The metaphor is the result of the tens10n between two terms in a metaphorical utterance. This first thesis implies a second. If a metaphor only con- cerns words because it is first produced at the level of a complete sentence, then the first phenomenon to consider is not any deviation from the literal meaning of the words, but the very functioning of the operation of predication at the level of the sentence.
What we have just called the tension in a metaphorical utterance is really not something that occurs between two terms in the utterance, but rather between two opposed interpretations of the utterance. It is the conflict between these two interpretations that sustains the metaphor.
In this regard, we can even say, in a general fashion, that the strategy of discourse by means of which the metaphoric utter- ance obtains its result is absurdity. This absurdity is only revealed through the attempt to interpret the utterance liter- ally. The angelus is not blue, if blue is a color; sorrow is not a mantle, if the mantle is a garment made of doth. Thus a metaphor does not exist in itself, but in and through an in- terpretation.
The metaphorical interpretation presupposes a literal interpretation which self-destructs in a significant con- tradiction. It is this process of self-destruction or transforma- tion which imposes a sort of twist on the words, an extension of meaning thanks to which we can make sense where a literal interpretation would be literally nonsensical.
Hence a metap. It is now possible to return to the third presupposition of the classical rhetorical conception of metaphor, the role of resemblance. This has often been misunderstood. Often it has been reduced to the role of images in poetic discourse, so that for many.
But if metaphor does not consist in clothing an idea in an image, if it consists instead in reducing the shock engendered by two incompatible ideas, '. What is at stake in a metaphorical utterance, in other words, is the appearance of kinship where ordinary vision does not perceive any relationship.
The functioning of a metaphor is here dose to what Gilbert Ryle has called a "category mistake. Two previ- ously distant classes are here suddenly brought together and the work of resemblance consists precisely in this bringing together of what once was distant.
Aristotle, thus, was correct in this regard when he said that to be at inventing metaphors was to have an eye for resemblances. But substitution is a stenle operation, whereas in a live metaphor the tension between the words, or, In this sense, a metaphor 1s an mstantaneous creation, a semantic innovation which has no status in already established language and which only exists because of the attribution of an unusual or an unexpected predicate.
Metaphor therefore is more like the resolution of. We will not recognize the specificity of this phenomenon so long as we limit our consideration to dead metaphors, which are really no I I longer metaphors properly speaking. By a dead metaphor, I mean such expressions as "the foot of a chair" or "a mountain. In such cases, the extended meaning becomes part of our lexicon and contributes to the polysemy of the words in question whose everyday meanings are thereby augmented.
There are no live metaphors in a i dictionary. Two final conclusions may be drawn from this analysis, and they stand in opposition to the last two presuppositions of the classical theory. First, real metaphors are not translatable. Th1s 1s not to say that they cannot be paraphrased, just that. A metaphor, in short, tells us some- thing new about reahty. From Metaphor to Symbol The advantage of taking up the problem of double-meaning in terms of metaphors rather than symbols is twofold.
First, metaphor has been the object of long and detailed study by rhetoricians; second, the renewal of this investigation by semantics, which takes up the structural problems left unre- solved by rhetoric, is limited to those linguistic factors that give a homogeneous linguistic constitution to the phenome- non in question.
Such is not the case with symbols. The study of symbols runs into two difficulties which make any direct access to their double-meaning structure difficult. First, symbols belong to too many and too diverse fields of research. I considered three such fields in my earlier writings. Psychoanalysis, for in- stance, deals with dreams, other symptoms, and cultural ob- jects akin to therri as being symbolic of deep psychic conflicts.
At this point we are dose to the third use of the word "symbol" by the history of religions. Thus the problem of symbols IS dispersed among many fields of research and so. The linguistic char? But the non-hngUlshc dtmen- sion is just as obvious as the linguistic one.. It is just this external complexity of symbols which accounts for my effort to clarify them in light of the theory of metaphor.
This may be done in three steps. It is first possible to identify the semantic kernel characteristic of every symbol, however different each might be, on the basis of the structure of meaning operative in metaphorical utterances. Second , the metaphorical functioning of language will allow us to isolate the non-linguistic stratum of symbols, the principle of its dissemination, through a method of contrast.
