In this passage from Hirsch’s essay, “Objective Interpretation,” the author focuses on finding an actual meaning instead of a possible meaning to the text. He is particularly fond of verification and how it relates to the most probable meaning. The passage in question reemphasizes Hirsch’s dispute that “public norms of language” are sufficient to establish the meaning of a text without reference to the author’s probable intensions. (17) Hirsch uses an objective interpretation to explain his findings using the distinction between understanding and evaluation of a particular writing. Using the Verification Theory, Hirsch, as a historical critic, focused on what the text represented to the author. In his essay, Hirsch gives four criteria in order to establish that a probable meaning is possible, one that coincides with the author’s intention: legitimacy, correspondence, generic appropriateness, and coherence. (24) He insisted, “if this perspicuous meaning is not verified, in some way, it will simply be the interpreter’s own meaning.” (23) Hirsch believed …show more content…
Hirsch stated that, “The array of possibilities only begins to become a more selective system of probabilities when, instead of confronting merely a word sequence, we also posit a speaker who very likely means something. Then and only then does the most usual sense of the word sequence become the most probable or “obvious sense”. (19) In order for a critique to interpret a text properly they must adhere that the context and coherence is plausible to that of the author’s meaning. Subsequently Hirsch mentioned that, “The interpreter’s goal is simply this: to show that a given reading is more probable than others. “ (24) A genetic critique must first reconstruct the meaning and assure that all the discovered textual data points them in the right direction, towards the actual meaning and not their own subjective
The. The “Challenging Darwin”. Bioscience. 2(2005). The 'Secondary' of the 'S 101, eLibrary.
It is in this instance, and others like it that we see another example of the importance of historicity. By studying these works, we can gain insight into ancient cultures, and even hypothesize about the past. If a work is highly historically accurate in other respects, it might lead one to believe that the other accounts in the work are accurate. Through this method, we may discover some of history through works of literature, history that records may not contain. Yet through this method we can only speculate, we cannot be certain of the accuracy of our results.
The events Ellis chose to channel in his rendition of history are a series of affairs where the historical record contains a small percentage of absolute facts and a great amount of information remains merely speculative. The qualms I have with Ellis choosing to remark on such uncertain occurrences depends not on the addition of his own theories or the insertion of beliefs held by others, only that he did not always clearly outline what was the truth and what was conjecture. The fact that he did this disappointed me as I feel it is the duty of Historians to present unbiased, or as unbiased as possible, information to readers, and to be as clear as possible when sharing their
Haas and Flower then provide an example [Page 177], of the differences of a student reader and an experienced reader. The example shows a remarkable difference between the two, the student reader was able to identify the situation and paraphrased what he found out. The experienced reader not only identified the situation, but provided a theory to attempt to explain what the author was trying to do; this is quite different than what the student reader provided. I believe Haas and Flower added the example to emphasize the difference of the conclusions that the student reader and the experienced reader came to. By adding the example, Haas and Flower were also able to support rhetorical reading and the difference it made between the readers. Haas and Flower then state the following: “While the student reader is mainly creating a gist and paraphrasing, the experienced reader does this and more – he then tries to infer the author’s purpose and even creates a sort of strident persona for the writer” [Haas and Flower, 177] The following quote is basically the description of the experiment, and explains the difference in the student reader’s response to the experienced reader’s
The Chicago critic Wayne Booth in his book Rhetoric of Fiction first coined the terms reliable and unreliable narrator. These terms have been of notable importance in narratological (analysis of narratives) studies ever since Booth’s book was first published in 1961. Booth defines the reliable and unreliable narrator in the following way: “I have called a narrator reliable when he speaks for or acts in accordance with the norms of the work (which is to say the implied author’s norms), unreliable when he does not” (Booth 158-59). In other words, when a narrator expresses values and perceptions that strikingly diverge from those of the author, he is deemed to be an unreliable narrator (Olson 93). Once the narrator has been deemed unreliable, then the narrator’s unreliability will be consistent throughout the rest of the work (Booth 158).
