Interpretation Radical but Not Unruly: The New Puzzle of the Arts and History

Interpretation Radical but Not Unruly

Interpretation Radical but Not Unruly

The New Puzzle of the Arts and History

Joseph Margolis

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS Berkeley • Los Angeles • London

University of California Press

Berkeley and Los Angeles, California

University of California Press

London, England

Copyright © 1995 by

The Regents of the University of California

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Margolis, Joseph, 1924-

Interpretation radical but not unruly: the new puzzle of the arts and history / Joseph Margolis.

p. em.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 0-520-08769-0

1. History—Philosophy. 2. Art and history. I. Title.

D16.9.M2763 1995

901—dc20

94-15598

CIP

Printed in the United States of America

123456789

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984 G for Coco, through good years in an uneasy world continually reinterpreted

Contents

Contents

Introduction

CHAPTER 1 Reinterpreting Interpretation

CHAPTER 2 Interpretation at Risk

CHAPTER 3 Prospects for a Theory of Radical History

CHAPTER 4 Puzzles of Pictorial Representation

CHAPTER 5 Textuality and Intertextuality

CHAPTER 6 History and Fiction

CHAPTER 7 Interpretation and Self-Understanding

Notes

Index

Introduction

I

As the twentieth century comes to a close, some will see in it the edge of a conceptual revolution. Others will gather to oppose the claim. To say we are on the edge is to say its lineaments are clear enough; but also, to be a proper revolution, the themes perceived must have infected in a public way the theorizing cadre of our society well enough to produce a significant change of direction in its work and deeply enough to justify a sense of the fundamental redefinition of its problems. The second condition is not easily met, but it cannot ignore the role of interpretation.

The truth is, the revolution that is at least incipient has taken incipient form many times. It was voiced already at the beginning of Western philosophy by Protagoras. That Protagoras was cut down so quickly by Plato and Aristotle, ridiculed in fact (for no entirely satisfactory reason), does not alter the fact that the radical vision here intended has had an earlier inning (in a much different form) and that, there, it never achieved the reversal of conceptual fortune we may once again anticipate. It cannot quite fail in the way it once did, though it may never succeed in the way one dreams. It cannot utterly fail because so many of its executive themes have already been incorporated by respectable lines of professional theorizing. But it may not succeed in a grand way either, because its coopted lesser elements obscure by sheer number the supposed advantage of overthrowing the prevailing practice.

In effect, the sense of revolution has been dampened by its own piecemeal success; more curiously, the champions of each of the successive reversals of the supposed canon have characteristically pursued their own work (thus altered) as if it were a project defined by straightforwardly applying that constant canon correctly.

You may take this as an instructive fiction or a true history of twenty-five hundred years of philosophy. Either way, it offers the advantage of identifying the nerve of the complex debates of the whole of Western history. The master theme of philosophical dispute, I suggest, lies with this single question: whether reality has an invariant structure or whether it is a flux. If it is invariant, then any human aptitude for knowledge—for science, history, art, interpretation, morality, public policy, religion, education—must be governed and guided by constraints congruent with that supreme constraint; but if reality is inherently a flux—however stable it may be for inquiry, action, creativity, production, judgment, and government—then only the contingencies of human thought can determine what to make of reality and our capacity to understand ourselves and the world, and how to use both rationally for constructive purposes. There is, then, no principled demarcation between what is real and what is interpreted to be real. There you have the sense of Protagoras’ original dictum: Man is the measure. For man belongs to the flux he measures. Of course, I say this at the very start of our study. I have no right to suppose you will feel the least bit obliged to agree with me.