Finally, in re- turn, this new understanding of symbols will give rise to further developments in the theory of metaphor, which would otherwise remain concealed. In this way the theory of symbols will allow us to complete that of metaphor. I hypothesize that these developments will provide enough of the missing intermediary steps to allow us to bridge the gap between metaphors and symbols.
These traits are the ones that relate every form of symbol to a language, thereby assuring the unity of symbols despite their being dispersed among the numerous places where they emerge or appear. The appearance of this.. The symbol, m effect, only giVes nse to thought tf it first gives rise to speech. Metaphor is the appropriate re- agent to bring to light this aspect of symbols that has an affinity for language.
The metaphorical twist, which our words must undergo in response to the semantic impertinence at the level of the entire sentence, can be taken as the model for the extension of meaning operative in every symbol.
In the three areas of investigation cited above, for example, a symbol, in the most general sense, functions as a "surplus of significa- tion. The sea in ancient Babylonian myths signifies more than the expanse of water that can be seen from the shore.
And a sunrise in a poem by Wordsworth signifies more than a simple meteorological phenomenon. As in metaphor theory, this excess of signification in a symbol can be opposed to the literal signification, but only on ' I ' the condition that we also oppose two interpretations at the same time.
Only for an interpretation are there two levels of signification since it is the recognition of the literal meaning that allows us to see that a symbol still contains more mean- ing.
This surplus of meaning is the residue of the literal interpretation. Yet for the one who participates in the sym- bolic signification there are really not two significations, one literal and the other symbolic, but rather a single movement, which transfers him from one level to the other and which assimilates him to the second signification by means of, or through, the literal one.
Symbolic signification, therefore, is so constituted that we can only attain the secondary signification by way of the primary signification, where this primary signification.
Having ascended the ladder, we can then descend 1t. Allegory is a didactic procedure. Next, the work of resemblance characteristic of symbols can also be associated with the corresponding process in metaphors. The interplay of similarity and dissimilarity pre- sents, in effect, the conflict between some prior categorization of reality and a new one just being born.
As one au thor has put it, metaphor is an idyll with a new partner who resists while giving in. And metaphor has long been compared to stereo- scopic vision where the different concepts may be said to I come together to give the appearance of solidity and depth. In a symbol, it is true that these relations are more confused, not being as nicely articulated on a logical level. This is why we speak of assimilation rather than apprehension: the sym- bol assimilates rather than apprehends a resemblance.
Moreover, in assimilating some things to others it assimilates us to what is thereby signified. This is precisely what makes the theory of symbols so fascinating , yet deceiving.
All the boundaries are blurred- between the things as well as be- ' I I I. Later we will be able to catch hold of one of the factors operative here when we turn to the non-linguistic stratum of symbols.
Jack the key. We readily concede that a symbol cannot be exhaustively treated by conceptual language, that there is more in. For them, one must choose: either the symbol or the concept. But metaphor theory leads us to a different con- clusion. This is why the theory of symbols is led into the neighborhood of the Kantian theory of the schematism and conceptual synthesis by the theory of metaphor.
There is no need to deny the concept in order to admit that symbols give rise to an endless exegesis. If no concept can exhaust the requirement of further thinking borne by symbols, this idea signifies only that no given categorization can embrace all the semantic possibilities of a symbol. But it is the work of the concept alone that can testify to this surplus of meaning. The Non-Semantic Moment of a Symbol It now is possible to identify the non-semantic side of I I symbols, if we continue our method of contrasts, and if we iI agree to call semantic those traits of symbols which 1 lend themselves to linguistic and logical analysis in terms of signification and interpretation, and 2 overlap the corre- sponding traits of metaphors.
For something in a symbol does not correspond to a metaphor and, because of this fact, resists any linguistic, semantic, or logical transcription. And would we have religious sym- It is a bound activity, and it is the task of many d1sC1phnes to reveal the lines that attach the symbolic function to this or that non-symbolic or pre-linguistic activity. I w1ll only say that 1n psycho- analysis symbolic activity is a boundary phenomenon linked to the boundary between desire and culture, which is itself a boundary between impulses and their delegated or affective representatives.
