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.To avoid dissolving the text into a thousandcompeting readings, he appeals to certain 'interpretative strategies' whichreaders have in common, and which will govern their personal responses.Not any old reading response will do: the readers in question are 'informedor at-home' readers bred in the academic institutions, whose responses arethus unlikely to prove too wildly divergent from each other to forestall allreasoned debate.He is, however, insistent that there is nothing whatsoever'in' the work itself that the whole idea of meaning being somehow 'im-manent' in the text's language, awaiting its release by the readers' inter-pretation, is an objectivist illusion.It is to this illusion, he considers,that Wolfgang Iser has fallen prey.The argument between Fish and Iser is to some extent a verbal one.Fishis quite right to claim that nothing, in literature or the world at large, isPhenomenology, Hermeneutics, Reception Theory 75'given' or 'determinate', ifby that is meant 'non-interpreted'.There are no'brute' facts, independent of human meanings; there are no facts that we donot know about.But this is not what 'given' necessarily or even usuallymeans: few philosophers of science would nowadays deny that the data inthe laboratory are the product of interpretation, just that they are notinterpretations in the sense that the Darwinian theory of evolution is.Thereis a difference between scientific hypotheses and scientific data, though bothare indubitably 'interpretations', and the uncrossable gulf which much tra-ditional philosophy of science has imagined between them is certainly anillusion." You can say that perceiving eleven black marks as the word 'night-ingale' is an interpretation, or that perceiving something as black or elevenor a word is an interpretation, and you would be right; but if in mostcircumstances you read those marks to mean 'nightgown' you would bewrong.An interpretation on which everyone is likely to agree is one way ofdefining a fact.It is less easy to show that interpretations of Keats's 'Odeto a Nightingale' are wrong.Interpretation in this second, broadersense usually runs up against what philosophy of science calls the'underdetermination of theory', meaning that any set of data can be ex-plained by more theories than one.This does not seem to be the case indeciding whether the eleven marks I have mentioned form the word 'night-ingale' or 'nightgown'.The fact that these marks denote a certain kind of bird is quite arbitrary,a matter of linguistic and historical convention.If the English language haddeveloped differently, they might not; or there may be some language un-known to me in which they denote 'dichotomous'.There may be someculture which would not perceive these marks as imprints at all, as 'marks'in our sense, but see them as bits of black immanent in the white paperwhich have somehow emerged.This culture may also have a differentcounting-system from ours and reckon them not as eleven but as three plusan indefinite number.In its form of script, there may well be no distinctionbetween their words for 'nightingale' and 'nightgown'.And so on: there isnothing divinely given or immutably fixed about language, as the fact thatthe English word 'nightingale' has had more meanings than one in its timewould suggest.But interpreting these marks is a constrained affair, becausethe marks are often used by people in their social practices of communica-tion in certain ways, and these practical social uses arethe various meaningsof the word.When I identify the word in a literary text, these social practicesdo not simply drop away.I may well come to feel after reading the work thatthe word now means something quite different, that it denotes 'dichoto-mous' rather than a kind of bird, because of the transformed context of76 Phenomenology, Hermeneutics, Reception Theorymeanings into which it has been inserted.But identifying the word in thefirst place involves some sense of what its practical social uses are.The claim that we can make a literary text mean whatever we like is in onesense quite justified.What after all is there to stop us? There is literally noend to the number of contexts we might invent for its words in order to makethem signify differently.In another sense, the idea is a simple fantasy bredin the minds of those who spent too long in the classroom.For suchtexts belong to language as a whole, have intricate relations to other linguis-tic practices, however much they might also subvert and violate them; andlanguage is not in fact something we are free to do what we like with [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]