Episode 89: Berkeley: Only Ideas Exist!

0:08 Mark: You're listening to the Partially Examined Life, episode 189. Follow up. This is Mark Linsonmeier in Madison, Wisconsin.

0:16 Wes: This is Wes Alwan in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

0:18 Mark: So as always with these follow up discussions, we are chasing down themes that were raised in the main discussion and will sound less prepared at this point.

0:29 Wes: So let me just open up my folder. Yes. What are we talking about today?

0:36 Mark: Well, we had a couple things that maybe that we discussed discussing right now. One is to I threw out a little thing at the end about Knapp and Michaels article that I wanted to explore more deeply. And to do that I ended up reading some of this Stanford Encyclopedia philosophy entry on. It's the Foundational theories of Meaning section. But the article is just called Theories of Meaning and this is a topic that we should have an episode on. Paul Grice is a main figure here. Donald Davidson, which actually we're going to do for the next episode, has some good responses to him. Robert Brandom, there's quite a few people in this. But the idea, the question is what determines, you know, we talked about the meaning of a work of art. Well, wouldn't that be, insofar as we're talking about language, wouldn't that be dependent on your account of meaning and its relation to language itself? And so the mentalist theory, Paul Grice's theory is that we determine what a piece of language means not just by what it traditionally means, like according to the dictionary, but by the intention of the speaker. So he gives this example. Well, South Bend is not exactly New York City. So yeah, we can know what literally that means, but what the speaker probably meant there is like the restaurants aren't as good in Indiana as in New York City and a whole cluster of other snobby things about New York City. And so Grice actually thinks that speaker meeting is the primary thing that we should pay attention to. And actually it's only a matter of conventional meetings are just built out of lots of speakers meaning the same thing by the same phrase over time and that sort of sticking.

2:19 Wes: Yeah. So we should say to begin with and we'll link to this article, the Stanford article. We are focused on the foundational theories of meaning part. We actually have done a lot of shows on semantic theories where the kind of weird general results that we generally come to from those. So Frege, for instance, and Wittgenstein and others, the general kind of theory you come to involves trying to relate meanings to reference or meaning and reference and say that a meaning is just a function. It's A function that maps some description of the world onto or a property onto its object. So we don't need to go into that. But it's very abstract and theoretical and strange, frankly, I think. But the theories we're talking about with these foundational theories are. Let's see, the way Stanford puts it,

3:10 Mark: attempts to specify the facts in virtue of which expressions of natural languages come to have the semantic properties that they have.

3:16 Wes: Yeah. And so these facts are bas largely psychological and sociological. Right. For some reason I'm having trouble getting to this section here, and since you

3:26 Mark: bring it up, can you say a little more about the relationship between those two types of definition of meaning, of why you would have such a disconnect? I know that Frege, it was a big deal that he was an antipsychologist, so he specifically did not want to talk about things in the head.

3:41 Wes: Yeah, I mean, I think the first one focuses on. So the way the Stanford Encyclopedia article puts it is it assigns semantic contents to expressions of language. So, for example, this is from the Stanford section on the semantic theories. The tallest man in the world is not simply the man who happens to be tallest, but rather a function from ways the world might be to men, namely the function which, for any way the world might be, returns as a referent, the tallest man in that world, if there is one, and nothing otherwise. This fits nicely with the intuitive idea that to understand such an expression, one didn't know what the expression actually refers to. After all, one can understand the tallest man without knowing who the tallest man is, but must know how to tell what the expression would refer to, given certain information about the world, namely the heights of all men in it. This is an example of possible world semantics, but it really is just an outgrowth of what we began talking about with Frege, which was this difference between sense and reference, where you could have some description or name that you're using two different descriptions or names that refer to exactly the same thing, like the morning star and the evening star, which both refer to veen. But there's something more there to that. There's more than just the referential function. There's also the aspect under which you see it. You may not know that the morning star is the evening star. They're different things to you. They look different, they occur at different times of the day. And until you've made that connection, they might as well be referring to different things, but they don't. Ultimately, what we saw with a lot of our episodes on meaning is that meanings will be ways of in the same way as the example I just said again, mapping. Well, I don't know if that helps anymore to keep saying that, but mapping these.

5:30 Mark: Right. I'm trying to get the specific connection between the two. So it seems like the way that you just described it, you might say these foundationalist theories, meaning the way I introduced it with Grice, is a way to reconceptualize the whole problem. But it does seem like if Grice were to come along and meet Frege, then Frege would say no, no. My question is, are they just simply talking past each other or is there really a conflict that if Grice says the meaning of an expression depends on the speaker's intentions. So if the speaker says the morning star, the speaker doesn't mean the evening star. It is a fact of the world that the morning star equals the evening star. So Frege just says, okay, so fine, the sense of that is the morning star. And it actually doesn't even seem to depend on, well, does it depend on the person psychologically, meaning the morning star? Frege specifically thinks that these senses are social entities, that these are extra mental entities, aspects of something.

