So today, we're going to discuss literary interpretation. And as I said, start of the chorus, one of the large categories of question that is dealt with in aesthetics are questions about our understanding and our appreciation of works of art. And today, we're going to deal with one of the largest questions of sets of questions in terms of volume of philosophical material written about it, certainly. And that is understanding literary works and interpreting them.
And for better or for worse, most of the discussion of literary interpretation in the philosophical literature has focussed on what the role of the author's intentions are in determining the meaning of a literary work. Now it's important to clarify at the start that this is not a debate about whether, at least for those who think that literary works have a meaning, there's not a debate about whether the meaning of a work and what the author meant can coincide or not.
Rather, what's at issue is whether what the author means or the author's intention determines what the work means. It's a matter of whether we can use our discoveries about the author's intention as evidence or as a standard by which to test an interpretation of a work.
So that's roughly speaking, what's at issue here. And this debate really took off or is said, at least nowadays, to have taken off in 1946 with the publication of a paper entitled The Intentional Fallacy by Monroe Beardslee and William Winstead. And as the title indicates, they regarded it as a mistake to use the author's intention as a standard for literary interpretation on this view. It's not the office intention that ever determines what the literary work means.
And indeed, they later expressed his position by saying it's not evidence for an interpretation that it's gives the meaning that the author intended. And this, you can sort of understand, caused a great deal of interest because it's natural to think. I mean, maybe not anymore, but in certain contexts anyway. It's natural to think when you find an artwork puzzling or literary work puzzling that the author is trying to get something across.
The artist is trying to get something across, have a meaning in mind. And that's it's natural then to think, well, if only the artist were here, we could just ask them, what did they mean? And that would save us a whole lot of trouble if Beardslee and Wimps Out are right. That's not how you do it. Obviously, most of the time when we're looking at artwork or reading a book, the artist is not there. The thought is even if they were, that would not tell us what the work means.
And this was a very attractive view at the time, in particular because the dominant form of literary criticism was a school of criticism known as new criticism, one of whose slogans or principles was too focussed squarely on what's in the text. They had the view that previous criticism had focussed too much on the author's personality and the author's biography.
Information like this and that critics were sort of abandoning the task of criticising the work that was in front of them and instead were engaging in biography or psychology or anthropology. So it's harmonised very much with the spirit of the Times as well as presenting thesis. That's interesting for various reasons. Now, reading this paper, it is kind of difficult to see what the argument is actually when you try and pick it out.
So what I'm going to suggest is a bit of a reconstruction. I think that they present us with a dilemma in various bits of the paper. So they say, OK, well, suppose that the author's intention does determine the meaning of the work. We're left with the question of how we figure it out. There's two possibilities. Either the author succeeded in fulfilling his intention in the work or he did not. So take the case in which the authors succeeded.
If the author fulfils his intentions, then the poem in their example will show us what his intentions are. However, the implication seems. And again, it's I must say, it's not explicit. If the poem does show us what the author's intentions are, then discovering his intentions will not tell us what the poem means. The thought seems to be that it's actually the other way around. You have to first determine what the poem means to figure out the author's intentions.
In the case where the intentions are fulfilled, not discover intentions to determine what the poem means. As I say, that's my reconstruction of it. That bit of it is not explicit, but that seems to be what they mean. So that's the case in which the author fulfils his intentions. Now, let's suppose the intentions are not fulfilled. In that case, they say the poem will not be evidence of the off his intentions. And we have to go outside of the work in order to determine what the intentions were.
So to the poet's letters, diaries, interviews, things like that. But if we're going outside the poem, again, the implication seems to be that's not doing criticism. That's doing biography or journalism or what have you. It's not reading the poem anymore. It's not interpreting it anymore. So clearly, that's not discovering what the poem means. So in either case, the thought seems to be the author's intentions.