Over a span of twenty-five hundred years, it would be surprising if the meaning of this message had not taken a changing shape that gathered to itself the most compelling arguments it could find leading down to our own late day. I may perhaps risk, therefore, a drastic economy and declare straight out that, at the end of the twentieth century (also, foreseeably, at the start of the twenty-first), many strong philosophical currents have either embraced the following doctrines or now admit that they are, singly and conjointly, internally coherent and justified in claiming some plausibility:

1. Reality is cognitively intransparent*. that is, all discourse about the world is mediated by our conceptual schemes, and there is no way to tell whether what we claim about the world directly corresponds with what is there, in the world, independent of the conditions of inquiry;

2. The structure of reality and the structure of human thought are inextricably symbiotized: that is, there is no principled means by which to decide correctly what the mind contributes to what we take to be the world’s real structure or what the brute world contributes that makes its seeming intelligibility apt for our correctly representing whatever structure it has independent of inquiry;

3. Thinking has a history, is historicized-. that is, all the supposed fixities, invariances, necessities, universalities of thinking and the world— for instance, of logic, rationality, laws of nature, principles of judgment and conduct—are contingent artifacts of the historical existence of different human societies; there are, thus, no necessities de re or de dicto, except in the sense of so appearing under the constraint of changeable history; and

4. The structure of thinking is preformed and self-modifying: that is, whatever appears compelling or salient with regard to inquiry or reality is tacitly formed by antecedent enculturing processes that we cannot entirely fathom, though, by participating in those same processes (as we must), we alter them, alter ourselves, and alter the conditions under which those who are yet to come will be encultured.

The extraordinary thing is that 1-4 are now very nearly commonplace (which is not to deny that they are also disputed). Taken in its most extreme form, the entire set accommodates Protagoras at a stroke and actually goes beyond him. For the most distinctive mark of modernity is associated with reflecting on the singular events of the French Revolution and coming to believe that human thought and existence have an inherently historical structure that affects our very competence to decide whether whatever we take to be true or real is timelessly or objectively true or real. In this sense, the radical notion that reality is a flux may already have won the contest. But it is true enough that very few believe it deeply: very few act and think as if the world were really intransparent, as if there were no de re or de dicto necessities, or as if the salient convictions of our world were merely horizonally confined to our own small history (or a little beyond). What remains is what usually remains: the need to work out as compellingly as possible the dialectical applications of 1-4.

In this spare sense, the theory of interpretation has, in the late twentieth century, undergone changes that could constitute a large revolution of its own. In less than fifty years, all the supposed fixities of criticism in the arts and history have been strongly contested. The sense of objective rigor, so closely keyed to the themes that once dominated the theory of explanatory method in the physical sciences in the 1920s and 1930s, and, as a matter of course, were allowed to legitimate whatever might be seriously offered in the weaker disciplines (criticism and history), are now noticeably on the defensive. This is not to say that rigor is being bargained away. It is rather that it is being redefined.

In the philosophy of science, the change in conceptual orientation is quite startling. One can trace it in the early work of theorists like Gaston Bachelard and Ludwik Fleck and, closer to our own time, in Thomas Kuhn, Michel Foucault, and other historians of science—and, even more adventurously, in the recent work of Paul Feyerabend, Nancy Cartwright, Bas van Fraassen, Arthur Fine, Ian Hacking, and younger theorists. All this certainly brings us to the edge. Still, the revolution remains marginalized within university and establishment circles—even as its piecemeal themes are enthusiastically embraced.

Philosophically, nearly every would-be canon has had its effective subversives: in phenomenology, Husserl has had to give way to Merleau- Ponty and Heidegger; in hermeneutics, Emilio Betti’s masterful summary of the Romantic tradition has given way to Gadamer; Hegelianism has given way to pragmatism; Marxism, to early Frankfurt Critical theory; structuralism, to poststructuralism; positivism and the unity of science, to the work of the figures mentioned just above. Through the whole movement of Western thought, certain great subversives have always appeared. In the turn into the twentieth century, it is surely Nietzsche who is most honored in this regard. The greatest of these, across the centuries, have been the partisans of the flux. But our own late period has managed to produce a small army of freethinkers who have opposed, often irresponsibly, the presumptions of the would-be canon—and, within the space of interpretation and its theories, they have sought to reverse the vision of objective rigor that, as recently as the 1950s, was presumed to be in place in New Criticism, Romantic hermeneutics, and Francophone structuralism.