And many psychoanalytical terms bear the mark of this double origin. The Interpretation of Dreams, for instance, introduces the concept of censorship, which expresses the repressive action of a force at the level of the production of a text, albeit a text which is first revealed as erased or disfig- ured.
Similarly, we might point to those diverse procedures Freud placed under the generic title of the "dream work. Insofar as these deep confhcts resist any reduc- tion to hngU1shc processes, yet cannot be read anywhere else than in the dream or symbolic text. Such a mixed conceptuali- zation does not betray some fault in the conceptualization of psychoanalysis, but on the contrary the exact recognition of the place where.
This brief discussion of psychoanalysis allows us to grasp one reason why the symbol does not pass over into metaphor. Metaphor occurs in the already purified universe of the logos, while the symbol hesistates on the dividing line between bios I and logos.
It is born where force and form coincide. It is more difficult to say what makes poetic language a "bound" language. As a first approximation, in fact, it is an unbound or liberated language that is freed from certain lexi- cal, syntactical, and stylistic constraints. It is freed, above all, from the intended references of both ordinary and scientific language, which, we may say by way of contrast, are bound by the facts, empirical objects, and logical constraints of our established ways of thinking.
But may we also not say, again by way of contrast, that the poetic world is just as hypothetical a space as is the mathematical order in relation to any given world? The poet, in short, operates through language in a hypothetical realm. In an extreme form we might even say that! Here a poem is.
But if it is liberated in this sense, in another sense tt 1s bound, and it is bound precisely to the extent that it. Therefore to limit ourselves to saying that a poem structures and expresses a mood is not to say much, for what is I. What binds poetic discourse, then, is the need to bring to language modes of being that ordinary vision obscures or even represses.
And in this sense, no one is more free than the poet. Finally, the symbolism of the Sacred as it has been studied, for example, by Mircea Eliade is particularly appropriate for our meditation on the rootedness of discourse in a nonseman- tic order.
Even before Eliade, Rudolf Otto, in his book, The Idea of the Holy, strongly emphasized the appearance of the i I Sacred as power, strength, efficacity. Whatever objections we!
We are warned from the very begin- nmg that we are here crossing the threshold of an experience that do:s not allow itself to be completely inscribed within the l I. The numinous element is not first a question? This power as efficacity par excellence is what does hot pass over completely into the articulation of meaning. The preverbal character of such an experience is attested to by the very modulations of space and time as sacred space and sacred time, which result and which are inscribed beneath language at the aesthetic level of experience, in the Kantian sense of this expression.
The bond between myth and ritual attests in another way to this non-linguistic dimension of the Sacred. It functions as a logic of correspondences, which characterize the sacred uni- verse and indicate the specificity of homo religiosus's vision of the world. Such ties occur at the level of the very elements of the natural world such as the sky, earth, air, and water.
And the same uranian symbolism makes the diverse epiphanies communicate among themselves, while at the same time they also refer to the divine immanent in the hierophanies of life. Thus to divine transcendence there is opposed a proximate sacred as attested to by the fertility of the soil, vegetative exuberance, the flourishing of the flocks, and the fecundity of the maternal womb. Within the sacred universe there are not living creatures I l here and there, but life is everywhere as a sacrality, which permeates everything and which is seen in the movement of the stars, the return to life of vegetation each year, and the I alternation of birth and death.
It is in this sense that symbols I are bound within the sacred universe: the symbols only come I to language to the extent that the elements of the world them- selves become transparent. This bound character of symbols makes all the d1fference between a symbol and a metaphor. The log1c of meamng, therefore, follows from the very structure of the sacred universe.
Its law is the law of correspondences, correspondences between creation in illo tempore and the present order of natural appearances and human activities. This is why, for example, a temple always conforms to some celestial model. And why the hierogamy of earth and sky corresponds to the union between male and I. Similarly there is a correspondence between the tillable soil and the feminine organ, between the fecundity of the earth and the maternal womb, between the sun and our eyes, semen and seeds, burial and the sowing of grain, birth and the return of spring.