Don't tell us what the poem means. They don't make it the case that the poem means what it does. OK. So that, as I say, with a little bit of reconstruction seems to be their principal argument. Now, Beardsley, who was a philosopher, wimps that I think was a critic rather than a philosopher. But Beardsley revisited this theme a number of times later in his career and on the full version of the handout, which I'm going to post on Web Learn.
I've gone through three other arguments that he presents in his other works. I'm not going to go through all of them here, but I'll just mention one other one, because I think it gives kind of an insight into how he's thinking about this issue and also about what he sort of thing he thinks the literary work is.
So 1970, in a book called The Possibility of Criticism, Beardslee presented a number of counter examples to the claim that the author's intention or what he took to be count examples became the author's intention determines the meaning of the work. So the argument seems to be that if there can be texts with meanings that were not intended by an author, then the off his intentions do not determine textual meaning, anything. Indeed, there can be such texts.
So he says there can be meaningful texts that have no offer, such as certain typographical errors or even computer generated texts. He thinks the text that ends up being produced sometimes can be meaningful. I think he gives the example of typographical error of being filled with righteous indigestion, which you can sort of give a meaning to. It seems, he says. And any way you can imagine certain less controversial, less metaphorical, I should say, examples.
So the thought seems to be these text can have meaning with no author. Therefore, authorial intention does not determine the meaning. And even amongst offered texts, he thinks there are cases in which they have meanings that the office didn't intend. So an example that's become a bit notorious. He quotes a poem by the 18th century poet Mark Aiken, side or ACoNs side, called The Pleasures of Imagination, in which can side talks of someone raising their plastic arm.
He says this line has changed its meaning since ACON side has died because the word plastic has changed its meaning. It's now refers to this synthetic material that lots of stuff is made of. Agins I couldn't have intended this because he was dead when it changed its meaning. Therefore, authors intentions don't determine the meaning.
Third counter example he gives is that there can be even texts that are authored and the author is still alive, but which have meanings that the author is unaware of and therefore could not have intended. So double entendres are a good example here. They're embarrassing because you produced a text or an utterance or whatever that has a meaning that you weren't aware of and therefore could not have intended. OK. So those are some of Beardsley's arguments for the anti internationalist position.
But there are others and there are a number of varieties of anti intentional ism, as we'll see shortly. Gerald Levinsohn provides another argument against the relevance of the actual author's intentions and explain what I mean by that in a moment. So Levinsohn says that there are certain categories of evidence, so types of evidence that it's legitimate and other categories of evidence that it's not legitimate to expect a reader to have.
And he thinks that sometimes in order to discover on author's intention, you would need evidence that it's not legitimate to expect the reader to have. So, for example, sometimes it's possible for the author's intentions to be revealed only by private diaries, private papers, conversations that he's had with his loved ones at night.
Things like this, it's not reasonable to expect that the reader of the text an author produces would have not legitimate, I think is what he says more often to expect that a reader would have access to this evidence. Sometimes that's what you would need in order to discover on authors intentions.
So if it were the case that the meaning was determined by authors intentions, then there wouldn't be this sort of implicit contract, as he puts it, between author and reader, that certain demands are reasonable to put on the reader and certain ones are not. And the meaning of a word can't be something that you can only access by submitting to unreasonable demands of these kinds. Knowing about his private diaries, knowing about his private conversations.
OK. And that sort of thought is repeated in a number of anti intentional writings, also in the full version of the handout. I've given an argument by Joseph Raas, who's much better known as a legal and political philosopher, to the same effect. It's similar to Levinson's argument, but he adds some other points. So these are the anti essentialist criticisms of the relevance of intentions. What did they put in its place? What do they think determines the meaning of a work?
I think, broadly speaking, we can distinguish three kinds of theories that are current in the anti intentionally camp. One claim is that its conventions of various kinds. That's determine what a literary work means. So linguistic conventions, literary conventions, these sorts of things. Beardslee in wimps that don't call themselves conventional lists.
