Thursday, March 5, 2009

Postmodernism, how do we know a text means?

There was a request for a follow up where we can have an actual conversation.

This reply came from Jugulum. It was censored on Team Pyro:
CD-Host,

You said,
"The meaning doesn't reside in the comments themselves, but rather in the shared culture which allows me to predict the meaning you and they are likely to assign."

OK... I can sort of accept that there is no "inherent" meaning in the particular combination of shapes that make up the content of these comments. Nor is there inherent meaning in the sounds that they map to, if we speak the comments aloud. For communication to work--or, for me to be able to predict what meaning you will assign to my words--there has to be some "shared culture", in your terminology. At the very least, we must all be English-speakers. (But that's not all there is to it. There are other degrees of "shared culture". For instance, an isolated hill-billy will misunderstand a Brit's comment about carrying a torch onto a lift. i.e., there's lingo, jargon, slang, regional dialects, etc.)

I get that much. As far as that goes, I see merit in what you're saying.

But...

Can't we still say that my comments have an inherent meaning, based on the context of my culture? Or if you don't like that phrasing: That there is a meaning which I intend--a meaning that is graspable by anyone with access to my culture? A predictable understanding, in your terminology? That there is an authorial intent, accessible to others? (I'm not claiming that anyone will necessarily perfectly understand that intent. Our horizons of cultural understanding will never perfectly coincide. But we can approach each other.)

In fact, we could say this: Any time we try to read or hear someone else's words, we should seek to understand their culture/language. When I speak, I assume that there is a shared culture. And I expect that my listeners will pay attention to that. That they'll seek authorial intent.

If you insist that there isn't inherent meaning in the collection of symbols I put together--isn't there inherent meaning in, "Those symbols, put together by Jugulum, a 21st-century American native English-speaker"?

All of this translates to, "We should seek to use an authorial-intent hermeneutic. The better we exercise such a hermeneutic, the better we will understand. (i.e., The better we achieve shared culture, the better we will be able to predict the intended or received meaning.)"


The hope for this thread is to have an open ended discussion on this. All are welcome.

3 comments:

CD-Host said...

Jugulum --

Great questions.

Can't we still say that my comments have an inherent meaning, based on the context of my culture? Or if you don't like that phrasing: That there is a meaning which I intend--a meaning that is graspable by anyone with access to my culture?

Those are three different things. 1) An author's intended meaning

2) The interpretation that other's in your culture would assign it.

3) An inherent meaning

I'd say 1, author's intended meaning, usually exists but is inaccessible to others. The cultural interpretation usually exists in a fuzzy way. That is what makes communication possible but it is also what leads to misunderstandings. 3 an "inherent meaning" is a much more interesting question. You already get that any inherent meaning doesn't exist in the text but in the minds of the readers. What I happen to think is a good criteria for inherent interpretation is:

* A view justified based on a text.

* That this view of the text is held historically by large groups of people that read the text.

* That this view of the text doe not contradict other view of the text.

In other words meaning resides in readers and "inherent meaning" resides in history and analysis.

"We should seek to use an authorial-intent hermeneutic. The better we exercise such a hermeneutic, the better we will understand. (i.e., The better we achieve shared culture, the better we will be able to predict the intended or received meaning.)"

I'd say that's almost always true but there are key exceptions. Since you used hermeneutics, the particular case of the bible works well. Lets use the old testament. One of the key arguments between liberals and conservatives is should the Old Testament be read as a Christian book, i.e. as Paul and the Hellenistic Jewish community would have read it, or as the Hebrew/Aramaic speaking Jewish community would have read it?

Almost all conservative Christian translations side with the former position, that is against author's intent. Going for a dual fulfillment. Isaiah 7:14 being a perfect test case. No one questions Isaiah's intent, but to use "original intent" there would be to assert that Matthew is simply wrong in Matt 1:22-23.

Jugulum said...

I have some comments, but I've already spent more time on this than I should at the moment. :) I'll just ask a quick question for now.

Part of the difficulty here is ambiguity in what everyone means by "meaning residing in".

Let me put the question this way: Can we say that there is objective meaning conveyed by the text, along with the relevant cultural background? In other words, the text--considered in context of the language and cultural expectations of the speaker & original audience--has a meaning?

I realize you may want to make clarifications & tweaks to the wording of that. But is the thrust of it on-target with what you mean?

I'm asking this because I don't think that's at all how your comments were taken at TeamPyro. When you said:
"All comments are meaningless. But you are capable of assigning them meaning, as are the rest of the readers."

I think that was taken as, "Meaning is relative, and can be assigned however the readers want." Which I think is not at all what you intended.

CD-Host said...

Let me put the question this way: Can we say that there is objective meaning conveyed by the text, along with the relevant cultural background? In other words, the text--considered in context of the language and cultural expectations of the speaker & original audience--has a meaning?

It might it might not. Let me give you an example (a bit silly) using our culture.

"5y8w 8w q 53w5 o8h3" That's a string of text. I assume you found it meaningless. (pause here and verify)

Actually I just shifted up on the QWERTY keyboard for
"this is a test line". Even though you could read the characters and had cultural knowledge of QWERTY without the expanded commentary it didn't convey meaning. Once however I subtly shift your culture by showing the up trick

"qh95y34 o8h3" (which is just a shift of "another line") can be interpreted.

In other words the meaning of a text varies with each individual's cultural understanding to some degree. For most text the variance is fairly small. To talk about an "objective meaning" for a text plus a culture we have to have a text which has small variants in meaning given small variants in culture. Most texts meet this criteria.

But is the thrust of it on-target with what you mean?

Yes.

I'm asking this because I don't think that's at all how your comments were taken at TeamPyro. When you said:
"All comments are meaningless. But you are capable of assigning them meaning, as are the rest of the readers."

I think that was taken as, "Meaning is relative, and can be assigned however the readers want." Which I think is not at all what you intended.


Things that are relative are not arbitrary. Those are entirely different concepts. For example, distance is relative to velocity in space time, but it is not arbitrary. If you I know your path of motion I can determine how you will experience various distances via. simple math, even though you and I may have entirely different experiences of those distances.

And the TeamPyro stuff gets back to the other thread. The reason they were taken that way was because the clarifying comments were censored. That was deliberate. Had the conversation progressed in a natural fashion those sorts of misunderstandings would have been worked through.