[lit-ideas] Re: Interpretation and Elision
- From: Robert Paul <robert.paul@xxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Fri, 09 Dec 2005 12:40:16 -0800
Phil Enns wrote:
Mike Geary wrote:
"I can imagine RP responding to me thusly: all we have is our experience
of the world to go on."
Agreed.
Earlier he had written:
> Robert Paul wrote:
> "I think that my new heresy ... is simply that to assign a cause to an
> event is to give an interpretation."
> But the business of interpretation is not about causes but reasons.
In the first case, both Mike and Phil misunderstand me (although they're
free to imagine what they like). What I'm claiming is that if 'A causes
(caused) B,' doesn't express a logical connection between A and B (so
that one might say, 'The presence of A entails the presence of B'), then
'A caused B,' is our interpretation of 'Nature.' No inductive argument
will get us beyond that either.
As for the second case, my interpretation of Phil's comment on my new
heresy is that he wrote it in haste, for such syntax is unlike his usual
careful exposition. 'Interpretation deals with reasons, not with
causes,' perhaps. But this, or course, is false. The geologist, e.g., in
explaining (i.e., giving the causes of) the formation of the Grand
Canyon, is interpreting things, every bit as much as the detective who
fits 'physical' evidence into an explanatory pattern is interpreting
things. The detective and the historian and the literary critic are more
alike than they are unlike.
Let me be clear about what I'm not saying. I'm not saying that there is
no 'truth of the matter,' so that all we have are 'interpretations' of
actions and events; that is, although I'm saying the latter, I'm not
saying it because I believe there is no such thing as the truth of the
matter in particular instances or that there is no truth in general.
That would be absurd. Those who make such claims must already have in
mind some conception of truth, such that our attempts to reach it fail.
A fortiori, as Erin likes to say, they could not hold (1) We can never
reach the truth and (2) there is no such thing as truth, together,
anymore than one could intelligibly say that because no human being
could ever lift a two-ton weight unaided, there is no such thing as a
two-ton weight.
Robert Paul
The Reed Institute
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