They just call themselves that the intention lists. But I think it's not misleading to categorise them this way because their positive account of what determines literary meaning is that it's determined. They put it through the syntax and semantics of the language through grammars and dictionaries are habitual knowledge of the language and the history of word use. So the history of word use may is maybe intention with classifying them as conventional list.
But otherwise that seems to be basically their view. Now they qualify their view in a number of ways, their positive account. So they point out that, of course, the author, his own use of the words in private, even in private meetings that he and his circle may attached to the words, is part of the history of those words use. And for that reason, that can be drawn upon as part of the evidence for what they mean. So the author is a member of the public like anybody else. Speaker of the language.
Like anybody else. And if the way words are used determines what they mean, then the way he uses them. And that sense can help determine what they mean. But the thought seems to be just that. That's only part of the evidence. And the fact that the author is using those words carries no special weight here. It's just part of the evidence. Part of the whole history of the use of the language. And in particular, it's not because they are there.
It's evidence of what the author intended. That it's OK to draw upon that evidence. Rather, it's because it's part of the history of the use of the word that it's OK to draw upon that evidence. And the history of the use the word it's part of what determines what the works in which that word occurs mean. And they also make the point that it's not as though either that's knowing about the author's intentions,
can't give us clues about what to look for in the text. So you might not have thought to try and find a certain meaning in a text. But learning of the author's intentions might prompt you to do so, provided that you find it and not based on the author's intentions in the way they intentionally would claim, then that's perfectly legitimate. So obvious intentions can be clues for what to look for. That's OK. But they don't determine what it means.
They don't make it the case that the text has the meaning that it does. So that's the Beardslee wimps. That's version of conventional wisdom. Levinsohn supports a view that he calls hypothetical intentional ism. I think it's accurate to describe him as an anti intentional lists. He distinguishes themselves from an intention lists. But I think really he's just distinguishing himself from himself from Beardslee here.
So he thinks, as I mentioned, that meaning can only be determined by what could be found out by someone with logit, with evidence that it's legitimate to expect them to have again. So not private conversations and diaries, for example. So he he thinks that, in fact, the meaning of a work is what would be is the intention that would be attributed to the author. The best hypothesis about what the author's intention would be that you arrive at using only evidence that it's legitimate to have.
So it's a bit like in a jury trial when the judge says to the jury, don't consider that bit of evidence because it was obtained. Legally or otherwise inadmissible. Just arrive at the decision that the admissible legal evidence supports. Now, that's. So even if the illegal evidence shows something different, that if you were to take the illegal evidence into account, you would arrive at a different verdict in the case of a court setting.
Juries are not supposed to do that. They're only supposed to consider admissible evidence, even if taking all the evidence admissible and inadmissible together would lead you to a different conclusion. Levinson thinks something similar is going on with literary interpretation, that you're only the meaning can only be what you would arrive at, a hypothesis you would arrive at about the author's intentions using only legitimate evidence.
That's why it's called hypothetical intention ism, because it might turn out the best hypothesis about what the author's intentions are that you arrive at. Using only legitimate evidence is different from what the author's intention actually is, or indeed different from the best hypothesis to write about using all the possible evidence or all even all the available evidence. Okay, it might say a little bit more about that later, but that's in summary.
His view is trying to capture the truth in the thought that the intention is relevant to determining the meaning without going so far as to say it simply does determine the meaning. Another family of A.I. intentional. Its theories have recently been dubbed value maximising theories a little bit.
It might be a little bit misleading to call them value maximising, but the basic thought common to them is that one thing that counts in favour of an interpretation excuse me is that it makes the work look good. So other things being equal to interpretations that account for all the same things equally well. But from one of which it follows that the work is good. And from the other of which it follows that the work is not so good or even bad.
In a situation like that, you go with the one that makes the work look better. From which it follows that the work is better. So it's it's not I stress the thought that it's enough that it make the work look good. That's for it to be a good interpretation. I thought just is that amongst the factors we've got to consider are whether it does make the work look good and how much weight you want to put on that and how that interacts with other factors can vary in your theory.