The wildest, most daring, possibly the most suicidal of these late thinkers have been the French philosophers: Derrida, Bataille, Barthes, Lyotard, Deleuze, and certain of the French feminists. The best of these is very probably Foucault, who was neither a mere wild thinker nor one to ignore the detailed connection between the newer views of the history of thinking and the strongest systematic conceptions of sci enee. In a true sense, therefore, the possibility of arriving at a comprehensive and perceptible revolution depends on the effectiveness with which the compelling subversion of the standard philosophies of science and logic may be joined to the compelling subversion of the standard theories of interpretation and history—in the name of the flux. It would not be far from the mark to suggest that, subliminally, many of the best minds of the day are busy testing that vision. It is even possible that never before has the complete subversion of the canon—of the ancient and modern canon, committed at least to the invariant structure of reality and the work of rational inquiries set to discern (said to be capable of discerning) such structures—been on the edge of being completely toppled. Doubtless, the canon will not be simply toppled. But the strengthening of the contest between these antagonists, the improved position of the partisans of the flux, is something of a surprise. I do not say the partisans will succeed—but they cannot be ignored; and philosophical honor requires that the challenge they represent be fairly met, without dismissing their charges as nonsense or illiteracy. It is in that sense that I offer the tally of claims—1-4—that I say would, if vindicated, constitute a genuine revolution in thought. That’s all.

So seen, the radical possibilities of the theory of interpretation signify á larger conceptual estate than might have been imagined. The contest lends a sense of grandeur to disputes that would otherwise seem terribly local. At any rate, this change of focus captures the spirit of the argument that follows. It is persuaded that nothing the canon once held to be beyond dispute is still conceptually safe and that the doctrine of the flux can accommodate a sense of rigor, coherence, scope, plausible detail, resilience, provisionality, humor, objectivity, and the like adequate to the best work of the canon. Furthermore, the reverse cannot be shown (so I claim): the canon (the doctrine of the invariant structure of reality) cannot make room for the best work of the defenders of the flux. It cannot regard those as anything more than risked in misguided departures from the true way. The reasons are worth identifying.

Put more directly, the new puzzles of interpretation fasten on the single question of just how to demonstrate the coherence and viability and power of understanding artworks, texts, histories, theories, the real world, human existence itself, under the condition of the flux. That argument has never been attempted in a way that rightly answers the objections of the canon’s best champions. It needs to be undertaken, since the point of the effort is to enlist the talents of a redirected imagination: to produce, if possible, a sense of reasonable transition where, before, there was only bafflement and confrontation.

In the larger picture there are perhaps two decisive figures who have dominated the continuous revision of the canon, both in our understanding of science and logic and in our understanding of history and interpretation: Aristotle and Kant. The challenge intended is, in a fair sense, directed against both—or, better, against the conceptual commitment each has been taken to have made (but perhaps never actually meant to defend in the inflexible way their champions have imagined). Nevertheless, the target of the argument that follows is directed against the official doctrines of each as well as against the presumption that the objectives usually assigned their best projects may be asymptotically approached even if they were never actually completed.

In this sense, Aristotle is the advocate of the view that reality has an essential structure, a structure that is inherently changeless, that true science is directed to its discovery and governed by whatever constraints make that possible, including whatever makes the guidance of action in a changing world rational. Aristotle’s canny caveat in the direction of the possible and the probable (for instance, in the Poetics) therefore falls under the heading of the progressive, the selfcorrective, the approximative, the verisimilitudinous. But if the first claim were defeated (that of strict invariance), then so would the second (the conformable objectives of an asymptotic science). Without the anchor of the invariant sciences, Aristotle’s tolerance of the provi- sionality of the practical disciplines (notably, in the Eudemian Ethics) would float out of principled control. The discipline of interpretation would be adversely affected as well. I speak here only of an intended strategy of argument: I claim to have established nothing substantive yet. Notice, however, that what holds for invariance and flux holds also for cognitive transparency and intransparency. For, invoking the distinction introduced in the tally offered just above, once we admit symbiosis and intransparency (1-4), it is conceptually impossible to treat cognitive conjectures as discernibly approximating more and more closely to the real structure of the independent world.