There is a triple correspondence between the body, houses, and the cosmos, which makes the pillars of a temple and our I spinal columns symbolic of one another, just as there are I correspondences between a roof and the skull, breath and wind, etc. This triple correspondence is also the reason why thresholds, doors, bridges, and narrow pathways outlined by the very act of inhabiting space and dwelling in it correspond to the homologous kinds of passage which rites of initiation I ' I help us to cross over in the critical moments of our pilgrimage I through life: moments such as birth, puberty, marriage, and '' ' death.
Such is the logic of correspondences, which binds discourse I. And as regards the symbolism that circulates among the ele- ments of the world, this too brings into play a whole work of language. Even more, symbolism only works when its struc- 62 '. I I ture is interpreted.
But this lin- guistic articulation does not suppress what I have called the adherence to symbolism characteristic of the sacred universe I' rather it presupposes it. Interpretation of a symbolism cannot! I even get under way if its work of mediation were not legiti- II mated by an immediate liaison between the appearance and the meaning in the hierophany under consideration.
If we now bring together the preceding analyses, I am inclined to say that what asks to be brought to language in symbols, but which never passes over completely into lan- guage, is always something powerful, efficacious, forceful. Man, it seems, is here designated as a power to exist, in- directly discerned from above, below, and laterally.
The Intermediate Degrees between Symbol and Metaphor I My last remarks- as adventured and adventurous as they I I might be- render the whole enterprise of elucidating. The comparison of metaphor to an. The result 1s that when a metaphor is taken up and accepted by a linguistic community it tends to become confused with an extension of the polysemy of words.
It first becomes a trivial, then a dead metaphor. Symbols, in contrast, because they plunge their roots into the durable constellations of life, feeling, and the universe, and because they have such an incredible stability, lead us to think that a symbol never dies, it is only transformed.
Hence if we were to hold fast to our criteria for a metaphor, symbols must be dead metaphors. If not, what' makes the difference? Metaphorical functioning would be completely inadequate as a way of expressing the different temporality of symbols, what we might call their insistence, if metaphors did not save themselves from complete evanescence by means of a whole array of intersignifications.
One metaphor, in effect, calls for another and each one stays alive by conserving its power to evoke the whole network. The network engenders what we can call root metaphors, metaphors which, on the one hand, have the power to bring together the partial metaphors borrowed from the diverse fields of our experience and thereby to assure them a kind of equilibrium.
Burning Fountain, and, espectally, Metaphor and Realzty. Finally, certain metaphors are so radical that they seem to haunt all human discourse. These metaphors, which Wheelwright calls archetypes, become indistinguish- able from the symbolic paradigms Eliade studies in his Pat-.
This originary sym- bolism seems to adhere to the most immutable human manner of being in the world, whether it be a question of above and below, the cardinal directions, the spectacle of the heavens, terrestrial localization, houses, paths, fire, wind, stones, or water. If we add that this anthropological and cosmic sym- bolism is in a kind of subterranean communication with our libidinal sphere and through it with what Freud called the combat between the giants, the gigantomachy between eros and death, we will see why the metaphorical order is submit- ted to what we can call a request for work by this symbolic experience.
It partially provides through its organizational network and 1ts hierarchical levels. And, in fact, the history of words an. Numerous authors have remarked upon the kinship between metaphors and models.
This kinship play. If we adopt the distinction introduced by Frege between sense and reference-the sense being the pure predicative relation, the reference its preten- tion to say something about reality, in short, its truth value- it appears as if every discourse can be investigated in terms of both its internal organization, which makes it a message, which can be identified and reidentified, and its referential intention, which is its pretention to say something about something.
What is this referential value? It is a part of the heuristic function, that is, the aspect of discovery, of a metaphor and a model, of a metaphor as a model. In scientific language, a model is essentially a heuristic procedure that serves to overthrow an inadequate interpreta- tion and to open the way to a new and more adequate one.