But that's one thing that is common to these kinds of theories. And so Joseph Rad's, as I mentioned, is a proponent of this view of literary interpretation. And so he thinks that, as he puts it, the meaning or meanings of a work are what is given by an explanation, which, as he puts it, adequately covers the significant aspects of the work, is not inconsistent with any aspect of the work,
explains those aspects of the work it chooses to focus on. And and this is the key point that makes it a value maximising very best accounts for the reasons that there are for us to pay attention to it as a work of art of its kind. Sometimes gas's this out by saying that interpretation should reveal why the work is important.
So what does he offer in favour of this view? Well, he thinks one thing in its favour is that it explains how interpretations or explicit explanations of a works meaning differ from other explanations of aspects of a work. So this is something that any theory had a distinction that any theory of interpretation had better respect. The thought is. So in his example, to illustrate that not all explanations of aspects of work, of a work are interpretations.
He says you could show that Hamlet's behaviour is perfectly consistent with the laws of physics as far as we know them. And he said this might even be a true explanation of Hamlet's behaviour. But it would not be an interpretation. It would not be an explanation of what the work means. He thinks that what makes an explanation into an interpretation of a literary work is that it gives us the reasons that there are for paying attention to Hamlet.
What's important about the play? And he thinks a second reason in favour of his view, apart from the fact that it gives us a way of marking the distinction between interpretations and other explanations, is that his view is the best explanation of how new or innovative interpretations can become possible when general truths about the world are discovered.
So he gives the example of psychoanalysis. It became very well known interpretation of Hamlet during the 20th century to interpret Hamlet's behaviour in terms of the Oedipal complex proposed by Freud. And Raas says, What? What's going on here? On one view, you could think that what's happening is that when theories like this are discovered, they reveal the meaning of the work that has been hidden all this time.
And it was only with the discovery of the theory that this meaning of Hamlet became manifest to anyone. And although he admits that sometimes the meaning of a word can be hidden for a while from everyone. In a way like that. He doesn't think it's plausible to say that the meaning of a work can be hidden from everyone in any in every case and in particular in this case, he doesn't think that's plausible. He doesn't sort of spell it out.
But the thought seems to be that it's implausible that the work could be around for so long and this meaning be completely hidden from everyone. And the support he gives for that is to say this is like supposing that there was an English word or an expression that was around for a really long time and had a meaning that was hidden from absolutely everybody who was using it. Nobody knew what the meaning was of this English word until somebody came along with a theory that suddenly revealed it.
He thinks it's analogous to that. And that's why he thinks it's implausible to suppose that, as he puts it, with psychoanalysis, we're unable to retrieve the meaning of the work, the hidden meaning of the work. His theory, he thinks, explains this. These kinds of innovative interpretations better. He thinks that with theories like psychoanalysis, what happens is that the meaning changes.
So it's not that there was a meaning there all along that became uncovered. It's that the work acquired a meaning. And the reason it acquired a meaning on his theory is that we acquired new reasons to pay attention to it with the discovery of psychoanalysis. The work became important for reasons that it hadn't been important before. With the discovery of, for example, psychoanalysis. Now he's not committing himself to the claim that the psychoanalytic interpretation of Hamlet is a sound one.
He's just using this as an example of the type of thing that he does. It is possible and he thinks this is how you explain it when it happens, that the meaning changes because our reasons to pay attention to a change and interpretations, unlike other kinds of explanation, reveal the reasons we have to pay attention to it, account for, as he sometimes puts it.
The reasons we have to pay attention to it. OK. So those are very, as I say, quick overview of a large field of theories, anti internationalist theories, the view that it's not the author's intention, but something else that determines the meaning of a work. Now, I'd like to get into some of the intentional list replies to this. So for a long time it was pretty much accepted that ASEAN centralism was right. And as far as I know in literature departments, I think that's still the dominant view.