Kant, however, is the advocate of the view that reality is ultimately noumenal and that, under the conditions of phenomenal experience and reflection (known to be unable to capture the noumenal), we can nevertheless discover the strict necessities under which thought and intelligible world are uniquely constrained, constitutively and regula- tively—hence, not symbiotically—in every sector of human interest.

(The single most decisive passage that illuminates both the strength and weakness of Kant is the preface to the second edition of the first Critique.) Kant’s admission that the noumenal world is really unknowable, and his admission that he himself was dissatisfied with all his efforts at formulating those synthetic a priori truths that the inherent structure of experience was said to manifest, have hardly dampened the (rational) hope that we could make progress transcendentally either in discerning the universal structures of the phenomenal world or in discerning the necessary sui generis structures of human understanding.¹ But Kant nowhere satisfactorily explains just how, given our contingent cognitive resources, we can be sure that they harbor deeper cognitive powers that are not subject to the same vagaries that infect our contingent resources. That, ultimately, is what historicizing human thinking confirms.

In a profound sense, it is the convergence of these two still-vigorous (but failed) themes that has given the latest philosophical visions of the twentieth century their continued canonical force: for example, in Husserl, in the unity of science movement, in Habermas, in the unrelenting programs of physicalism and extensionalism so characteristic of American philosophy, in Saussurean structuralism. These are all at risk now, I claim. For the moment, I offer no supporting arguments. Whatever these visions take to be apodictic or invariant or universally binding, or progressively directed to grasping such structures, may be reclaimed in this or that more restricted context or may serve this or that more provisional interest. For example, the law of excluded middle is, as a logical principle, clearly not a necessary truth, as was once supposed (certainly by Aristotle and in the tradition that derives from Frege²); but no one would dream of disallowing, because the principle cannot be shown to be necessarily true, the regulation of at least a part of discourse and argument in accord with it.

Grant this much, and you will find yourself led to add a further dictum to our previous tally, namely:

5. The phenomena and entities of human culture are socially constituted or constructed, have no natures, have or are only histories: that is, persons and selves, artworks, artifacts, texts, actions, institutions, societies, words and sentences, and the like cannot be characterized as falling under natural kinds (as either having assignably fixed essences or behaving nomologically in ways that may be explained by reference merely to what would explain the behavior of physical things); they have only (predicatively), or are only (referentially), histories, nar- ratized careers of a distinctive sort—ordered compatibly with the arrow of physical time but subject to forms of change peculiar to themselves.

Now, 5 is the radical thesis in our pack, the one still relatively unfamiliar and uncertain, the one still uncompromisingly disputed, denied, resisted, ridiculed, ignored. Were it to be admitted to full parity with 1-4, we should have gained a long march on the revolution sketched. There would then be no doubt that we were close to the edge. The intriguing fact is that there are now strong theorists who embrace 5. Certainly, in theorizing about literary and historical interpretation, one cannot fail to find a clear advocacy of 5 in Roland Barthes, in Michel Foucault, in Harold Bloom, and also, somewhat less boldly but in a way more robustly, in the work of Hans-Georg Gadamer. There are others, of course. But in these four, it appears in a ramified, original, and decidedly influential form. This is not to accept everything any of them might say about 5. It is only to say that a very strong beginning has been made in our time to confirm the flux—even if, here and there (notably, in Gadamer and Thomas Kuhn), a certain symptomatic uneasiness about just where the doctrine leads also appears. Remember: I am merely reporting (here) the signs of the time. I am not even insisting on the adequacy of the philosophical work of these figures. (They are plainly controversial.) In any case, it is in the theory of interpretation as applied in the arts and history that the boldest gains favoring 5 have been made. It may serve to forestall misunderstanding (but not dispute) if I add a few further anticipatory distinctions here.