In Mary Hesse's terms , it is an instrument of redescription, an expression that I will use in the remainder of this analysis. The red. This change of language proceeds from the construction of a heuristic fiction and through the transposition of the characteristics of this heuristic fiction to reality itself.
Let us apply this concept of model to metaphor. The guideline here is the relation between the two notions of a heuristic fiction and the redescription that occurs through the transference of this fiction to reality. It is this double move- ment that we also find in metaphor, for "a memorable metaphor has the power to bring two separate domains into cognitive and emotional relation by using language directly appropriate for the one as a lens for seeing the other The basis of this transfer is the presumed isomorphism between the model and its domain of application.
It is this isomorphism that legiti- mates the "analogical transfer of a vocabulary" and that allows a metaphor to function like a model and "reveal new relation- ships. In doing this both poetic and scientific language atm at a reality more real than appearances. The theory of model. Thts 15 why poetry creates its own world. In the same way that the literal sense has to be left behind so that the metaphorical sense can emerge, so I the literal reference must collapse so that the heuristic fiction can work its redescription of reality.
In the case of metaphor, this redescription is guided by the I interplay between differences and resemblances. The eclipse of the objec- tive, manipulable world thus makes way for the revelation of a 1 new dimension of reality and truth.
In speaking this way I am saying nothing more than Aristot- le said when dealing with tragedy in his Poetics. The composi- I tion of a story or a plot-Aristotle speaks here of a mythos-is.
In other words, poetry only imitates reality by recreat- ing it on a mythical level of discourse. Here fiction and rede- I scription go hand in hand. Must we not conclude then that metaphor implies a tensive use of language in order to uphold a tensi ve concept of reality? I By this I mean that the tension is not simply between words, but within the very copula of the metaphorical utterance. On one side, there is more in the metaphor than m the symbol; on the other side there is more in the symbol than in the metaphor.
There is more in the metaphor than in the symbol in the sense that it brings to language the implicit semantics of the I symbol. What remains confused in the symbol-the assimila- tion of one thing to another, and of us to things; the endless correspondence between the elements - is clarified in the tension of the metaphorical utterance.
I But there is more in the symbol than in the metaphor. Metaphor is just the linguistic procedure-that bizarre form of predication- within which the symbolic power is depo- sited. The symbol remains a two-dimensional phenomenon to the extent that the semantic face refers back to the non- semantic one.
The symbol is bound in a way that the I metaphor is not. Symbols have roots. Symbols plunge us into the shadowy experience of power. Metaphors are just the linguistic surface of symbols, and they owe their power to I relate the semantic surface to the presemantic surface in the. I depths of human experience to the two-dimensional structure of the symbol.
The final problem to be dealt with in this series of essays concerns the range of attitudes that a reader may entertain when confronted with a text. When somebody means more than what he actually says? Now we ask what is it to understand a discourse when that discourse is a text or a literary work?
How do we make sense of written discourse? To the. Just as the dialectic of event and meamng rematns tmphclt and difficult to recognize in oral discourse, that of explanation and understanding is quite impossible to identify in the dialogical situation that we call conversation. We explain something to someone else in order that he can understand. And what he has understood, he can in turn explain to a third party.
Thus understanding and explanation tend to overlap and to pass over into each other. I will surmise, however, that in explanation we ex-plicate or unfold the range of propo- sitions and meanings, whereas in understanding we com- prehend or grasp as a whole the chain of partial meanings in one act of synthesis. This nascent, inchoative polarity between explanation and understanding as it is dimly perceived in the communication process of conversation becomes a clearly contrasting duality in Romanticist hermeneutics.
Each term of the pair there represents a distinct and irreducible mode of intelligibility. Explanation finds its paradigmatic field of application in the natural sciences. When there are external facts to observe, hypotheses to be submitted to empirical verification, general laws for covering such facts, theories to encompass the scat- tered laws in a systematic whole, and subordination of empir- ical generalizations to hypothetic-deductive procedures, then we may say that we "explain.
The necessity of interpret- ing these signs proceeds precisely from the indirectness of the way in which they convey such experiences. But there would be no problem of interpretation, taken as a derivative of understanding, if the indirect sources were not indirect ex- pressions of a psychic life, homogenous to the immediate expressions of a foreign psychic life.
