[E. Albright]

Originally posted by Krsqk:
RE: Language as interpretation

E. Albright, you are exactly right. However, if something is written down, it must be interpreted in the context in which it was written.

For example, if I write a book about someone who plays with acid, it makes a major difference if I'm writing it during the 1860s or the 1960s. All language is subject to that change, although not usually in that magnitude.

Ouch. The deconstructionist in me wants to jump on this and scream bloody murder over your apparent favoring of writing over other forms of communication, but I think it'd be irrelevant (and said disconnected deconstructionist Albright parts might be extracting an interpretation from your speech that you never intended to put there, but that's not what I'm driving at...).

On the other hand, if you agree with what I'd earlier stated re: speech as a necessarily interpretive act, you subvert your argument that "it must be interpreted in the context in which it was written." If all communication is interpretive, you cannot judge something in its "real" context, unless you have firsthand experience with it [ and at this point my nascent phenomenological instincts want to scream bloody murder, 'cause your firsthand experience is still interpretive, subjective and intentional (ah, quelle joie to deal with Continental philosophy!) ], because your conception of the context is formed by the accounts of others (i.e., by other communications) and is thus naught but a subjectively interpretation...

The point that your above comment raises doesn't, IMO, go any distance to being able to redeem the notion that one can definatively know the "meaning" of a text, which is to say that it is insufficient to negate the fallacy of intentionality { i.e., the assertion that "one can, by reading a text [ and if we let Derrida have his way (as we probably shouldn't ), all communications are 'texts' ], discern with certainty the message that the author intended to communicate" is ultimately indefensible }.

The gist of the above critical babbling is that, even if one "[ interprets a work ] in the context in which it was written", one cannot hope to state authoritatively that one is interpreting it "literally". The idea of iterpreting something "literally" suggests that there is a single, definate and correct way to interpret any given work, and hélas, there is no way to justify this assertion...

(Yes, it's good to try to take a work's historical context into account. But this doesn't grant the interpreter a magical looking-glass with which to discern the "true" meaning of the work. Rather, it allows the interpretation of the work to be more consistent with the interpretation of other works derived from the same context...)

E. Albright
(An obviously less-than-completely reformed former deconstructionist)

[ Edit: typing errors ]

[ December 16, 2002, 13:53: Message edited by: E. Albright ]