For one thing, I mean to speak of flux (or the flux) in a relatively uncomplicated way, as designating the reality of a world of change. In this I oppose two ancient doctrines: (a) the Parmenidean claim that change is simply unreal (Is Not); the other, (b), Aristotle’s claim that, necessarily, change is real only if it is predicable of what, among real things (ousiai), is changeless in them (predicating potencies with respect to their essences, or predicating attributes only in accord with a bivalent logic). I speak of the flux, then, only in the sense (c) that a changing world may manifest stable and discernible structures, even structures that appear not to change over time, without its being the case that their apparent invariance is a necessary feature of the world (de re) or of our discourse (de dicto).

For a second, I mean to speak of the things of the world as arti-facts or constructions in two different but compatible senses: (d) in the Kantian-like sense that the experienced world is symbiotized but only intransparently, so that one can no longer claim (with Kant) that what, disjunctively, transcendentally, the understanding mind contributes to the intelligible structure of the phenomenal world is necessarily and discernibly invariant; and (e) in the relatively uncontroversial sense in which, within the terms of (d), some things are made or produced (artworks) or appear as what is done (deeds, actions) by way of specific human agency. This again catches up a classical distinction (Aristotle’s, regarding poiesis and praxis); but its more important instruction rests with the fact that what is constructed or constituted in either or both of these senses is not for that reason unreal, fictional, heuristic, imaginary, or ideal (in the philosopher’s jargon). What is brute in the world remains acknowledged; but all postKantian thinking must come to terms with the benign paradox that what we take to be independently real (real apart from our inquiries) is itself an artifact of those symbiotized inquiries. Kant is already committed to a constructed world; against Kant, however, I read that same thesis in accord with symbiosis and the doctrine of the flux. That is what I mean by Kantian-like or post-Kantian.

Finally, I mean to treat all discourse as contextual or contexted, in the sense (f) that discourse may be said to address an intelligible world constituted by human agents who are themselves artifacts of a culture that changes and lacks necessary invariance; and (g) that, relative to any such world, discourse could never convincingly pretend to master all possible conceptual schemes pertinent to truth-claims about such a world, and cannot, relative to any conceptual scheme, uniquely fix all the referents of our truth-claims. Whatever we say, therefore, is contexted—in the deep sense that reference is logically informal and inherently affects the discernibility of truth, and that predication reflects the discursive powers we acquire only contingently in becoming the culturally apt creatures we are. My point is that contexted discourse is ineliminable, insuperably Intentional, and intrinsically interpretive.

Now, then, the gist of the argument that follows is this: if you grant these last claims, (c)-(g), together with my first themes 1-4, and then add 5 (social constructivism), the most radical theories of interpretation favored at the end of our century but often thought incompatible with acceptable standards of philosophical rigor will prove entirely coherent and viable. Furthermore, given the conceptual tastes of our age,

I doubt that these most radical theories can be convincingly resisted for long.

II

Let us, however, set aside the red flag of revolution. It is true that the items tallied—1-4—form a substantial part of the structured space of current philosophical argument, and it is true that they become increasingly radical and contested in the order in which they appear in the tally. But we may also view the puzzle of interpretation in terms of a number of smaller-gauge questions. In fact, the argument that follows rests essentially with a series of heterodox analyses of certain familiar notions: in particular, those of reference and predication, intentionality and intentionally complex properties, individuation and numerical identity, the nature of cultural entities, history and the historical past, and description and interpretation. I intend to explore all of these themes congruently with 1-4; but it will not be possible to give a full account of each. The running argument will support the view that all the linguistic distinctions mentioned—reference, reidentification, predication, interpretation—ultimately depend on a society’s consensual memory of its ongoing practices: proving that would confirm that such matters were contextually bound to a society’s historical experience in ways entirely opposed to standard views about the nature and description of physical entities. That would not be a negligible conceptual gain.

