Dear Ms. Venturella,
The only step in the direction of literature I have taken is a
paper on the notion of interpretation. I am attaching a copy.
The author you should consult is Siegfried Schmidt, who has
just retired from being the director of the "Medieninstitut"
at the University of Münster in Germany. On his website you'll
fiind a lot to study.
Best wishes,
Ernst von Glasersfeld
PS: I have just reached 90 years and am no longer teaching or
doing anything accademic..
CHAPTER 6
ON THE CONCEPT
OF INTERPRETATION
Interpretation
is a frequent term not only in
literary studies. It is used by musicians and lawyers, actors
and priests, translators and psychoanalysts, computer
scientists and diagnosticians, and some time ago, when private
airplanes began to come on the market, there appeared
publications on how to interpret clouds. It is, of course, not
unusual for a term to be borrowed by diverse professions and
then to be used with a somewhat modified meaning, or
metaphorically, or even in an unrelated way. Interpretation
is remarkable, I believe, in that the core of its meaning
has remained unaltered wherever the word was adopted. I stress
core, because subsidiary aspects have certainly been
dropped and added. To pursue these nuances would, no doubt, be
an interesting and revealing investigation in its own right,
but it is not what I intend to do here. The core itself is
complicated enough and there is little risk that I shall
exhaust it. The reason for that complexity is this: the
activity of interpreting involves experience, the coordination
of conceptual structures, and symbolic representation; that is
to say, it involves the very activities of cognition and thus,
inevitably, a theory of knowledge.
Like many nomina actionis, ‘interpretation’
designates either an activity or its results. When someone
says, “I’m not sure how to interpret what she did”, it may
mean that he sees several possible interpretations and does
not know which to choose as the most plausible; but it may
also mean that he has no interpretation because he sees no way
of constructing one. In the first case, the speaker’s quandary
pertains to the results; in the second, to the activity. In
this chapter, I shall be concerned with interpretation
as activity and only incidentally with the appropriateness or
choice of its results.
Whenever we say ‘S interprets X’, we bring
to mind a specific situation which, I would argue, is always
composed of the following elements:
1.
an active subject (S), the interpreter;
2.
an object (X) which is experienced by S;
3.
a specific activity (interpreting) carried out by S;
and
4.
the activity’s result (Y), which is not part of S’s
immediate experience of X but is linked to X by some relation
known to S.
Some, I expect, will
disagree with this schema and consider it incomplete. There is
a wide‑spread tendency to take for granted that the object X
must be an object of a special kind, an object that was
intended to be interpreted. Thus it is implicitly or
explicitly assumed that an originator or author (A)
deliberately chose or produced the object X in order to
express, convey, or communicate something else
which we may call ‘intended meaning’. Like Y, this meaning (M)
is not a constituent part of the object X; but unlike Y, which
is the result of S’s interpretive activity, M is the result of
an act of association on the part of A. This act of
association may be deliberate or habitual but, in any case, as
far as A is concerned, it turns an ordinary experiential
object, X, into a semiotic object or symbol. The addition
often seems quite innocuous because we are so accustomed to
dealing with conventional symbols.
The effects of that seemingly modest
addition are momentous: it inevitably leads to the assumption
that the result of S’s activity in (3) should be considered a
success only if Y constitutes a replication of M. If
that condition is taken as a requirement, it vitiates all
further discussion of the process of interpretation, because
it at once shifts the focus away from the question ‘How is
interpretation achieved?’ to the question whether or not the
interpreter’s result Y is an acceptable or correct
replica of the author’s intended meaning M. But since M is, by
definition, in A’s head, and Y must under all circumstances be
constructed in S’s head, there simply is no way of comparing M
and Y in order to decide whether or not they match. One
person’s thought, concepts, sensations, emotions, etc., can
never be actually compared with another’s. At best, they can
be tested for compatibility –but compatibility, no matter how
well it might be established, does not warrant the assumption
of sameness. In fact, the requirement that an
interpretation of X, in order to be considered a good or
correct interpretation, must match the meaning an
originator has associated with X, is just another
manifestation of the epistemological ingenuousness that leads
realists to the unwarranted belief that what we experience
should in some way correspond to an ontological reality and
that, if only we try hard
enough, we shall finally have a true
picture of the world as it is.[i]
Discarding the requirement of a matching
replication and putting in its place the requirement of
compatibility may, at first sight, seem to be no gain. One
might think that, in order to establish an interpretation’s
compatibility with an intended meaning, one would need as much
access to that meaning as if one wanted to produce a replica
of it. That, however, is a false impression. Compatibility is
a matter of avoiding clash, passing between
obstacles, fitting into space that is not encumbered by
the conditions that have to be complied with. The relation of
fit is essentially a negative one: within the frame of
reference, or grid, used to establish the fit, no point
occupied by the one item is occupied by the other; a match,
on the other hand, is a match precisely to the extent to which
the two items share points within the chosen frame of
reference.