But within at least analytic philosophy of art, there's been a lot of people opposed to anti essentialism think that there actually is some truth in the idea that the author's actual intentions determine the meaning of the work. So some of the earliest criticisms of Beardslee and Web sites article before I go into those, I should say it is a distinction you want to make here between what's sometimes called extreme, actual intentional ism and moderate actual intentional ism.
I don't know if anybody holds the view that's called extreme, actual intentional ism. This is associated with a lot of people like to use this example, Humpty Dumpty and Alice in Wonderland, who at one point says, when I say when I said just now, there's glory for you. That meant that's a nice knock down argument because I can make words mean whatever the heck I want.
This is sometimes taken to be an expression of an extreme actual intention list view, namely that being intended is just a sufficient condition of being the works. Meaning doesn't matter what the words are. Doesn't matter what the literary conventions are. None of that else matter. None of that matters. It's just if you intend it. That's what it means. End of story. That's a sufficient condition of that being what it means.
Now, as I say, I am not aware of anyone in the real world who holds this view. E.D. Hirsch is sometimes classified as an extreme actual internationalist, but I think it's demonstrably false to regard him as an extreme actual intention list for reasons I'll get to in a second. So for the most part, what we're talking about is moderate, actual intentional ism. And the variations on this view are that sometimes, yes, the author's intentions do determine what the word means.
And you might think if it does have a meaning, it always is determined by what the author's intentions are. But there are limits on which intentions of the author can become the works, meaning. So, as E.D. Hirsch himself puts it, actually the author's verbal meaning is limited by the linguistic possibilities. So there are certain meanings that the text can possibly support and on an actual intentionally set view.
It's the author's intention that if the author intends one of those meanings that the text can support, then that becomes the texts, meaning that breaks the tie, so to speak, between the range of possible meanings the text could have and b meaning it acts and determines it as meaning it actually has. OK. So that's the landscape.
Now, what are some of their replies to beardslee in Web sites criticisms. Well, early reply, important reply to Beardslee in Wims that was offered by Frank Choppy in think 1963 and Chalfie raises a number of points and takes them up on a number of the examples they gave in particular. Some of the replies he makes, it eats. So he says it's certainly true that often we continue to think that an interpretation is right.
Even when we discover that the author disavows it, he says that is a familiar phenomenon and that is familiar enough anyway. That's the sort of thing that lends credibility to the anti intentional, its view that Chalfie says that doesn't mean that the author's intention doesn't determine the meaning. All it shows is that sometimes the text is better evidence of his intention than the stuff he says after the fact.
So you've got to distinguish between what the author's telling you about what the text means or what its intention was and what his intention actually was, and what he tells you is just one bit of evidence for his intention. The text itself in some circumstances can be better evidence of what his intention was than what he tells you. And Chalfie thinks this is particularly true when the effect produced by a text is especially complex.
So he thinks in situations like this, if the author says, well, I didn't intend to have that effect, sometimes it's really not plausible to think that effect could have come about by accident and not been intended. And it's much more plausible, thank the authors, for whatever reason, self deceived or not telling the truth about what its intentions were.
In that case, the point about the complexity of effects and the unlikelihood that those could just be accidental in some cases thinks that suitcase of this kind. And second, he thinks that a. intentional ism ignores the fact that we just don't stand in the same relation to, say, a poem after we learnt that the author could not possibly have intended a certain meaning.
So Blake's famous hymn, Jerusalem, where he talks about the dark satanic mills, often taken to be a complaint against the Industrial Revolution. But apparently there's pretty conclusive evidence that Blake couldn't have been talking about industrial mills in that line when he's talking about dark satanic mills. And Chafee says, look, discovering this just just does change how we relate to the poem.
And anti intentional ism fails to capture that fact. So too choppy makes a point that would relate to what Levinson said. Although Levinson was writing much later about this matter of legitimate evidence, what we can be reasonably expected to know, he says it's not really clear where we would draw the line or what makes a piece of evidence legitimate. And Levinson, for his part, is actually quite open about this.