The treatment of physical and cultural phenomena would need to be reconciled, of course. So there would be a confrontation to work through. It would be seriously misrepresented, however, if it were put entirely in terms of that overworked contrast between so-called analytic and continental (or continental European) philosophy. Everyone in the philosophical community has had to come to terms with those terribly muddy epithets. One has only to recall that Frege, Carnap, Wittgenstein, Brentano, Meinong, and Husserl were at once analytic and continental philosophers and that what represents Anglo- American analytic philosophy best would be quite impossible without the contribution of these and similar thinkers.

No, the point of the contrast is to signal, obliquely, the strong programmatic disjunction between analytic philosophy thus augmented (think of Tarski, Hempel, Duhem, von Wright, and an army of others) and a loosely collected company of thinkers, chiefly contemporary , whom—quite frankly—the analysts take to be dubious as philosophers. Chief among the latter are: Heidegger, Gadamer, the Frankfurt Critical group, Lukacs, Merleau-Ponty, Sartre, Ricoeur, Derrida, Lacan, Deleuze, Lyotard, Foucault, Levinas, the French feminists, and similar-minded authors. Here and there, the harsh judgment has been attenuated. Merleau-Ponty and Foucault sometimes appear on the edge of respectability; Habermas and Apel may have made the grade. But the deeper complaint has more to do with discerning an alleged inability, among the authors mentioned, to formulate a philosophical argument. It is a fair complaint and it will have to be fairly met.

Now, the notions collected a moment ago will form the target of the intended argument. I mean to defend a series of claims about reference, predication, intentionality, identity, and the like that are particularly apt for a systematic picture of interpretation in the arts and history. Wherever possible, the account will be reconciled with what is familiarly claimed for the physical sciences; where that is not possible, a rationale will be offered to justify the departure from standard views. Even here I shall have to pick and choose: more issues will arise than may be managed in a small space. Furthermore, I shall draw quite openly on the work of the doubtful figures mentioned a moment ago. But I should like to assure you that I intend to abide by two reasonable constraints: first, that whatever I endorse of such work can be shown to be philosophically rigorous; and, second, that the rigor of the analysts and the rigor of the continentals (not their favored doctrines, of course) are, among the better specimens of each, very much the same.

Several very large themes will need to be singled out particularly: intentionality may be the most strategic and the most quarrelsome of these. I shall have to economize here as well, to confine the argument to what is strictly needed and possibly a bit more. Elsewhere, it may be enough to lay out the sense in which particular terms are to be taken, so that readers may assure themselves that they have the lay of the land. For example, it may be enough to say, to distinguish between description and interpretation, that the difference between the two is not, as such, a difference between two kinds of speech act. Interpretation is chiefly concerned with certain predicates and the conditions under which they are rightly attributed to the referents of our discourse; whereas description is thought to yield statements or assertions that take bivalent truth-values or logically weaker values, or values (accurate, precise, and the like) that are more eccentrically linked to the assignment of full-fledged truth-values. Obviously, then, interpretations may be descriptions and descriptions may or may not be interpretations. Also, we have as yet no reason to suppose that interpretation applies only to what is antecedently describable in non- interpretive ways. It is possible that statements that, for logical reasons, are interpretations may become so regularized that they are henceforth treated as descriptions. Still, on the argument being sketched, description must be interpreted at some level of analysis.