The substitution of the concept of fit (and
its dynamic corollary, viability) for the
traditional concept of truth as a matching, isomorphic, or
iconic representation of reality, is the central
feature of the theory of knowledge I have called Radical
Constructivism (Glasersfeld, 1975, 1980, 1981b). This
conceptual shift has certain consequences for a theory of
interpretation. In exploring these consequences, two questions
arise at once: What constitutes fit and viability
in interpretation, and how can they be established? I
propose to examine these questions by first looking at simple
instances of interpretation that do not involve an author and
the supposition of an intended meaning.
Among the first professional interpreters
were the augurs in ancient Greece and Rome. According to their
various specializations they observed the stars, the flight of
birds, thunder and lightning, miscarriages and monsters, the
entrails of sacrificed animals, and other phenomena, and they
interpreted certain findings as omens of events to come.
Although the prediction of the future was referred to as the
discipline of mantics, or seers, it did not involve anything
we would now call a semantic code. The particular
phenomena the mantic selected were taken as symptoms (or
signs) rather than as conventional symbols. The course of all
events was believed to be predetermined by fate and the seer
simply claimed to have privileged insights into the workings
of fate. He therefore could discern connections between the
events or states he took as omens and the events or states
that were to follow. The connections between the two, however,
were neither semantic (in the modern sense), nor
causal; they were, as we would say today, merely
correlational. The Greek mantics, for example, often chose to
observe birds of prey, because, given that they soar at great
heights, they had a wider horizon and could see further.
Consequently they had information that was not yet accessible
to an earth‑bound creature. Observing them, a skilled seer
could draw more or less intuitive inferences from their
behavior and predict what lay ahead and still out of view for
the surface dweller (cf. Burckhardt, 1952, p. 502).
In terms of the schema, the mantic, S,
takes the behavior of a bird, or flock of birds, as object X
and derives from it a future event, Y. The relation on the
basis of which he interprets X as an omen pointing to Y may
lie anywhere in the continuum from experiential induction to
mystical intuition. I want to emphasize, however, that no
matter how the seer has established that relation, there is
absolutely no assumption that the birds fly in the way they
are observed to fly because some originator intended that way
of flying as an expression of the meaning a mantic
might see in it. The flight of the birds, in that classic
view, was just as predetermined by fate as everything else,
and the skilled mantic was simply one who managed to see
connections between events that remained hidden to other
mortals.
Although, today, we tend to scoff at
mantics and seers, we still accept a good many predictions
that are based on the interpretation of signs whose relation
with the predicted event is purely correlational, and some of
the signs are not very different from the flight of birds
(e.g., the recent Chinese successes in predicting earthquakes
by observing and interpreting the behavior of wild animals who
seem to know more about these events than the seismologists).
Though less animistic, much of all present know-how is
essentially still of that kind.
Pilots, mountaineers, sailors, and others
whose life may depend on the timely prediction of the weather,
will be the safer the better they interpret such atmospheric
conditions as happen to be observable. In their case, too, the
objects they interpret are signs only because experience has
shown them to be more or less reliable indicators of things to
come; that is, induction has yielded correlations,
although there is as yet nothing like a comprehensive causal
theory of atmospheric processes and developments. A mountain
guide, for instance, may interpret a certain cloud formation
as heralding the approach of a snow storm, and he might say,
“These clouds mean storm”. In any such case, however, it is
clear that the meaning is attributed by the weather-wise
observer and not by some other originator who is using the
clouds as a vehicle of expression.