6:29 Wes: And philosophers still talk frequently about propositions, right? So that's a propositional semantic entity. The proposition is not just something in your head, but it's also not just the fact as a referent. It's this weird Platonic in between realm where you. It's a way to hedge the bets and say you don't know what's going on. It's like dark matter in physics is just a way not to talk about some of the difficulties associated with that or maybe think of it as a compromise. But yeah, when we talk about semantics in the previous way, we're talking about assigning these entities to expressions that are not mental, but not simply the same thing as the objects in the world. They kind of bridge, which is a way of acknowledging that predication, what we do with predication is it's relational and it's not like we can point to something in the world that expresses is that relationship. We say X is Y. That's one of the troubles of grounding all of this stuff is we can't point to the relational part of it and say, oh, that's another entity out there outside me that I can observe empirically. So the entity in a way is invisible. And it's not even helpful to think of it as in thing like terms. It doesn't behave like a thing ontologically.

7:44 Mark: So it could be that even Grice, when we're talking about foundational theories of meaning. It's not that the meaning is the thing in the person's head. It depends for its right referent on the contents of things in the head. So you could still talk about the meaning of a phrase and the meaning of the phrase could still be a phragian non mental entity. It's just which fregian non mental entity it is depends on some mental event, which I'm not sure that Frege would entirely disagree with that, you know, he doesn't really get into. So this is really the point of dispute here is for Grice it depends on a mental event. For folks responding to Grice it's more a social fact. And that really gets at the heart of what we were talking about, a literary work is the meaning of a metaphor. Say, is the correct interpretation of that metaphor depend on the fact of what was in the author's head when he wrote those words? Or does it depend on sociological facts about language?

8:47 Wes: Yeah, so we give an example of Grice and I think you're right, we could combine Grice's foundation theory of meaning or an anti intentionalist theory of meaning with any number of different semantic theories. So we could say yes, we don't want the meaning, the entities that we call meanings to simply be mental entities. They have to be these external things. But we could say, as you pointed out, that the way we get to those things, the link between expressions and those external meanings necessarily involves the intention of the person who's uttering those expressions. So that's the mentalist account. That's one of them, the most famous one. And for the non mentalist, what do we mean by social? I mean we have talked about later Wittgenstein and meaning is use. And I think that's one of the classic examples of a rival theory that's not intentionalist. So in this case the meaning of a word, most briefly in Philosophical Investigations 43, the meaning of the word is its use in the language in most cases, he says, or for a large class of cases, that's opaque. We've talked about some of that before. But that idea of its being use gets us or it's being like sort of words being like chess pieces or something, where their meaning is not some specific entity in the head, but it's a sort of all the possible ways in which they could be used by a language speaker, let's put it that way. It's more about potentialities than some actual image in the mind or something like that. Just once we get into that world of potentiality, we sort of move into a world which is no longer strictly intentional or no longer strictly in someone's head.

10:30 Mark: And I like the machinery that we just stumbled upon in the J.L. austin episode of distinguishing between the locutionary aspects and at least the perlocutionary aspects of a sentence. So just to use that Gricean example again, South Bend isn't exactly New York City. So we might say we understand the literal meaning of that. If we understand the literal meaning of that as it would be conventionally used, then we understand the locution. We understand what the sense and reference are of those terms. We know what New York is. We know what South Bend is. We know they are not the same thing. As Grice points out, we really, in just explaining that, we've not really understood why the person is saying that, because we haven't really understood what the speech act is actually supposed to do. It's not supposed to convey the literal proposition that South Bend is not the same city or qualitatively the same as New York. It's supposed to be a dis on South Bend. And so that would be. Well, again, the difference between the illocutionary aspect and the perlocutionary aspect seemed to be whether it was a conventional expression. So if we can say a dis, I hereby dis South Bend. If we could sort of translate the sentence maybe into something that was like that, fuck South Bend, then that means it's in the illocutionary aspect. Maybe. But if it's some non traditional. The difference between the illocutionary and the prolocutionary, maybe it doesn't matter so much here. I'm just trying to remember it myself.

12:03 Wes: Yeah, just the fact that there's some subtext, and often we're using language in that way where there are multiple meanings. There's a literal meaning, but often in casual discourse, it's really casual conversation. It's the subtext that actually counts. And then there's layers of subtext. There may also be unintended subtext, let's say. But I think all of this goes towards the expansion of the notion. Part of the problem about talking about intention and all this stuff is how, you know, is how expansive the notion gets. But actually, that may not be helpful to bring up right at this point,

12:35 Mark: according to the new critics, Wimzade and Beardsley that we just discussed, you shouldn't have to pay attention to at least stuff external to the text itself about the author's intention and the way that I just said it though a given statement in a poem or other piece of literature, that's going to have a literal meaning. Yeah, you just have to understand the language really. And maybe some facts about the world like where New York is or whatever. Imagine that that example was part of a PO to get that. Maybe the distinction between illocutionary and prolocutionary is relevant here. If we take that to be the conventional and the non conventional implications of the sentence. So that if we, you know, just by looking at the text itself. This was just an example Grice gave. This is not something that I heard somebody say to me in an actual situation and I had to look at their gestures and the way that they were looking at me and the tone of their voice to understand that this was supposed to be a dis. You could just tell it by the way that that's phrased because that's a conventional form of a dis. Well, you aren't exactly an Einstein, are ya? You don't need the tone of voice if you could see that written down. So that's the kind of thing that if it's in a poem you could figure out the meaning just based on customary connotations of the way that. That you know or what idioms. Right, conventional idioms. So the question is, do you then, since obviously there's going to be a prolocutionary aspect there that he doesn't just mean to say that, but he's actually. The statement is meant to be ironic and it's meant to make fun of the narrator. That's saying that because the narrator is such a shallow person. Like that's actually why, if you ask the author why that's in the poem there, you should be able to figure out that from just looking at the poem or the story itself. You know, the author would have to be pretty clumsy to not convey that. But maybe the author is specifically leaving it up to your imagination or maybe it doesn't. According to the New Critic, it doesn't even matter what the author intends. That you can decide based on the context and based on whether it's supposed to be an ironic statement or sort of what the prolocutionary aspect is supposed to be. So what do you think about that, Wes? To figure out the prolocution of a speech act as it occurs in a piece of literature? That's at least where, if anywhere you would be trying to consult authors intentions though according to the new Critics you shouldn't have to.