This continuity between direct and indirect signs explains why "empathy" as the transference of ourselves into another's psychic life is the principle common to every kind of understanding, whether direct or indirect. The dichotomy between understanding and explanation in Romanticist hermeneutics is both epistemological and on- tological.
It opposes two methodologies and two spheres of reality, nature and mind. Interpretation is not a third term, nor, as I shall attempt to demonstrate, the name of the dialectic between explanation and understanding. Interpretation is a particular case of understanding. It is understanding applied to the written expressions of life.
In a theory of signs that de-emphasizes the difference between speaking and writing, and above all that does not stress the dialectic of event and meaning, it can be expected that interpretation only appears as one province within the empire of comprehens10n or understanding.
A different distribution of the concepts of understanding, explanation, and interpretation is suggested, however, by th. Here mutual understanding relies on sharmg m the same sphere of meaning. Already in oral conversation, for exa. To under- stand the utterer's meaning and to understand the utterance meaning constitute a circular process. Then understanding, whtch 1s more duected towards the intentional unity of discourse, and explanation, which is more directed towards the analytic structure of the text, tend to become the distinct poles of a developed dichotomy.
But this dichotomy does not go so far as to destroy the initial dialectic of the utter's and the utterance meaning. As we saw in the second and third essays, this dialectic is mediated by more and more intermediary terms, but never canceled. Then the term in- terpretation may be applied, not to a particular case of under- standing, that of the written expressions of life, but to the whole process that encompasses explanation and understand- ing.
Interpretation as the dialectic of explanation and under- standing or comprehension may then be traced back to the initial stages of interpretative behavior already at work in conversation. And while it is true that only writing and liter- ary composition provide a full development of this dialectic, interpretation must not be referred to as a province of under- s!
It is not defined by a kind of object- "inscribed" stgns m the most general sense of the term- but by a kind of process: the dynamic of interpretative reading. In the begmnmg, understanding is a guess. At the end , it satisfies the concept of appropriation, which was described in the Explanation, then will appear as the mediation between two stages of understand- ing.
If isolated from this concrete process, it is a mere abstrac- tion, an artifact of methodology. From Guess to Validation Why must the first act of understanding take the form of a guess? And what has to be guessed in a text?
The necessity of guessing the meaning of a text may be related to the kind of semantic autonomy that I ascribed to the textual meaning in my second essay. With writing, the verbal meaning of the text no longer coincides with the mental mean- ing or intention of the text.
The text is mute. An asymmetric relation obtains between text and reader, in which only one of the partners speaks for the two. The text is like a musical score and the reader like the orchestra conductor who obeys the instructions of the notation.
Consequently, to understand is not merely to repeat the speech event in a similar event, it is to generate a new event beginning from the text in which the intial event has been objectified. Here perhaps my opposition to Romanticist hermeneutics is most forceful. We all know the maxim-which indeed antedates the Romantics since Kant knows and cites it 1 -to understand an author better than he understood himself.
Now even if this maxim may receive different interpretations, even if it may be retained with proper qualifications as I shall atte? His intention is often unknown to us sometimes redundant, sometimes useless, and some- time; even harmful as regards the interpretation of the verbal meaning of his work. In even the. The surpassmg of the 1ntenhon by the meaning signifies precisely that understanding takes place in a nonpsychological and properly semantical space, which the text has carved out by severing itself from the mental intention of its author.
The dialectic of erkliiren and verstehen begins here. If the objective meaning is something other than the subjective intention of the author, it may be construed in various ways. Misunderstanding is possible and even unavoidable.
The problem of the correct understanding can no longer be solved by a simple return to the alleged situation of the author. The concept of guess has no other origin.
To construe the meaning as the verbal meaning of the text is to make a guess. But, as well shall see below, if there are no rules for making good guesses, there are methods for validating those guesses we do make. We still have to say what is to be guessed by understanding. First, to construe the verbal meaning of a text is to construe It as a whole.