Any prediction based on the interpretation
of an experiential item that is taken as a sign pointing to a
not yet experienced item, will be judged according to whether
it is or is not confirmed by actual subsequent
experience. The question of what constitutes confirmation
is an extremely tricky one because it hinges on how
well the predicted item has been specified. It involves all
the thorny problems of definition (e.g., how many drops
confirm a prediction of rain?); but in this discussion we can
shortcut all that by saying that a prediction will be
considered good if, within a stipulated time frame and in the
judgment of the people involved, a subsequent experience fits
the predictive statement. Whether such a fit can or cannot be
found is essentially an empirical question. Both the
description and the experiences to be tested are accessible to
those who must judge the fit and, though there may be
practical difficulties, the question should, in principle, be
answerable.
The situation is changed and becomes far
more complicated when the item X is taken as a sign, not
merely on the basis of the interpreter’s experience, but as
expression of a meaning given to it by an intentional
originator. In the simple examples we have so far considered,
the experiential items taken as signs, as well as the items
they were assumed to point to and the relation between them
that constituted the basis of the interpretation, were all
three within the interpreter’s field of experience and
cognitive action. In cases where there is an originator’s
intended meaning, the relation between that meaning and the
experiential item that is to function as the sign pointing to
it are within the originator’s field of experience and
conceptual action and, as such, not accessible to any
other interpreter. Nevertheless, we are firmly convinced
that we can communicate with others. There
seems to be a blatant contradiction between the claim of
communication and the apparently irrefutable
subjectivity of meaning. The contradiction, however, may be
resolved if we consider what, actually, takes place when we
communicate and, above all, what are the prerequisites of any
communication.
On the simplest technical level, Shannon’s
Theory of Communication (1948) makes it clear that meaning
does not travel from one communicator to the another. What
travels is a signal. A signal, of whatever
physical form it might be, has for the originator or source
the specific meaning he or she has encoded in it. A
receiver can decode a signal, provided two conditions
are satisfied: he must (1) recognize it as a signal, and (2)
have a specific meaning associated with it. On the technical
level, moreover, it is usually taken for granted that the
sender’s and the receiver’s codes are the same.
In the realm of
telegraphy, Morse code, and other technical signaling systems,
the ‘identity’ of the sender’s and the receiver’s codes can be
assured by simple means outside the communication
system (e.g., distributing a priori a list of permitted
signals plus their fixed meanings). In non‑technical, that is,
not deliberately designed communication systems, the
assumption of any such identity of codes and meanings
becomes precarious.[ii]
When the communication system is a natural
language, we tend to ignore that precariousness. Natural
language is learned in interactive situations, that is, in
situations where speaker and hearer are reciprocally part of
each other’s experiential field and where, therefore, there is
some feedback regarding the hearer’s interpretation of the
speaker’s utterances, as well as feedback regarding the
speaker’s expectations about the hearer’s responses.
Every child, in order to survive in its
community, must learn to interpret a great many linguistic
signals in terms of responses that are considered compatible
by the adult speakers among whom it lives. “Shut the door!”,
for instance, must be responded to with a sequence of motor
acts which has to be learned in a succession of experiential
situations, a succession which provides occasion for the
acquisition of simple but nevertheless specific skills and,
above all, occasion to experience what has to be avoided. Most
of us have been scolded at one time or another for slamming a
door when the instruction was to shut it. In time, we have
learned to shut doors so that the givers of the command are
satisfied –which is to say, we learned to adapt our
interpretation of their signal to their expectations. But that
learning was neither intuitive nor instantaneous– it required
a certain number of trials, errors, and the gradual isolation
of viable ways of responding. We would not expect a
child that grew up in igloos or tents to have acquired either
the skills to comply with that command or, indeed, the meaning
of the phrase. Though this example is extremely simple, the
principle it illustrates is fundamental to all linguistic
communication: a linguistic message, under any circumstances,
can be interpreted only in terms of the receiver’s experience.
At the beginning of the 18th century,
Giambattista Vico formulated a constructivist epistemology by
saying that humans can know only what humans can construct.