14:58 Wes: So I think the case of the new critics is actually ambiguous because, and I mentioned this in the podcast, there's sort of two issues here. One issue is just about you could have something like Hirsch's theory of meaning or Grice's theory of meaning, this idea that it relies on intention in some fundamental sense. And I think still be a new critic, because you could say the intent of writing poems is to be able to communicate what you're doing within the framework of the poem. And that's just the way it's fashioned. And going to the author's letters or writing or trying to ask them personally what they meant by that is irrelevant. Not in the sense that intention, not because intention in general is irrelevant, but because intention is a very complicated idea that includes much more than what you can get by asking the author right now or looking at their letters. Some of what's going on in the poem the author may have intended unconsciously, or it may reflect social intentions, societal intentions that are channeled through the author. So you could conceivably as a new critic, make that argument. Yes, I buy that as a theory of meaning, that foundationally meaning depends on intent. It's just that figuring out intent, intent is bigger than the conscious intent of the particular author. That's what you might say.

16:24 Mark: Yeah. And you could say that the whole death of the author thing is a way of expressing that really what you would need to know is the intentions of author, of the author at that specific moment of the whole organism that is the author interacting with language. And that's something that you're just never going to capture just by years later or even minutes later asking the person. That's the way psychological explanations work. They're probably going to make up stuff if you really ask them, what were you thinking at the time that you wrote that? What? Actually, it's just not going to be that accurate. Yeah.

16:57 Wes: And if you think about the way intent is formed, it gets very thorny. Right. Because it's not like I might say to myself, okay, I got to ask my roommate to pick up a gallon of milk on the way home. And I intend to communicate that and I will do that. And then you text them and ask them to do that. But the formation at that point you've said something propositional to yourself at the moment where you can fully say, yes, I have this intent to communicate something before that it's not an intent. In a way, there's some kind of impulse, but the impulse is blind. It's non propositional. Whatever set of causal circumstances, whether they're non mental being brain states or proto mental. However you want to think about all that. Those causal states are not in and of themselves intentional. And then the question becomes, well, is intention all expression or is it some of it interpretation? Don't I have to become aware and interpret the proposition? That's a occurred to me that I want to remind my roommate to get milk. I think it gets very, very complicated in that way. And we have to analyze intent psychologically. If you really want to do a foundational psychological theory with intent, we have to acknowledge the complexity of intention. So if a poet is going through a poetic process which may involve, for example, free writing and letting go and using language playfully and not trying to communicate simply for the sake of some pragmatic concern like getting milk, but in a way trying to abstract from one's desires and concerns, that's the way Schopenhauer would think of it. It's even more acute about, well, the question of intent becomes even more problematic because you might not know exactly what you're writing until you look at it and reinterpret it. And then of course, you can continue to fashion the poem based on that reinterpretation and you can go through that cycle and sort of free writing editing process, let's say, until you fashion something. But a lot of that is actually interpretation. And if you're thinking of intent broadly, then some of it, despite that cycle, you may not be fully aware of. So I hate to keep going back to the unconscious stuff, but yes, and

19:09 Mark: we most recently talked about that in our Robert Wright Buddhism episode where there's no CEO of the self. So with all that in mind, I want to then turn to the Knapp and Hirsch attempt to, I think, simplify ontology by Knapp and Michaels. Knapplet Michaels view to simplify ontology by saying, you know, somebody like Hirsch or even these new critics, they're positing the difference between the meaning entity, the meaning of the text, and the intention entity, the thing that was in somebody's head. And what we've just said is that, yeah, okay, something goes on in the head, but there's no intention entity in the head. That is maybe a bit of folk psychology and let's just get rid of that. So when somebody creates something, their intended meaning. So again, this is different than the intention. The intended meaning is just the meaning of what they make. Just putting it that way, it sounds like whether you believe that depends on whether you buy something like Grice's view of mentality. So if I Just again, to use Grice's example, if I utter that sentence in a work, South Bend, it's not exactly New York. What is it I intended to mean by that? Well, what I intended to mean by that is actually the meaning of the phrase. Although actually, Nav and Michaels are going to agree with Grice that that is the case. But maybe the order of justification is backwards. Grice still has to say that the only reason it actually has that meaning is because that's what I intended to say. And it's possible that if I use the phrase artistically and I meant something else, you know, so I'm again using it as a second order. I don't actually mean to say that New York City is way better than South Bend because I'm putting it in the mouth of a character who I'm trying to make fun of. So I'm actually not saying anything like that. I'm discounting the snobbiness that would normally come through. So in that case, would that be, from Michaels, Grice, an instance of me potentially establishing a new meaning for the phrase? It seems definitely not in the literary context. You see where I'm going here?