He says, I don't have a principled answer to the question of what makes evidence legitimate. All I mean is that there are some clear cases of illegitimate and clear cases of legitimate evidence. But Chalkie gives the example of a particularly innovative or brilliants interpretation of a work offered by a critic. And he thinks this is exactly the sort of thing that can enhance our understanding of the work that we can draw on in order to interpret it for ourselves.
But it may be something that didn't occur to anybody and wouldn't have occurred to somebody who wasn't particularly brilliant or imaginative. And the question arises, Jocky says, well, is it legitimate for us to draw on that evidence? Could we be legitimately expected to have that particularly creative, ingenious interpretation in our evidence base when interpreting the work?
He says. It's not clear that there's a good answer to that that will help people who want to appeal to the idea of legitimate evidence. So those are a few of Chaffee's points. Richard Boeheim is also quite well known for some of his responses to anti potential concerns, particularly the kind raised by Beardslee and wimps that so Boeheim says, look, beardslee in wimps out in their argument, which I described to you at the start.
Assume that if an author's intentions are not fulfilled, then they can't possibly be relevant to interpreting the work that getting into them is just doing biography. It's changing the subject. Whatever it is, it's not enhancing our understanding of the work. But Boeheim says actually there's lots of cases where, first of all, knowing that an off his intentions were unfulfilled can enhance our understanding of the work.
So Boeheim gives the example of a novel by Dostoyevsky. I think it's the idiot. But I'm not sure cheque on that in which he says the character of Prince Myshkin was intended by Dostoyevsky to be a portrayal of a perfectly good man. And Vilhelm says he failed in portraying a perfectly good man. Nevertheless, knowing that this was his intention can affect how we read the work. It can cause us to notice character traits of the work of Prince Myshkin that we wouldn't have otherwise been able to see,
or at least wouldn't have otherwise seen. So knowing of the unfulfilled intentions of the author is not as irrelevant as his main websites claim. So, too, he thinks that knowing about intentions that the author or artist originally had and then changed can also affect how we understand the work. So he gives the example of the sculptor Rodanthe, who was commissioned to do sculpture of the novelist Bozak.
Originally, he intended to make it a nude, and partway through the process he changed his mind and decided to portray Balzac as clothed. Well, Boeheim says this is the sort of thing that can give us an insight into to how Roedad sees the monumental Cees monumental sculpture. And so here's another case where that's not even an intention the author tried to fulfil in the end. The artist tried to fulfil it, but knowing about it, so says Vilhelm, can affect how we understand the work.
So those are some of the examples of the kind of counter-attack that was offered by the intense police writers. What are the views that they've developed? Well, E.D. Hirsch, I've mentioned a couple of times already, was one of the earliest, most prominent internationalists to reply to BEARDING website. And he argues that the author's intention is the only thing that can supply us with a good standard for what the meaning of a word could be.
So he says Beardslee wimps out want to say that it's the conventions of language that determine the meaning of the work. But they fail to recognise that the conventions of language permit multiple readings of virtually any sequence of words. They don't determine meaning in almost all cases, he says.
So in some of his examples, the sentence in a sentence as simple as I'm going to town today, that sequence of words, he says, well, depending on which of those words you stress, it can have a range of different meanings consistent with what the conventions of language would permit. And another example he gives, my car ran out of gas. He says, well, there's one natural way of reading this, but the conventions of language also permit you to read it as the train car emerged from a cloud of argon.
It is somewhat farfetched example and says the only reason that we go for the first reading, the normal reading that it's out of fuel is because of the reference to the author's intentions. We know they couldn't possibly have intended it to mean my train car emerge from a cloud of argon. Rather, we know they intended it to mean that ran out of fuel. The basic thought being that sequences of words can only be given a meaning by a human consciousness, as he puts it.
Conventions of language don't determine what a sequence of words can mean. And I think he must be implying here, too, that it wouldn't be plausible to think that the that every meaning that a sequence of words is permitted by the conventions to have is a meaning that it does have on this occasion. Only the author's intention can select from those meanings, it's permitted to have to provide a standard to determine the meaning.