That also fits the theory of interpretation. In order to
understand a piece of language I hear or read, I must build up
its meaning out of conceptual elements which I already
possess. If I am told that a mermaid is a creature with a
woman’s head and torso and the tail of a fish, I need not have
met such a creature in actual experience to understand the
word, but I must be somewhat familiar with what is called
‘woman’ and what is called ‘fish’ to construct a
meaning for the novel word. And if I am not told that the
fish’s tail replaces the woman’s legs, I may construct a
notion that is more like a fish‑tailed biped than like the
intended traditional mermaid. My deviant notion could then be
corrected only by further interaction, that is, by getting
into situations where my conception of a creature with legs as
well as a fish’s tail comes into explicit conflict with a
picture or with what speakers of the language say about
mermaids.
Once we realize that words cannot refer to
things that exist independently of an experiencer but only to
speakers’ and hearers’ representations of experiences, it
becomes clear that communication is possible only within the
bounds of what Maturana (1980) has called a ‘consensual
domain’, that is, a domain in which the communicators
have adapted their conceptualizations to the
conceptualizations of others by a succession of interactive
experiences. The notions, concepts, representations, or
meanings of two communicators, however, can never be compared
to establish sameness –they can only be tested for
compatibility, and such compatibility as has been or can be
established will necessarily be relative, because the number
of testing situations is, in practice, always limited.
It is important to realize that the
compatibility of two items does not entail their identity.
Indeed, a demonstration of compatibility cannot even be turned
into a proof of likeness. We believe to have understood
a piece of language whenever our understanding of it remains
viable in the face of further linguistic or interactional
experience. Only a subsequent statement or speaker’s reaction
to our response can indicate to us that an interpretation we
have made is not compatible with the speaker’s intended
meaning.
The more or less permanent meanings each
one of us has established for words and phrases in the course
of acquiring a given language is the direct result of our
individual histories of interaction with speakers of that
language. Insofar as our reactions to others’ recurrent use of
a word have turned out to be and remain compatible with those
speakers’ apparent intentions, we believe to have
understood what they intended; and insofar as we have
abstracted a conceptual structure from repeated uses of a
word, that conceptual structure is, for the time being, what
we think of as its meaning. The more frequent the situations
in which our meaning of a word seems to fit a speaker’s
intention, the more we will tend to believe that it is the
conventional meaning –and almost inevitably we forget that
fit, no matter how often it might recur, does not demonstrate
that our understandings actually match a speaker’s intended
meaning. There is always a next occurrence of the word that
may show us that our understanding was a misunderstanding.
To interpret an utterance or a
written piece of language (be it a message or a text) requires
something more than the construction of its conventional
linguistic meaning. In fact, to interpret an utterance
requires the insertion of whatever we consider its
conventional meaning into a specific experiential context. In
the case of a prosaic message, this is relatively easy to see.
If a subject, S, let us say Susan, leaves her office, walks
out on the parking lot and picks up a sheet of paper on which
someone has written, ‘Thursday, November 11th, 3 p.m.’, she
will have no difficulty in understanding the words or symbols,
but she will probably be quite unable to interpret
them. They clearly specify a particular hour on a particular
day, but since she has no clue as to why that point in time is
being specified, she has no way of relating that conventional
meaning to the framework of her own experiential world. Had
she found the sheet fixed to her car in a way that she would
consider deliberate, she would search her mind for a possible
sender and a plausible interpretation in terms of an
experiential event or situation to which the message might
refer. But the sheet of paper came to Susan from
nowhere and without a pragmatic context. Hence, though she
knows what it says, she cannot tell what it is intended to
mean.
In the case of a text, the situation is
more complicated. First of all, there are different kinds of
text. If Susan, instead of a single sheet, had picked up and
read a primer or a school book of any discipline, she might
have acquired some new conceptual structures because the text
would have led her to combine conventional meanings she
already possessed in ways she had not previously combined
them. In that sense, the text could modify and expand the
range of her over‑all conceptual network. The mechanism of
such conceptual expansion is, in principle, similar to the
mechanism that enables us to acquire a concept of mermaid
without having to construct it from direct experience.
