On Interpretation

This book provides an account of interpretation which explains how two significant features of critical practice can coexist - how critical practice both tolerates a plurality of sometimes incompatible interpretations of art works and nevertheless allows that confrontation and significant defeat may take place between critics. In contrast, many of the well-known accounts of interpretation fail to do justice to these two features. The kind of defeat that is typical in criticism is defeat by a relevant counterpossibility. This sort of defeat is compatible with multiplicity; and it is available for interpretive remarks only if these remarks have a certain status - only if they are ordinary statements. In a good deal of recent theorizing about interpretation this status has been explicitly denied - but on insufficient grounds. While it is possible given this status to distinguish interpreting from describing, the various conditions offered either as individually necessary or as individually sufficient for one or the other activity are not in fact so. On the account of interpretation developed in this book, rationality and objectivity are possible in interpretive criticism.