But it does have and it gives a few other arguments, which I'll put on the full version of the handout as to why it can't be the judgement of sensitive reader and various other things that select what the meaning of the work is. Now, within the moderate actual intentional list camp, which I say it's pretty much everybody in the real world who's an essentialist, there is a division between people who think that being intended is a necessary condition of being the literary works.
Meaning. And those who don't think that. So Hirsch thinks the meaning of work is what the author intended. So that means that if it's got a meeting at all, then it was intended by the author. And this, I think it's fair to say, is no Carroll's view as well. His view, which calls modest, actual intentional ism. But you could have a different view. You could say other things sometimes can determine the meaning of a work without the author's intention.
So this is Robert Stackers view. He says sometimes the author's intention determines the meaning of the work, but sometimes. As he puts it, convention and context at the time of utterance determines the meaning of the work. If the author fails to fulfil, his intention is meaning intention. The work may still have a meaning because the conventions of language and the context may well determine.
And probably and I don't mean that he's just saying the conventions of language either conventions of literature maybe relevant to may well determine what the meaning of the work is. So you can go either way on this amongst moderate actual intention lists. OK. So, as I say, debate about role of intention, determining meaning has played a very large role in the discussion of literary interpretation.
But what's common to all of these views is the assumption that literary works have a meaning and some have doubted that. So Steinhagen Olson has argued that, well, in effect, that literary works are not the kind of things that have meaning. He tends to put this by saying it's not useful to focus on the concept of literary meaning. But I think his arguments are effectively in support of the view that there isn't such a thing.
I think his arguments, if they're successful, show that the notion, the meaning of a poem talking about the meaning of a poem or play of a novel is a kind of category mistake that poems, plays, novels are not the kinds of things that that can have a meaning anymore than an idea is the sort of thing that can be green. That's an overt category mistake. This is a subtler category at stake that we tend to fall into.
Olson thinks and he says it's very natural to talk about the meanings of metaphors, sentences, utterances, but it's distinctly odd. It would be distinctly odd to ask what is the meaning of Macbeth? So he says, if you are a student asked this question on an exam, you would be justified in complaining. You're not sure what kind of answer is being expected.
What is the meaning of Macbeth? And I think it's perhaps significant that he uses a particular example here, because we're very used to talking about the meanings of poems, meanings of novels. But when you slide in the name of a particular novel play poem, at least in one hearing, one reading it does sound a bit odd to say what is the meaning of Oliver Twist like that? What is the meaning of Macbeth in his example? Does that oddness that he uses?
That's one point. Another thing he mentions is that literary works don't have the kinds of meaning producing features that are analogous to those possessed by sentences, metaphors and utterances. So take, for example, sentence standard sort of view is that the meaning of a sentence is a function of or arises out of the meanings of the words and how they're combined. Those two factors. Words have a certain meaning combined in a certain way.
From that arises the meaning of the sentence, Olson says. It's very unclear what the analogous parts of a literary work would be or what the modes, the analogous mode of combination would be. So, as he puts it, a speaker of a language tends to be able to identify as he puts the minimal semantic unit of a sentence. So the smallest part, that's meaningful.
So you get down to the level of the word that has a meaning down to the level of a two letters at the end of the word that doesn't have meaning. That's the kind of thought. But it's not really clear how you would do that if you were trying to model literary works on sentences, at least. And so there's that's another reason to be suspicious of the claim that literary works have meanings. Now, I'm not going to stick my neck out here and sales and is right.
But I do think there's I do think his view is worth considering taking seriously. And it would be attractive and kind of convenient if it were right. Because often when debates and philosophy are very intractable, people often say, well, sometimes that's because both sides are making an assumption that's false. And so there's a certain amount of attraction to the idea that maybe that's what's going on in the debate about literary interpretation.