There is nothing obscure about it. It derives from the fact
that the language user comes to establish ‘conventional rules
of language’. As in the case of word meanings, the speakers of
a given language come to obey and abstract rules of word
combination as a result of their continuous interaction; and
again, any such adaptation and abstraction must be based on
the individual construction of patterns of concepts and
actions which turn out to be compatible with actions and
reactions of other users of the language.
Primers, school books, and the like,
usually declare their didactic purpose in the title, which
might say ‘Italian for Travelers’, or ‘Introduction to
Meteorology’, and they give sufficient indications as to how
the concepts they explicate are to be linked to potential
experiential situations. That is to say, they explicitly point
out what was lacking in the message on the sheet of paper,
namely, how the reader who understands the words and phrases
they contain can apply his understanding to his or her own
experiential world. And since that experiential world may at
some time come to comprise a journey to Italy or an occasion
to discuss meteorology, the conceptual structures Susan may
derive from the found text are, at least in principle, liable
to be tested for compatibility in interaction with others.
What, however, if Susan had found a novel?
Literary writings usually do not indicate their purpose. They
may, of course, have some didactic effect, but that effect is,
as a rule, considered beside the point in a discussion of
literary interpretation. If the novel Susan finds, for
instance, describes at some point someone walking in Paris,
and Susan gathers from that description how one gets from the
Pont Saint Michel to the Place Vendôme, that kind of learning
would surely be deemed irrelevant to the interpretation, let
alone evaluation, of the novel as a piece of literature. Yet,
it is far less clear whether the fact that a novel suggests to
the reader a way of dealing with a fiercely jealous spouse is
to be deemed altogether irrelevant from a literary point of
view.
Is it the author’s
didactic intention that matters? One can hardly doubt that
Ibsen wrote Ghosts to teach the public a lesson. And
while there may be little, if anything, to warrant the
assumption that Goethe published The Sorrows of Young
Werther in order to warn young men against falling in love
with married women, it would be difficult to maintain that,
when writing Faust, he did not intend to impart some
kind of wisdom. However, if we accept any such supposition
–and it might seem quite reasonable to do so– it immediately
raises a serious question: How on earth can a reader be sure
that the wise conclusions he or she draws from the text do, in
fact, constitute the wisdom the author intended to impart?
That question, needless to say, must be raised not only with
regard to wisdom but with regard to any deeper meaning
or content that is presumed to lie beyond the conventional
linguistic meaning of words and phrases.
Any proficient speaker of the language in
which a literary text is composed can be expected to
understand the words and phrases the text contains.[iii]
But that kind of understanding
(which, in principle, is equivalent to what Susan could bring
to the found message) is not the kind literary scholars have
in mind when they discuss whether or not a certain
interpretation of a text is justifiable, plausible, or
correct. I submit that whatever one might choose as the
measure of justification, plausibility, or correctness when
one is concerned with literary interpretation lies beyond the
realm of linguistic competence (which is taken for granted as
prerequisite) and involves relations one establishes between
the conceptual structures called forth by the text and the
conceptual network that constitutes one’s own experiential
world. These relations, by definition, are subjective, in the
sense that they cannot connect anything but the reader’s own
conceptual structures with the reader’s own experiential
world.
Again, there are three types of elements
involved: the conceptual structures that constitute the
linguistic understanding of the text; the over‑all conceptual
fabric that constitutes what we call our experiential world;
and the conceptual links used to connect the two. Analogous to
the way new conceptual connections are formed when we first
encounter the word ‘mermaid’ and construct a meaning
for it, reading a piece of literature may lead us to modify or
extend the conceptual fabric of our world. But whereas we can
test our concept of mermaid for viability in contexts where
others use the word, there is usually no possibility of
testing one’s interpretation of a novel or a poem for its
compatibility with the author’s intentions.
The fact that the reader has, as a rule, no
possibility of interacting with the author renders it
questionable, to say the least, whether it could ever be
established that a given interpretation of a text is right
or correct in the sense that it embodies the author’s
intended meaning. In the first place, there is no way of
establishing whether or not the text is, in fact, a viable
expression of the intended meaning. Authors, after all, have
no external reason to question the expressive adequacy of
their texts, unless they become aware of the fact that readers
interpret them in ways that are incompatible with what they,
the authors, intended. If an author does become aware of such
a discrepancy (in the contemporary scene it might, indeed, be
brought home to him by a critic’s review), he may still tend
to blame the particular reader’s insufficiency of interpretive
acumen or effort rather than his own technique or ability of
expression. (There are, I believe, few instances of authors
rewriting their literary texts because of readers’
misinterpretations.)