21:17 Wes: So let's just reread the Grice thing. Facts about what expressions mean are to be explained or analyzed in terms of facts about what speakers mean by utterances of them. And facts about what speakers mean by their utterances can be explained in terms of their intentions. So we have this idea about the meaning of expressions are in some sense reducible to the meanings and the intentions of the speakers of those expressions. So I guess that fits nicely with. Sorry, it's Knapp and Michael's claim that those two things are identical in some way. But I think we could, in the same way that I just mentioned with the New Critics, I think we could expand the notion of intention as much as we like in this case as well, because they don't give us a specific idea of what they mean by intention. They don't say that it necessarily means conscious intention or anything like that. So if there is some unintended subtext to an assertion or to a statement or to the playful use of language in the art language arts, they don't tell us how to deal with that, really. If we want to give them the most charitable possible reading, I think we should allow for the possibility that their concept of intention does use. It does, strangely enough, involve unintended intention or unconscious intention.

22:33 Mark: In other words, elements are unintended within the intended meaning.

22:36 Wes: Yes. So in the South Bend, there's no New York example. It could be that someone is actually. So here's a psychoanalytic possibility or a possibility that psychoanalysts would think of. It could be that the person is actually quite. They're dissing South Bend because they've been forced to live there, but they would dis anywhere where they had to be and the grass is always greener. And really they're actually quite attached to South Bend. And in a way, they're trying to pry themselves psychologically off the fact that they like South Bend with a kind of what you would call reaction formation where they have to try and speak against South Bend. So that's a kind of fancy way. You could say there's some sort of unintended, not consciously intended subtext. But if the idea is that it's all the meaning of a poem, for instance, has to really be only what the poet consciously intended themselves. So that if we want to say that something symbolizes some element of the poem, symbolizes X, symbolizes Y, I think we're in big trouble. Especially if you ask someone to free write a poem and it's full of imagery and. And the author, the poet hasn't even had time to think about what any of it means, and they just give it to you. Well, then you can't interpret it all, really, because you could say, oh, I see the ocean here represents the character's, the speaker's anger at, blah, blah, blah. And all the author could say to that is, oh, I didn't think of that. And you're looking at a poem in which it all fits very, very nicely. But under this theory, if only conscious intention counts, then that interpretation is illegitimate. And I think that would be a big problem for poetry and the interpretation of poetry and literature. If you really require the author to consciously, carefully mean everything that you want to extract, legitimately extract from it.

24:28 Mark: I don't think we even really said what Knapp and Michael's conclusion is, which is that theory is unnecessary because there is no gap between the intended meaning and the actual meaning of the poem. Not just that the actual meaning reflects the intended meaning. They are one in the same entity. And so rules about how to. What constitutes a legitimate interpretation based on. Well, I was going to say based on this distinction between the intended meaning and the actual meaning are illegitimate. But I think further than that. There are no rules that are legitimate at all. But you just outlined the rule of coherence. So let's say we allow intended meaning to actually still include unintended elements so that you can. If somebody makes an utterance. Well, they mean the literal part of what they mean. They mean the perlocutionary aspect of what they had in mind. But then they're also, because they're human beings, they have a whole lot of unconscious stuff going on. They might mean quite a few more things. And because they're within a social milieu, then they might mean more things. But still. Still, if that statement south Bend is not exactly New York in Urdu, means fuck yo mama, then I think it's clearly illegitimate to say, wow, the meaning of that phrase fuck yo mama works in there. Like, unless somehow fuck yo mama is very consonant with the rest of the tone of the piece, so that you can see this as another unintended but organically fitting element. Probably that's just completely irrelevant. Wouldn't you say that that's a piece of theory to say that that's irrelevant?

26:15 Wes: Yeah, that's a piece of theory, though that kind of supports their general idea. Well, I mean, you're pointing to a case in which there's some sort of unintentional. It's not an unintentional meaning under this theory because it would fail. Well, I don't know. You're pointing to something in which the subtext is not. We might be tempted to think that's subtext, but the author doesn't speak Urdu and it's just an accident.

26:40 Mark: Right.

26:41 Wes: I'm understanding you correctly.

26:42 Mark: Yeah. It seemed like when we were looking at the Barthe and Foucault, that they were glorifying the reader and to really fill out that part of the picture, we would have had to read. We had almost read. You know, in addition to the intentional fallacy that Wimsad and Beardsley discuss. They discuss. What is it? The expressive fallacy. Is that what it was called?

27:02 Wes: I think so, yes. The effective fallacy, Something like that. The effect of fallacy.

27:08 Mark: So we did not read that, and so I can't talk. Speak on that. But, you know, just looking at the Bart and Foucault, it seems like they are in favor of the multiplicity of possible. You know, the tyranny of the author must go away. So actually getting the Urdu fuck yo mama connection would be a legitimate move because the piece of literature is in the public. It's in. It's in the reader's hands. And if that's something that the reader can bring to bear, and it seems actually really any freaking association connotation that the reader could bring to bear could at least be a legitimate thing to discuss. And say that this is an aspect of the poem's meaning. And I think clearly. Well, what do we think? Does Knapp and Michaels have to rule that out?