Something rather similar happens when value judgments (medical and legal judgments for instance) become so regularized that we treat the statements they subtend as factual statements. For the fact/value dichotomy is similarly a mixed classification: value judgments (moral, aesthetic, legal) are concerned with the use of certain predicates (tubercular, homicidal); factual judgments, however, are bearers of truth-values regardless of whether their predicates are normative or not. We may leave the matter there for the time being. I believe that (in saying this much) I have prepared the ground for an important gain.

Reference and predication raise more difficult questions. What needs to be grasped is that neither reference nor predication becomes conceptually more difficult (than what would hold in physical contexts) merely by invoking the complexities of the cultural world. That may not be readily perceived or conceded. I shall claim that the individuation and reidentification of all the particulars of our world depend on our context-bound practices of reference and predication; furthermore, that, if we can rely on our consensual memory regarding these matters, then it cannot be logically necessary that the natures assigned to particulars be held invariant in order to succeed at reidentifying them. The constancy of their natures (I suggest) will be a function of consensual practice, and the constancy of their identity (in the face of a change of nature) will be similarly ensured. This last suggestion will prove immensely important in developing the account of interpretation that follows. For the moment, I insist only that it is a coherent—and neglected—possibility. It is, also, plainly heterodox. Thus, if it were granted, it might well signify (I take it to signify) that there is a certain insuperable indeterminacy in determinate discourse itself that adversely affects every presumption of universality and invariance and that constrains consensus and communicative success in local, praxi- cal, and contexted ways that are not at all the marks of contingent ignorance. (Here, I may say, I find the strongest intellectual support in the originality of Charles Sanders Peirce and Wittgenstein and, in more historicized ways, in Marx and Foucault.)

Spelling matters out this way confirms the sense of the contest I say we cannot escape. Interpretation and history are bound to affect all the notions I collected a little while ago—if only we construe them in accord with items 1-5.

The most strenuous notion remains: that of intentionality. Fortunately, not a great deal needs to be said about the intentional or the intensional. I shall read intensional in the standard way, as signifying the nonextensional. The intensional is a feature of language initially, or at least preeminently, but not exclusively. It designates any form or structure of meaning, significance, sense, symbolic or semiotic or rhetorical or similar function or role assigned to a suitable vehicle (a sentence or semaphore signal or artwork or action or custom or text— or thoughts, if thoughts may be singled out). Such functions may not be merely structural or grammatical or syntactic in the sense that they may exhibit features that cannot be suitably analyzed in terms conformable with the constraints of the truth-functional connectives of first-order logic (for instance, as in the causal use of because or the use of the temporal prepositions before and after), or in the sense that they cannot be said simply to collect the semantic and pragmatic aspects of speech and related communicative vehicles disjoined from or added to an antecedently specified syntax. The intentional may be read, again more or less standardly, in the sense of aboutness developed by Brentano and improved by Husserl. I shall use it more in the Husserlian than the Brentanoesque sense, that is, as more concerned with the significative (or intentional or noematic) structure of a propositional attitude (desiring, believing, or the like) than as concerned with so-called intentional (or inexistent) objects of particular mental states (as in the fear of horses). The intentional is initially, or preeminently, a mental or psychological attribute or an attribute applied to thinking or cognitive activity, but not exclusively. The intensional and the intentional are quite distinct: each may occur without the other, though they are frequently combined, as in ordinary verbal expressions of belief. I assure you, however, that my use of these notions will be relatively standard.

I also introduce a term of art, the intentional, to designate certain further features of interpretive discourse and interpretable phenomena generally ignored in the analysis of the more familiar notions. It is not an established term linked to the usual distinctions regarding the

