Interpretation

13 Jun 2009 15:27

In the sense of "hermeneutics", not of "translation" (though whether there is a real distinction there is of course a disputed issue).

E. D. Hirsch, The Aims of Interpretation [An essay collection from 1976, picked up because I like his books on education and it was on sale for $2. There's a lot of sensible and valuable stuff in here, which is shockingly still relevant. (His sociological predictions about what it would take to displace New Criticism, for instance, were dead on.) But his neo-neo-Kantian arguments about how, if objects of cognition are to be "shared", we must be able to assume the same mental set, seem to me to be vulnerable on two grounds. (I am thinking about Chapters 3 and 6 particularly here.) First, as every Perl hacker knows, when it comes to information processing There's More Than One Way To Do It, with different antecedents, consequences and side-effects. Second, why should we think that any mental objects are shared, in that very strong and frankly rather mysterious sense? Wouldn't it be enough, to account for our empirical social life, if we just have highly similar mental objects, which would in any event accord better with what we know about learning? (See, e.g., Turner's Social Theory of Practices and Sperber's Explaining Culture.) That said, I think his arguments could be reformulated in less Kantian ways, to much the same effect. --- I don't know how his focus on reconstructing the author's meaning accomodates multi-author documents.]
Quine, Word and Object
Dan Sperber, On Anthropological Knowledge
Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson, Relevance: Cognition and Communication

Mark Bevir, The Logic of the History of Ideas [blurb]
Davidson, On Truth and Interpretation
Goeffrey Hawthorn, Plausible Worlds: Possibility and Understanding in History and the Social Sciences [blurb]
E. D. Hirsch, Validity in Interpretation
Klaus Krippendorff, "Measuring the Reliability of Qualitative Text Analysis Data", Quality and Quantity 38 (2004): 787--800 [Abstract: "This paper reports a new tool for assessing the reliability of text interpretations.... It responds to a combination of two challenges, the problem of assessing the reliability of multiple interpretations ... and the problem of identifying units of analysis within a continuum of text and similar representations... A computational example is included in the Appendix." Obviously, this is working at a much lower level of interpretation than is common in literary criticism, but getting reliable results here is both non-trivial, as readers of Richards's Practical Criticism should know, and crucial to getting sensible higher-level interpretations.]
William Elford Rogers, Interpreting Interpretation: Textual Hermeneutics as an Ascetic Discipline
Horst Ruthorf, Pandora and Occam: On the Limits of Language and Literature
Spinoza, Tractatus Theologico-Politicus