27:54 Wes: So I think in the reader's case, as a matter of investigatory procedure, it would be really remarkable, Right. If it were just there accidentally, some phrases of Urdu in there that's sort of like the words washing up on the beach. And then Knapp and Michaels, Michael. Or Michaels, the Knapp and Michael article. Yeah. If we stipulate that it actually was random, then the question of whether it means something becomes enormously complex. If we're intentionalists, it doesn't mean anything and it's not a legitimate part of the interpretation of the poem. That Urdu phrase. If we're non intentionalists, we might think so. For instance, that's why I brought up the idea of a picture washing up on the beach. And we know, again, it's just random. No one has intentionally caused it. And then we ask the question, well, does it actually picture? And I think we would be inclined to say yes, because I think we think of picturing in terms of these isomorphisms in structure, which are mind independent in a way. A is to the left of B, and this line is like that line and things like that, the same shape and the same. And I think we can think of those things as mind independent. And that's sort of why the early Wittgenstein was trying to do a picture theory of language. He was trying to give us some way in which, just syntactically, if you look at language as a whole and the interlocking web of the semantic features of a language, I may be distorting the constant here, but this is one way of thinking about this. But that enough syntax will give you semantics in the same way that it'll give you a picturing function which is mind independent. And that you don't just need these arbitrary semantic assignments, like from the word dog to dog or something like that, that looking at. If you took a whole language and you looked at its structure, you could figure out which word meant dog. Because with all the relations in the language and all that. So anyway, whatever we think of that, there are also theories that get beyond the picture theory, like the language's use theory. And then I don't know what to say. Honestly, it's just puzzling to me. I mean, intuitively, Knapp and Michael are appealing, where you just say, well, yeah, if it's an accident, this is a really good argument.

30:12 Mark: Well, it's not really language. I think they would have to say, just like the words on the rocks, they just look like language, but they're not really language because we are not imputing authorship to it. And we don't think the author knew Urdu. So if something that resembles an Urdu phrase gets in there, it's not really an Urdu phrase. It just resembles an Urdu phrase phrase. So it's not a legitimate part of the meaning.

30:33 Wes: Yeah, and I think there's, you know, I think intuitively that's very, very appealing. I think once you start getting deeper into all of this, like I said, it gets confusing. That's why I brought up the chess example as well, the picture example, but also the chess example. If a chess puzzle washes up and you solve it and someone says, well, that's not really a chess puzzle, that's just food for thought for me. I don't know. I wasn't able to really think this through. I can say I feel puzzled. I'm intuitively attracted to the nab and Michael, the overall, the overarching point, which is we need at least some intention in general. But I think there's more thinking to be done about that, at least for me. But I will say the one thing that we were talking about before with an app and Michael, that's what they're really wrong about, obviously wrong about this whole ontology thing they're doing. Because it doesn't matter on the level of investigation. It doesn't matter if the sense always equals. If the meaning always equals the intention, because we just might not know what it is. And that's, I think, Hirsch would say about himself. He wouldn't say. He's doing this ontological thing, like I said, where you're sprinkling intention, entity, powder on the non intentional meaning entity. And so that it blossoms into the real. All you're doing is you're saying, yes, there is some entity out there where it's called meaning equals intention. And I don't fully know what it is because I'm in an epistemological predicament. In the same way that if I are multiplying 235 by 572, that's an expression. That little chunk is what we call an expression. And solving that expression is what we call interpretation. And to interpret that, I actually do need a method. I actually have to know how to multiply that to get the result. I can be at a position of ignorance and have to come to a position of knowledge. And nothing about that implies these identifications that they're talking about. And they seem to realize that that's what's so odd about their article. Like, a few pages in, they give a completely kosher view of what this is all about, which is that it's not that you're trying to add intention, it's trying to add information about intention, which they think is fine. Then why wouldn't you just read Hirsch that. In that completely innocuous way?

32:44 Mark: So I was trying to figure out. I actually went back and listened to the beginning of our interview with Searle if there was this comparison that I was trying to look at and whether we agree with the comparison, whether we agree with Searle and we agree with. With Knapp and Michaels here, of trying to get rid of an extra mental entity. Right. So Searle's deal was in perception. You might think because of things like illusion that you're not actually perceiving objects in the world. You're perceiving some extra mental. Some entity, and then you're interpreting it to be the object in the world. And he says, yeah, of course, psychologically, something is happening in the head where you receiving waves of light or whatever from the object, and those are getting converted in all the interesting ways, but you're still perceiving the object. And when you're having a hallucination, you're simply not perceiving at all. Something in the head is going on like perception, but you're not. We don't want to add an entity of, say, the intentional object that is distinct from the object out in the world. The object out in the world is the thing that under normal perceptual circumstances, we are perceiving. All right, so here, comparably, I think Knapp and Michaels are like Searle trying to say, you traditional literary theorists, you're saying that when I perceive a meaning in a phrase, then I then have to infer from that meaning that I perceive about the intentions of the person who perceived it, the intentions of the person who uttered the phrase. Right. So there was, again, the meaning of the phrase, and then there was the intended meaning of the phrase. And those are two distinct things, because the intended meaning of the phrase really is the intention to mean something in particular in the person's head. So the meaning of the phrase would be a phragian kind of linguistic entity. The intended meaning of the phrase would be a psychological entity. This all sounds like Grice, you know, making those distinctions between the meaning and then the fact about psychology. And so these guys are trying to get rid of one of the. Just like Searle just thinks that that's a tremendous mistake when you're talking about perceptions. If I misidentify a shadow, I'm in my room at night and there's a shadow on the wall, and I think there's a person there really seeing is a shadow. And I'm misidentifying it so comparably it would have to be that. Let's say you look at this and you actually interpret it as Urdu when the the author didn't know Urdu and definitely didn't mean that, then it's not that you are perceiving an objective pre interpreted meaning, let's say, and then you are interpreting it. There are many ways it can be interpreted. It's a polysemus space or something like that that Foucault would talk about. And, and you are pushing the Urdu. You're grasping the Urdu aspect or pushing the meaning. No, according to this Searle like analysis by Knapp and Michaels, you are simply not reading it correctly. You're simply not reading it at all. I mean, what do you think of that comparison?