A work of qJscourse is more than a linear sequence of sentences. It is a cumulative, holistic process. The relation between whole and parts- as in a work of art or an animal- requires a specific kind of "judgment" for which Kant has given the theory in the Critique of Judgment.
The reconstruction of the text's architecture, therefore, takes the form of a circular process, in the sense that the presupposition of a certain kind of whole is implied in the recognition of the parts. And reciprocally, it is in construing the details that we construe the whole. The judgment of importance is itself a guess. Second, to construe a text is to construe it as an individual.
Kant, from another point of view, confirms this statement: the judgment of taste is only about individuals. This localization and individualization of the unique text 1s also a guess.
Therefore the reconstruchon of the whole has a perspectival aspect similar to that of a perceived object. A specific kind of onesidedness is implied in the act of reading. This onesided- ness grounds the guess character of interpretation. Third, the literary texts involve potential horizons of mean- ing, which may be actualized in different ways.
A few years ago I used to link the task of hermeneutics primarily to the deciphering of the several layers of meaning in metaphoric and symbolic language. I think today, however, that metaphoric and symbolic language is not paradigmatic for a general theory of hermeneutics. This theory must cover the whole problem of discourse, including writing and literary composition. Literature is affected by this extension to the degree that it can be defined in semantic terms by the relation between primary and secondary meanings in it.
The secondary mean- ings, as in the case of the horizon, which surrounds perceived objects, open the work to several readings. It may even be said that these readings are ruled by the prescriptions of meaning belonging to the margins of potential meaning surrounding the semantic nucleus of the work.
As concerns the procedures for validation by which we test our guesses, I agree with E. Hirsch that they are closer to a logic of probability than to a logic of empirical verification. And smce a text is a quasi-individual, the validation of an interpretation applied to it may be said to give a scientific knowledge of the text.
Such is the balance between the genius of guessing and the scientific character of validation, which constitutes a modern presentation of the dialectic between verstehen and erlaren.
At the same time, we are also enabled to give an acceptable meaning to the famous concept of the hermeneutical circle. Guess and validation are in a sense circularly related as subjec- tive and objective approaches to the text. But this circle is not a vicious one. That would be the case if we were unable to escape the kind of "self-confirmability" which, according to Hirsch, 3 threatens the relation between guess and validation.
But to the procedures of validation there also belong proce- dures of invalidation similar to the criteria of falsifiability proposed by Karl Popper in his Logic of Discovery. To conclude this section, if it is true that there is always! The text presents a hmtted fteld of possible constructions. From Explanation to Comprehension The preceding description of the di.
The following presentation of the same dtalechc, but in the reverse order, may be related to another polarity in the structure of discourse, that of sense and reference. As I said in the first essay, this new dialectic can be considered from one point of view as an extension of the first one. The reference expresses the full exteriorization of discourse to the extent that the meaning is not only the ideal object intended by the utterer, but the actual reality aimed at by the utterance.
But, from another point of view, the polarity of sense and reference is so specific that it deserves a distinct treatment, which reveals its fate in writing and, above all, in some liter- ary uses of discourse. The same points will hold for the coun- terparts of the theory of the text in the theory of reading.
We have seen that the referential function of written texts is deeply affected by the lack of a situation common to both writer and reader. Interpretation Theory : Discourse and the Surplus of Meaning. Paul Ricoeur. Anteprima libro ». Cosa dicono le persone - Scrivi una recensione. Pagine selezionate Pagina del titolo. Indice analitico. Stack - - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 39 2 Interpretation Theory : Discourse and the Surplus of Meaning.
Vittorio Villa - - Etica E Politica 8 1 Whole Language and Ideologies of Meaning. Daniel Altshuler - - Natural Language Semantics 22 1 Discourse Representation Theory. Jan van Eijck - unknown. Richard E. Palmer - - Philosophy and Literature 2 1 Edward N.
Zalta - - In T. Everett eds. CSLI Publications. Miguel Vatter - - Theory and Event 12 2. Added to PP index Total views 43 , of 2,, Recent downloads 6 months 1 , of 2,, How can I increase my downloads?
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