According to Michael Polanyi, our understanding of a concept depends in part on the language we use to describe it. Connie Barlow's book, From Gaia to Selfish Genes, looks at metaphors in science as integral parts of some new biological theories. One example is Richard Dawkins' theory about the selfish gene, where he claims that the most basic unit of humanity, the gene, is a selfish entity unto itself that exists outside the realm of our individual good and serves its own distinct purpose. Dawkins looks at the evolutionary process, how DNA replicates in forming human life, and the possibility that there is a social parallel to genetics, where human traits can be culturally transmitted. Dawkins, in the excerpts that Barlow has chosen, uses heavily metaphoric language to explain these scientific concepts to the general public. However, the language that Dawkins uses, while thought provoking, also carries some negative implications that extend beyond his theory. The selfish gene theory has many positive aspects, but its metaphors detract in certain ways from the scientific message of Richard Dawkins.
reader creates “supplementary meaning” to the text by unconsciously setting up tension, also called binary opposition. Culler describes this process in his statement “The process of thematic interpretation requires us to move from facts towards values, so we can develop each thematic complex, retaining the opposition between them” (294). Though supplementary meaning created within the text can take many forms, within V...
“1.The reader response is what counts. We can’t know for sure what an author intended, and the text itself is meaningless unless a reader responds.
Finally we can say that the discussion in the class and the differences in the interpretations showed us clearly the differences between the perceptions of the readers on the same work. In the lights of the reader-oriented theories one can claim that there is no single truth or meaning derived from the text, the responses will change as the readers change.
It also tells whether we agree with the views or whether the narrator tends to propose something that is strange and
He argues that one may be able to note the intentionality but he/she may not be able to know the intention, and this makes it important to differentiate between text and discourse. Discourse is responsible for finding the intention of the text by relating its content to the extralinguistic reality. The process of relating the text to the extralinguistic reality, which is the discourse, results in the text. Widdowson thus defines discourse as “the pragmatic process of meaning negotiation” and the text as “its product” (p.8). Other scholars who distinguish between text and discourse in terms of product and process are Brown and Yule (1983). They state that “the discourse analyst treats his data as the record (text) of a dynamic process in which language was used as an instrument of communication in a context by a speaker/ writer to express meanings and achieve intentions (discourse)’ (Brown and Yule, 1983:26). It can be noted that Brown and Yule’s description of text and discourse is similar to that of
One of the aspects that causes Darwin’s essay to differ from Gould’s is the targeted audience. Writing to a particular audience certainly affects the tone used in the essay. In this case, even though Darwin and Gould both claim the validity of evolution, they aim at different readers. As illustrated in “Natural Selection,” Darwin, focusing on the doubtful audience, maintains a neutral tone, and ...
This paper will explain the process we, as humans usually follow to understand a certain text or utterance. This explanation would be achieved through the analysis of two journal articles from semantics and pragmatics perspective, taking into account a range of techniques associated with each of the two concepts including:
The description theory of meaning was proposed independently by Bertrand Russell and Gottlob Frege as a response to some of the fallacies of the reference theory. Description theorists propose that instead of being a simple ‘word - world relationship’, meaning is derived from descriptions associated with certain objects and stored in our mind (or senses in Frege’s case). Frege and Russell’s accounts of the theory differ subtly in how they view descriptions. Several objections have been made against the theory, but only the most important objections will be raised. These include Strawson’s objection to the attributive use. Also, the problems of ignorance and error raised by Kripke tarnish the description theory’s attractiveness. The Twin-Earth thought experiment is decisively refutes the theory.
During the time-period when they authored this essay, the commonly held notion amongst people was that “In order to judge the poet’s performance, we must know what he intended.”, and this notion led to what is termed the ‘Intentional fallacy’. However, Wimsatt and Beardsley argue that the intention, i.e., the design or plan in the author’s mind, of the author is neither available nor desirable for judging the success of a work of literary art. It is not available because the author will most certainly not be beside the reader when he/she reads the text, and not desirable because intention as mentioned already is nothing but the author’s attitude towards his work, the way he felt while writing the text and what made him write that particular piece of writing and these factors might distract the reader from deciphering the meaning from the text. This method of reading a text without any biographical or historical background of either the poem or the poet practiced by the New Critics was known as ‘Closed Reading’. This stemmed from their belief in the autonomy of the text.