36:01 Wes: Well, suppose I'm walking down the street with a friend and I'm walking my dog. These examples, by the way, are ridiculous just because I'm coming up with them on the spot. And I'm also wearing a shirt, one of my favorite shirts with who's The Crime Dog McGruff. The Crime Dog McGruff on my shirt. And my friend says nice dog. And I think they're referring to the dog that I'm walking, but they're referring to the dog on my shirt. So obviously when they say nice dog, it's not that I don't understand any meaning. It's not that it's just gibberish to me. I understand in general. It's just that it happens to be ambiguous. And so this is the problem. And often we actually do do rely on authors to clarify the intent before we get the full meaning, which is not because if we stipulate their theory, it's not because meaning doesn't equal intent. We can be fully on board with that theory, but it's just that we're in a certain epistemological predicament regarding what that is. And so when I say, oh, you meant when they look confused and then they look at my shirt and then I realize, oh, it's the dog on my shirt. I'm using contextual clues in a way, I'm interviewing the author to figure out what they actually meant. And then I am assigning the right meaning instead of the wrong meaning to the expression. It's not. The initial meaning was entirely wrong. Like I said, it was in the ballpark. But there's still lots and lots of room for ambiguity. And I'm not convinced that. I think Knapp and Michael probably know this. This is why I keep Talking about this PDF, page 5, page 726 in their article where they say the issue of determinacy or indeterminacy is irrelevant. Hirsch thinks it's relevant because he thinks, correctly, that the movement from indeterminacy to determinacy involves the addition of information. But he also thinks, incorrectly, that adding information amounts to adding intention. Well, in my dog example, the charitable way to interpret all that is that if you want to be an intentionalist, here is to say, yes, I'm just adding information. Meaning does equal intention. I just didn't know what the meaning intention was. The uncharitable way that they're reading Hirsch is to say that, oh, no, he thinks that the indeterminate meaning isn't just my particular epistemological predicament, but it reflects an entity to which I have to add another entity to make it. That's the dilemma there. And I think, clearly there's too many examples of us, of ambiguity in language and us misreading each other's meanings and clarifying them by querying each other about intentions, not to know that, yes, there is such a thing as an interpretive process. And so the way it squares up with Searle, I don't exactly know.

38:42 Mark: I guess the question is, when the person said, nice dog, what was the meaning of that phrase? According to what you just said, the meaning of that phrase was ambiguous. But actually, Knapp and Michaels are going to say, no, the meaning of that phrase was what the author intended was the dog on your shirt is nice, and you just didn't know that you were imputing a meaning that actually wasn't there. But there is actually the one entity of the meaning of the phrase, and that is exactly the same as what the person intended it to mean. So what do you think of that? You think that actually. No, no, actually it was ambiguous until he clarified.

39:18 Wes: No, I don't think anyone is saying that it's ambiguous until it's clarified. I don't think anyone's saying it's ambiguous in the sense of assigning the entity ambiguous meaning to it. This inherently ambiguous entity. I think think if they're an intentionalist like Hirsch, they would say exactly what Knapp and Michaels say, which is that there is the entity that's what the speaker is and the meaning equals the intent. And that is exactly what the speaker is referring to, but that the hearer misinterprets, doesn't know that. But that means, though what I'm not sure that Hirsch and Michael understand is that means that you do need theory in the sense of you need an interpretative method. And I don't see how you can get around that. We actually, because of our epistemological predicament, we do need a method to interpret things. And you could just call that theory.

40:08 Mark: So there is still a dualism there. You might have thought the dualism was between the intention and then the meaning of the text, the intended meaning and the meaning of the text, which is a polysema space. It is multi meaninged, and only some of those correspond to. To what the person had in mind. But if you get rid of that duality and you say, like Nap and Michaels do that. No, no, the actual meaning of the phrase is the intended meaning. Well, there's still the duality between that and what individual interpreters make of it. So you could, like Searle, say, okay, well, that's not a separate entity, but why not? I mean, call it a meaning attribution. So there's the meaning of the phrase, which is in fact equivalent to what the intended meaning, and then there's various meaning attributions that people make. And in fact, you could look at the social circumstances, you could look at the social facts surrounding the phrases used and say, well, that's a reasonable meaning attribution, and that's a really weird meaning, in other words, an interpretation. So it seems there's always. There's still a dualism of some sort. And the interpretive problem does not go away. Right. Just by shifting the ontological ground here from meaning in the head versus meaning of the phrase to meaning of the phrase versus what I think the meaning of the phrase is and what you think and what we talk about. Maybe we agree on the meaning of the phrase, which is not the same as the meaning that the author intended. So you still need. They haven't succeeded in getting rid of the need for theory or have they?

41:46 Wes: Yeah, I don't think so.