intentional. The Intentional (I shall say) incorporates both the intentional and the intensional insofar as they arise as features of culturally formed phenomena. The Intentional need not be confined to the mental or the linguistic (as in music, for instance, or conventional behavior). Broadly speaking, the intentional = the cultural-, it is characteristically articulated intensionally in phenomena or activities that implicate the intentional. It belongs primarily to the collective life of historical societies, and it appears as an ingredient in the properties of artworks, texts, institutions, traditions, actions, histories, theories, personal careers, linguistic utterances, customs, practices, and the like. So Intentional properties are to be regarded as real enough: they are not merely the marks of a façon de parler. I regard Intentionally qualified phenomena as inherently apt for interpretation; they are the possessors of intrinsically interpretable properties. Hence, then: intensional, intentional, and Intentional are to be used predicati vely. Accordingly, where the properties they collect are ascribed veridically, questions arise about the nature of what exhibits them, since, as we suppose, there must be some appropriate fit between referents and their attributes. Furthermore, introducing the Intentional permits me to escape the decidedly solipsistic tenor of so much of analytic philosophy—regarding both the strong treatment of the intentional in Brentano and Husserl (and among their followers) and the dominant themes of Anglo-American philosophy featuring the psychological or the biological sources of psychological or mental competence (preeminently in cognitive claims). Interpretation, therefore, will be seen to play a most strategic role in reorienting inquiry in philosophy and philosophically sensitized sciences. Plainly, if the Intentional is as ubiquitous as I suggest, then interpretive questions will arise in all forms of discourse: it will not then be possible to segregate the physical and human sciences, for instance; all the sciences will be human sciences. This gives a fair inkling of the potential scope of our topic, though I shall address that issue only obliquely. (Still, as I also say, to speak of what is real, within the terms of the flux and intransparency, is to speak interpretively.)

Realism regarding human cultures entails a realism regarding Intentional properties. There you have the principal, potentially quarrelsome, novelty on which the solution of the puzzle of interpretation rests—the one I intend. Everything depends on how the admission of the Intentional affects reference, predication, numerical identity, the nature of cultural things, the process of history, and interpretation itself. The Intentional (I say) never occurs except as inseparably embedded (incarnate) in physical or biological properties. I treat it as the interpretive feature of an indissolubly complex property—or simply as that property.

The entire argument that follows construes interpretation as addressed to the Intentional—in accord with 1-5 and under the assumption of the flux. My claim is that these conditions allow for the coherence and viability of a radical theory of interpretation and that that theory is more and more favored as we near the end of our century. The rest of the argument concerns how certain standard theories in philosophy and interpretive criticism are affected by the change considered and how broadly it may be applied.

I must also say that the argument that follows does not proceed in the manner usually favored by familiar philosophical examples. It is more oblique than that, because it means to recover the complexities of interpretation that the usual exemplars make no provision for. The indirection intended is more in the nature of a piece of tact than of a loss of discipline. It is simply impossible to find in the usual analyses of the philosophical topics mentioned—reference, reidentification, excluded middle, and the rest—sufficiently sensitive clues regarding the interpretation of paintings, historical events, individual careers, for instance, that would attract and persuade provisional practitioners of the interpretive arts in question. I am as interested in convincing the latter of the advantages of a change of interpretive model as I am of convincing philosophers that that change jeopardizes nothing that conceptual rigor would require.

As I see the matter, the single most strategic issue concerns the demonstration that discourse about the arts and history requires resources of reference and predication at variance with standard views that take physical objects as their paradigms. The actual discernible practices are the same, I am convinced, but they have been characterized in such a way as to make it extremely difficult to understand just how discourse about the arts and history could possibly function successfully if their pertinent referents did not exhibit natures very much like the natures of physical objects. What I wish to show is that these essential practices remain palpably coherent in accommodating the distinctive, even radical, possibilities of interpretive discourse. I believe the argument is widely thought to be impossible to defend. In any case, I have never seen the objections pursued in a sustained way. The question deserves an inning.

Let me add two final first qualifications. The first concerns the great scatter of views of what interpretation comes to. It is a fact that, in the philosophy of the physical sciences, the dominant tradition has long held that science aims at what is uniquely true of the independent natural world. Under conditions of relative ignorance and the absence of full evidence—perhaps ultimately irremediable—theories purporting to yield an accurate account of the world, or such an account suited to