if it is to be used in validation exercises, focus on the actual communication and identify or infer intention from that.
Intending to communicate can coincide with the 'communicating something' if the two overlap – and I would suggest that this is the norm; authors communicate what they intend more often than not; the exceptions prove the rule. In the scope of biblical interpretation, the constraints bounding the texts that we have received add confidence to our stance that there has been an effective transmission of the intended purpose. Hirsch would have said that the text means what the author meant (or intended) it to mean under those conditions. The alternative would be an involuntary communication – devoid of conscious intention. That is considered abnormal. For biblical interpretation we are not dealing with this factor.
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Originally posted by Dafyd:
If it must collapse into one side or the other that can only be if there is no overlap between the two sides. But without overlap between the two sides there is no communication.
I would say that intention can collapse into the authorial side and yet for the communicated intention to remain accessible, though there may need to be some back-and-forth between audience and author (a form of hermeneutical spiral). Intention can be the fixed or determinate entity on one side and communication still succeed by virtue of an overlap, if the audience has the desire to ascertain the intention that is being communicated. If an audience has no such desire, then there is no overlap, no fusion of horizons.
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Originally posted by Dafyd:
Imagine trying to use the word 'cat' to mean 'to communicate' without explicitly setting up a code. You can't do it. You can't meaningfully intend a sentence to mean something if there can be no uptake of that meaning by the audience.
I think this is a different issue to dictionary use. A dictionary does not assist with the meaning of a communication above the word level. Something else is needed to get meaning from other levels, such as clause, sentence, paragraph, discourse – or even to work on the distinction between surface level and deep level meaning. One can get by in life perfectly well without ever having recourse to a dictionary or lexicon by acquiring the necessary skill set for effective communication from public discourse – the practical use of a language.
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Originally posted by Dafyd:
To what extent are they fallacies and to what extent are they merely you disagreeing with the conclusion?
The meaning of a word is the meaning current in the author's community in the relevant context(and is open to change via various linguistic phenomena), not necessarily the meaning it may have had in the past.
I think you answered your question in your second paragraph. I don’t generally disagree with that, but there have been instances (and for all I know continue to be) where an interpreter has concluded that the past meaning of a word can be taken to be the meaning current at the time of use.
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Originally posted by fletcher christian:
Isn't part of the problem of chasing down an authorial intent an attempt in some way to narrow the field of interpretation to one thing? I know you can say, well we can layer on readings over that, but to fix an authorial intent also fixes the readings within that narrow frame. Perhaps I'm misunderstanding this, but I suspect that is a modern and specifically western obsession.
I suppose the question would be: What other factors should be added – and, more importantly, how should they be validated?
It’s always been a concern of commentators to validate their interpretations and remains so today for Christians because the stakes are rather high. Believers need to now how to live and what decisions to make; a variety of different interpretations – some of them mutually incompatible – is a barrier to meeting that need.
The distinction between meaning (as fixed authorial intention) and significance (as the application to particular times and places) is helpful here, in that it allows for a variety of applications to meet needs, while taking their cue from a fixed point so that they do not veer all over the place. In fact, we could say that the process of interpretation is quite broad and takes in both the work to ascertain an authorial intention and the work of application – which may also include an analysis of the history of reception (though I think it is risky to apply that too soon in the process).
So, if the question is: How do I validate an interpretation?, then we have to fix a meaning somewhere. I think the only valid place to do that turns out to be authorial intention. The alternatives carry greater risks. The challenge question back to those who do not go with authorial question is, of course: How do you validate the disparate readings? What criteria do you use and how do you validate them?
Posts: 2826 | From: London, UK | Registered: Apr 2006
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Dafyd
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Posted
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Originally posted by Nigel M:
quote:
Originally posted by Dafyd:
The sense in which words mean something is distinct from the sense in which non-linguistic actions mean something.
What non-verbals do do, though, is show why texts are inert; humans infer intention from things other than texts, so there is no requirement to view texts are holding a meaning, or intention, in the absence of human interaction.
The point here is that you deny texts are a special category of human action. And that is to deny that texts are anything other than their material records.