41:47 Mark: So this was going to be. I didn't mean to take up our whole hour with this topic.

41:51 Wes: I think. Well, I know you wanted to discuss a little of the bard. We could do it quickly.

41:55 Mark: I think let's screw the bard. I don't even care about the bard at this point. So you had brought up this TSLA poem, the Song of J. Alford Prufrock, which seemed a good one to bring up because he himself was a new critic. And then you sent me some discussions of what it actually means, kind of Cliff Notes things and the Wikipedia article on it, and it all sounded pretty reasonable. I wouldn't have known what this was about at all. It's a guy wandering around and he's describing things on the street that he's seen. And then he's talking about. Indeed, there will be a time to wonder, do I dare? Do I dare? And he kind of, you know, kind of do I dare disturb the universe? And you don't know, you know, what is he talking about? What is he daring? You know, a careful reading of it yields like the things you told me that he's maybe working up to say something important, but he's gutless and he can't ultimately say it. So what need is there for theory in figuring out how to interpret this poem? Why did you suggest this?

42:57 Wes: That's a good question. Did I think theory was required? So I guess it depends on what you mean by theory. I think there's some sort of interpretive method required and I'm a fan of the whole just close reading, new critics approach, where you're basically attending to the text itself. And I think a lot of the methodology is actually basic folk psychology, basically, which I think is actually a lot of the way we evaluate things in general, including truth claims about, say, I mean, the earth is round when we've never. The conspiracy theorists will, you know, the flat earth conspiracy theorist will say no, because they have a different, more paranoid conception of human psychology in which people are trying to deceive them. So even though we have no direct experience of it, we're willing to trust others. That's basically a psychological theory theory. And there's lots of psychology, I think, in basic close reading lit, crit method. I mean, if you looked at. That's why I also sent you the Wood article, where James Wood, who's a really great critic in that article, we'll post that too. There are examples of his sorts of critical claims. And then there's the critic who's writing the article, claims about Wood and then claims about Wood's novel. If you look at a lot of it, a lot of it involves speculation about the psychological states of character in a poem. Similarly, you're speculating about the psychological state of the Persona, the speaker in the poem, who's not necessarily the actual author. So I'll leave it at that. All I'm trying to Say here is that there is a method. You could still reject theory in the sense of wanting to reject these more postmoderny or post structuralist sorts of frameworks for approaching things, or a psychoanalytic framework or a feminist framework. You might reject theory in that sense sense and simply want to go back to a simpler new critic approach. But still, I think there's a lot of theory there in the sense of methodology.

44:46 Mark: Right. So Wood is against imposing your philosophical view on something by reading it in a certain way that he did not like what this trend that he saw of people just basically evaluating morally, which we see all the time now in social justice sort of reviews of things on TV and stuff, and just talking about the stereotypical representations of blah, blah, and that is a thing to be concerned about. Perhaps it should not substitute for actual interpretation of the meaning of the work. Like, you can't. Just because somebody uses all white characters and maybe even has a bunch of junky ethnic stereotypes in there, does that reduce the meaning of the work? Well, actually, this is an open question. As I'm saying, this actually does seem to me like. Well, it does mean actually that it's a perpetuation of a racist or whatever worldview, and that actually is part of the meaning of the work.

45:41 Wes: Yeah, I'm not objecting to that, and I think Wood would have a nuanced position on that. I only sent this as actually. Not as a critique of certain methods of interpretation, but just as an example of the types of claims that are made. So, for instance, at some point the critic who's writing this article will talk about whether something in the novel is persuasive. And what do we mean by that? Well, a lot of it was. We might mean causal plausibility, the way events are linking up plot wise, but a lot of times we're talking about psychological plausibility. I just wanted to get at the sense in which there is a methodology going on. You might disagree that it's largely psychological, but there's something like that going on. And these sorts of claims that critics are making are highly interpretive and not simply a matter of reading the explicit meaning of something.

46:26 Mark: Right. I think psychological interpretations, when we're not talking about the psychology author, but the psychology of the characters are just part and parcel of. Of the coherence interpretations of, you know, does it make sense not even just that the characters would act this way psychologically, but that this kind of result would happen given the things that are set up? If there are really improbable coincidences like unless the world has been set up so that there's an act of fate going on under underlying. And you can say that, you know, it is not a coincidence that the ring fell in the hands of a living hobbit like you because there are greater forces at work. That's fine if that's part of the makeup of the universe, but that's how you interpret what this universe is, is by reflecting on. Are they supposed to. Like, that's the first thing that kids think of. Like that wouldn't really happen or that character wouldn't really do that. And you might have to explain to the kid like, well, this is the all too clever kid is. No, actually you should be more of a kid. Because this is supposed to be, you know, a certain suspension of disbelief and is channeling the sort of logic that happens in fables or something like that, which is actually not, even though those are aimed at kids, is not what happens in real life just what kind of genre conventions are being brought forward.