The question of the expressive adequacy of
a text, however, becomes almost irrelevant in the face of the
obstacles that preclude any verification of a reader’s
interpretation. If no direct interaction between reader and
author takes place, there may, of course, be some indirect
interaction, in the sense that the reader interprets other
works, comments, or explanations of the author in question.
Any such further reading may or may not lead to a modification
of the reader’s interpretation of the first work; but the
interpretation of the subsidiary readings will, as a rule, be
no less uncertain than the interpretation of the original text
–and two uncertainties do not add up to more certainty.
If, indeed, the reader consults critics’ or
other experts’ comments and explanations, this complicates the
issue, because it introduces yet another interpretive step.
What critics and experts say, again, can relate only to their
own interpretation of the author’s text and not to the
author’s intended deeper meaning. The reader thus must
interpret what they say about their own interpreting. At best,
this may lead to some consensus about how the text can
be interpreted, given the conceptual fabric that constitutes
the reader’s and critics’ experiential world. But such a
‘shared’ experiential world exists only to the extent
to which individuals have interactively established a
consensus; it cannot possibly extend to include an author who
has not participated in that interaction.[iv]
Theoretically, then, one would expect that
individuals of an interacting social group could
arrive at a consensus concerning the interpretation of a given
text. In fact, that seems to happen in certain places and at
certain times. But since whatever consensus is achieved can be
no more and no less than a relatively smooth fit of individual
actions and reactions, a consensus concerning an
interpretation does not, and cannot, imply that the
participating individuals’ interpretations have to be the
same. A consensus merely requires that the manifestations of
their interpretations are mutually compatible and do not give
rise to perceptible clashes.
Thus there would seem to be an inevitable
indeterminacy about the correctness of anyone’s
interpretation of a text. No amount of investigation of
related texts and no amount of interpreting other readers’ or
critics’ interpretations could ever establish that there is
one true meaning of a text, let alone one that matches the
author’s intended meaning. By means of direct interaction,
some interpretations may be eliminated as no longer viable,
but they cannot confer the stamp of uniqueness or correctness
on any that survive. The viability of an interpretation, after
all, can be assessed only from the interpreter’s point of
view.
This state of affairs is analogous to the
state of affairs in science. No matter how well a theory works
within the framework of scientific goals –explanation,
prediction, and control– it can never be shown to describe or
match an ontological reality, nor can it be shown to be the
only possible interpretation of the scientists’ experiences.
There is, however, an important difference. The scientist has,
as a rule, a fairly well‑defined framework of goals. He
searches for explanations with a view to predicting and
controlling experiential situations. In that respect, the
mantic (though he may have used a different methodology) is
related to the scientist, because he, too, interpreted signs
and omens in terms of experiential situations. Both he and the
scientist are judged according to how well some experience
that is subsequent to their pronouncement can be fitted into
their prediction.
By contrast, literary interpreters, though
they might be said to explain the texts they interpret,
cannot refer to subsequent experience as testing ground of
their interpretations’ viability. While the scientist’s
interpretation of experience or experiments and the mantics
interpretation of omens are, in the last analysis, always an
instrument for the management of further experience, the
interpretation of a literary text seems to be an end in
itself. The constraints within which it attempts to achieve
viability are set by the text alone and not by any external
area of experience. Hence, the quest for the
interpretation of a text turns out to be a futile undertaking.
It would seem more appropriate to consider objects of
literature, and of art in general, in the way suggested long
ago by Paul Valéry (1933):
Once published, a
text is like an appliance of which anyone can make use the way
he likes and according to his means; it is not sure that the
builder could use it better than others. Besides, he knows
well what he wanted to make, and that knowledge always
interferes with his perception of what he has made. (p. 1507)
Acknowledgement
I am indebted to Betty Jean Craige for
helpful comments on an early draft of this chapter.