Both sides have wrongly assumed that literary works have meanings. And from there arises all the difficulties and confusions. Now, I don't know if that's possible because you might say, well, if they don't have meanings, they have something that's something that critics are doing. And maybe all these same problems would arise again once we recognise what that is.
So as say, they want to stick my neck out here for the truth of this theory or for the notion that it would just dissolve all these kinds of problems. But I think there's some things you can think of in favour of it. So think of the kinds of reasons that lead us say that literary works do have meanings. I think one thing that leads us to say that is that it's possible to understand a literary work. It's possible to misunderstand this. It's possible to understand it better than you did before.
But the fact that you can understand something doesn't entail that understanding. It is a matter of grasping a meaning that it has. So this is clear if you think about all kinds of contexts in which we talk about understanding something. So two people who love each other might be described as understanding each other very well. That doesn't seem to be a case of grasping the meaning of the other person. Similarly, understanding a natural phenomenon like the tides.
Something like this doesn't seem to be a case of grasping the meaning or a meaning of the phenomenon. We can talk about understanding subject matters like economics. If you understand economics or say you fail to understand economics, it's not because you fail to grasp the meaning of economics.
So the fact that it's possible to understand literary works doesn't commit us, at least the view that literary works have meanings, nor does the fact that literary works have parts or elements that themselves have meanings. Commit us to the view that literary works themselves have meanings. So the words of which they're made have meanings, sentences, let's say, have meanings, but it doesn't follow from that.
The work itself has a meaning. I've marked a lot of essays and I don't think I've ever asked anybody. What did your essay mean? I've asked people. What did you mean by this passage? Things like this or what does. What did you argue in it? But again, it does sound a bit odd. Just like in the McBeath case to ask, what does your essay mean? The mere fact it's made up of meaningful parts doesn't permit us to.
That further striking fact is that in this debate, almost invariably the examples philosophers use to support their points are not, if they're examples of the meaning of anything. Don't tend to be examples of the meaning of a work. So example Beardslee in Wimps Out discuss is whether the phrase moving of the earth in one of John Dunn's poems is about earthquakes or about the rotation of the earth.
And that's the sort of thing you might debate. But if that's a question about meaning, it's clearly not a question about the meaning of the poem. It's a question about the meaning of that phrase within the poem. Likewise. Raz talks about the meaning of the colour blue in paintings of the Madonna and Renaissance paintings, says it symbolises virginity. Well, once again, that's a case of the meaning of the colour of her cloak.
It's not a question about the meaning of the painting. And lastly, and here, I'll just go through it quickly. If you look closely at what critics do when they render a work, understandable to us, it's not plausible to construe a lot of these operations as cases of discovering the meaning of anything. So talking about the theme of a work, say if you say the theme of Othello is jealousy. Well, the theme of the work is not its meaning. You don't say Othello means jealousy.
The theme of Othello, a theme of Othello, is jealousy, but it's slurring over important distinctions to equate the theme with the meaning. Likewise, critics often postulate facts about the world of a work. To explain puzzling features of the story. So they try and figure out why Hamlet procrastinated, for example. But that's not obviously explaining the meaning of it. Now, there may be some sense in which it's trying to fill out the content of it or to explain why it has certain content.
But once again, it's not clear that this is a case of trying to discover the works meaning. And similarly, critics talk about the function of a character. So in first part of Henri, the fourth, people often say the Hotspur functions as a foil to Prince. How? Because he's hotheaded and Prince Hal is cool and calculating. OK, that's definitely what they do. And we understand it better. But it's seems very unnatural to describe that as a case of describing of explaining the meaning of Hotspur.
Explaining how he functions is not automatically a case of explaining meaning. And so to categorising or contextualising works and characters in it. Critics talk about character being of a stock type. So might describe someone as a character is a femme fatale or the braggart soldier. Things like this, again, that helps us understand it, but it's not clear that it's a matter of discovering the meaning. So as I say, I haven't thought about this enough to stick my neck out and say, all right.
Or that this is the right way to think about it. But I do think that it deserves further thought that it's received. Thanks very much.