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Abstract
What is the relation between interpreting a person’s speech and actions, on the one hand, and interpreting a written text, on the other? That question is considered in connection with the theories of interpretation offered by Donald Davidson and Paul Ricoeur. There are some important similarities between those theories. However, it is argued that Davidson and Ricoeur are divided on fundamental questions about the relation between meaning and intention, about the reference of texts, about the relation between the meanings of texts and the meanings of spoken words, and about the notion of correctness that applies to interpretation. On each of these points, it is contended, Davidson has the better of the dispute.
Notes
1 Davidson, ‘A Coherence Theory of Truth and Knowledge’, in Subjective, Intersubjective, Objective (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), p. 148.
2 The recent writings in which Davidson comments directly on literature and the interpretation of texts are: ‘James Joyce and Humpty Dumpty’, in P. French, T. E. Uehling, and H. Wettstein (eds) Midwest Studies in Philosophy, 16 (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1991) (hereafter JJHD); and ‘Locating Literary Language’, in R. Dasenbrock (ed.) Literary Theory after Davidson (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1993) (hereafter LLL).
3 It does not follow from the view that a speaker’s (or writer’s) intentions are crucial to the meaning of her words that linguistic meaning can be reductively analysed in terms of speakers’ (or writers’) intentions, or that the content of these linguistic intentions can be spelled out in a way that does not employ the concept of linguistic meaning. So there is no tension between Davidson’s stress on the central role of linguistic intentions and his oft‐expressed view that the interpretation of a speaker’s words, on the one hand, and the ascription of intentions and other attitudes, on the other, are conceptually and methodologically on a level – so that neither is prior to the other. (For the oft‐expressed view see, e.g., pp. 143–4 of ‘Belief and the Basis of Meaning’, in Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984).)
4 Davidson, ‘First Person Authority’, in Subjective, Intersubjective, Objective, p. 14.
5 See LLL 305–6: ‘the intention by the originator that an utterance or writing be interpreted in a certain way is only a necessary condition for that being the correct interpretation; it is also necessary that the intention be reasonable’. And JJHD 4: ‘In speaking or writing we intend to be understood. We cannot intend what we know to be impossible; people can only understand words they are somehow prepared in advance to understand.’
6 ‘A Nice Derangement of Epitaphs’, in E. LePore (ed.) Truth and Interpretation: Perspectives on the Philosophy of Donald Davidson (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986), p. 440.
7 JJHD passim.
8 For Davidson’s remarks on these differences, see LLL 303–5.
9 ‘A Coherence Theory of Truth and Knowledge’, p. 151.
10 Paul Ricoeur, ‘The Model of the Text: Meaningful Action Considered as a Text’, reprinted in his Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences, ed. and trans. John B. Thompson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981) (henceforth MT).
11 Ricoeur himself lists four contrasts: I focus on the two most significant.
12 Ricoeur credits the point to Eric D. Hirsch, whom he quotes with approval: ‘The act of understanding is at first a genial (or a mistaken) guess and there are no methods for making guesses, no rules for generating insights’ (E. D. Hirsch, Validity in Interpretation (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1967), p. 25).
13 ‘A Nice Derangement of Epitaphs’, p. 446.
14 In fact, Ricoeur himself draws on work in the analytic tradition to make his point. He compares validating an interpretation of a text to justifying a legal interpretation, and quotes H. L. A. Hart on the non‐demonstrative character of juridical reasoning. (See MT 212–15, where Ricoeur cites Hart’s paper ‘The Ascription of Responsibility and Rights’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 49 (1948), pp. 171–94.)
15 Davidson’s quotations come from: Sigmund Freud, ‘The Interpretation of Dreams’, The Standard Edition, Vol. 4 (London: The Hogarth Press, 1958), p. 266; and Hans‐Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method (London: Sheed & Ward, 1975), pp. 275–6.
16 See also the first of the two long quotations above. Ricoeur says there that, when a human deed becomes an institution, its meaning ‘no longer coincides with the logical intentions of the actors’. That implies that a deed that has not yet become an institution (or never becomes an institution) has a meaning that does coincide with the actors’ intentions.
17 An earlier version of this paper was presented at a conference on Translation and Interpretation in Paros, in March 2006, organized by the European Centre of Translation and the Department of Philosophy and History of Science, University of Athens. I am grateful to the participants for many helpful comments.