Someone, Charles Baskerville, leaves a trail of footprints. From this Sherlock Holmes might be able to infer their intentions. Someone else, Dr Watson, fearing that the evidence will be lost makes a copy of the trail of footprints. Now, this is not self-identical to the first walker's trail. It's a different set of footprints. Now Sherlock Holmes might be able to infer that Dr Watson's intention was to copy Charles Baskerville. And based on that he might be able to infer at one remove Charles Baskerville's intentions. But the maker of the marks is still Watson. Watson is the author.
So: on this model, the author of the Bible you have in your hand is the printer, the person who caused the marks to be made. You may infer that their intention was to copy the marks made by the editors of whatever translation you're using, and that the editors of whatever translation were intending to translate marks made by some other scribe, and so on, back to Paul. But the point is that you're not directly interacting with anything Paul created. Only if texts have some special status, bearing meaning, can you interact directly with the bearer of Paul's meaning.
That's just one consequence of not granting texts special status as bearers of meaning.
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It is not impossible to compile a dictionary of (non-verbal) gestures. The Highway Code (in the UK) has images of authorised persons gesturing and an explanation of what those gestures mean.
I would say that those gestures are then in a broad sense textual. That is, they have assigned meaning independent of the immediate instance of use. (As you say below they are not non-linguistic.)
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But even allowing for all that, with the world of biblical interpretation we are operating in a written environment where non-verbal cues are absent. They can only be irrelevant, therefore, for a hermeneutic.
The reason I bring them up is to show that verbal and para-linguistic cues are different in kind from non-verbal cues: that the relation of non-verbal cues to agent's intention and their ability to bear meaning is different from the ability of verbal and para-linguistic cues to bear meaning.
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quote:
Originally posted by Dafyd:
Intending to communicate something is not the same as actually communicating something.
Intending to communicate can coincide with the 'communicating something' if the two overlap – and I would suggest that this is the norm; authors communicate what they intend more often than not; the exceptions prove the rule.
In the sense in which you intend 'the exceptions prove the rule' it is false. Exceptions to a rule show that the rule doesn't apply. If meaning is authorial intention then there are no exceptions to the rule: the text would always mean what the author intended and therefore there could be no question of e.g. authorial competence.
As soon as you recognise that authorial competence might be a factor you deny the equation of meaning and intention. You may be making a different case that what should concern us is authorial intention rather than meaning.
But that is a different set of questions.
Just to add: I do wish that you would make it clear to your readers - and yourself - when you are talking about intentions in Hirsch's sense and when you are talking about intentions in the more common English usage sense. As I said last time, the two doctrines are not the same.
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The alternative would be an involuntary communication – devoid of conscious intention. That is considered abnormal. For biblical interpretation we are not dealing with this factor.
The case isn't so abnormal that we don't have words to describe the possibility or rule the possibility out, namely 'unintentional' and 'intentional'. If intentional communication were the rule we could rely on we wouldn't have the ordinary vocabulary to say so.
A trivial example: from the New Testament we can tell from the number of references to wine and the absence of references to beer that wine was a common drink. It's unlikely that the authors consciously thought about that; rather that they just took it for granted. Is that part of the intended meaning of the text?
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quote:
Originally posted by Dafyd:
If it must collapse into one side or the other that can only be if there is no overlap between the two sides. But without overlap between the two sides there is no communication.
I would say that intention can collapse into the authorial side and yet for the communicated intention to remain accessible, though there may need to be some back-and-forth between audience and author (a form of hermeneutical spiral).
This description of the process rather implies that all the initiative in the matter lies with the audience. You don't make any mention of any action that the author takes to communicate. The author just have to make their intention accessible. But intentions can be accessible without any communication.
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quote:
Originally posted by Dafyd:
Imagine trying to use the word 'cat' to mean 'to communicate' without explicitly setting up a code. You can't do it. You can't meaningfully intend a sentence to mean something if there can be no uptake of that meaning by the audience.
I think this is a different issue to dictionary use. A dictionary does not assist with the meaning of a communication above the word level.
I am not seeing that this (cut for space) addresses the point.
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I think the only valid place to do that turns out to be authorial intention. The alternatives carry greater risks.
Why do you think that the reason with one approach rather than another is the 'risks'? Either meaning is authorial intention or it isn't. Whether there are risks associated with the approach doesn't matter if the approach is wrong.
[ 25. February 2018, 21:53: Message edited by: Dafyd ]
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we remain, thanks to original sin, much in love with talking about, rather than with, one another. Rowan Williams
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