47:39 Wes: Yeah, I mean, I think even with fables and even with highly unrealistic stuff, there can be a different type of coherence. And it's not just that we're trying to be pedants or sticklers or something like that, or literal minded when we make those critiques. A lot of it is about the effect on the reader, the dramatic effect, whether they. Whether you can succeed dramatically by pulling those moves. So it's not just that we care about plausibility for the sake of plausibility, but in a certain type of narrative structure that's meant to have a sort of. Intended to have a certain kind of effect on the reader, to produce certain kinds of satisfaction in the reader. People are going to say what? Or it's going to seem like it doesn't work. So one thing he criticizes in Wood's novel. So the success of much of this novel lies in Alan's Zeus. Alan is the protagonist, Zeus like position of keeping the peace. So you see these inferences from character, the details of the character in a novel to the novel's success. So that's one of the interesting dynamics and this sorts of interpretation where you move outward from feeling states of characters to the success or failure of the artwork and then later on. So he basically says there's a flattening and cheapening of certain scenes with the use of omniscience as a method. So the author can too easily get into the heads of too many different characters, resulting in kind of a faux theatricality. And he says, basically we'd been better off if we didn't know so much about what's going on in everyone's head. I think that's basically one of the big critiques of Wood. So you can see here how we're not just talking about internal coherence, but we're talking about how the dramatic effect

49:23 Mark: of all that stuff, right, that's part of why we care about coherence is because we're concerned with the combined effect of everything that's going on. That if you have a soundtrack or a plot element or something that is completely pulling a different direction than the thrust of what's going on, then dramatically you don't know what to think. And it's funny, though, when critics are. Even when I'm trying to evaluate something in these terms, it's not necessarily actually gauging what you feel. It's not necessarily gauging what the phenomenology is. I don't think so. I'm trying to think like one of the reviews of. What is that? The guy that did Family Guy did a Star Trek ripoff. The Orville.

50:02 Wes: Yeah, I watched a lot of that actually, and it's. What'd you think of that?

50:06 Mark: I thought it was fun enough. So I read a review of this that was like, I don't know, I can't decide whether it's a straight up drama, sci fi drama, or whether it's a comedy. And the fact that these jokes are randomly splayed around it just like ruins. So for this critic didn't really get. And I saw that as a failure of the critic to really to get it. That actually, no, what is interesting about this is it's actually the intended effect is to be both at once. And that has a lot to do with, I think, the way that adult males deal, maybe more than that, but at least cynical adult males deal with their own emotions that, yeah, I actually want to get sucked into escapist sci fi like this, but I also want to kind of be cool and self aware at the same time and make jokes about it. And those things actually don't grate on each other. So, you know, if I was going to go to church, I couldn't just go to church and have it be all hushed and get myself pulled into the sanctity because I just couldn't take that seriously. Like, I would need to have, along with the pious song Snide, that would be a church design for me and I could enjoy that. So I just felt like I understand where that reviewer was coming from. But it was misguided. It was not really getting. You could say, what tone did the author intend? And you could evaluate it according. Did it succeed in fulfilling that tone? Which I think if you intend to mix up the dramatic and the silly, sure, it achieved that. But then you could also ask, was that intention a reasonable thing to want to pursue? And it seems like this critic is making a subjective evaluation about the ideology of it and saying, look, just pick a genre. That's what works best.

51:54 Wes: I just want to draw attention to what you're doing because it's a really good example of all the different moves that could be made as a critic, which is, we had been talking about evaluating a work in terms of reader response, but then you can critique reader response. You can critique their particular interpretation, interpretive frame, in a psychosocial way. So you're talking about the way. What is it men would want to escape? Let's say snarky men, Toxic masculinity. No, sorry.

52:18 Mark: Who can't deal with their own emotions? I don't know.

52:21 Wes: Yeah. So you provide that critique of the interpretive frame. And again, that's another sort of interesting move that can be made. I really want to. I've been trying to think about all these different. How do you categorize all these different approaches to interpretation? And maybe one day, when we do our Theory of Lucreta episode, we can get more into all of that.

52:38 Mark: Well, what I was just doing was exactly what I think Beardsley and Wimsatt are explicitly critiquing. I think they were the ones. Maybe it was Beardsley or Foucault that brought up the Romantics, that they were responding to, that they were saying that in order to judge something, you have to know what genre it is. You have to know basically what the author's intention in creating it was. And then you can say, did it succeed in the author's intention? Or you could say, was that even a good intention to have? So exactly the way I just laid out that thing about the Orville is how they describe their Romantic opponents that they're trying to improve on.

53:12 Wes: I'd have to think about that. I'm not so sure. By the way, I wanted to mention that Orville. I actually had more of the reaction of the critic. I mean, in most shows, you would just call it a drama with comic relief, which is fine. There's lots of comic relief in the original Star Trek. After a certain point, I thought the show had lots of promise, but I found it unwatchable after a while. Just too Hokey and too sentimental in places and too not funny enough. I would have liked more of a slapstick escape. Just absurd. Have you ever watched Other Space? Yeah, I love that.

53:41 Mark: That's a much better show.

53:42 Wes: Yeah. There's only one season of that, Right.

53:45 Mark: I don't know if it moved to another network or something.

53:47 Wes: I only saw one season anyway. So beyond my personal reaction to Orville, I'm not so sure about what's allowable with the new critics and what's not. I think going beyond. When you move out to the social fr. You say, oh, this critic has sort of been influenced by some negative. They've internalized some sort of negative social factor that compromises their critique. I don't know how that fits in, in all honesty, I think with the people they're criticizing, it's more about this idea that. I don't know. I don't know. Let me leave it at that.

54:21 Mark: So I think if we do another one of these criticism episodes, maybe we should actually get a literary critic on with us, or a writer, an English professor who just deals with this stuff all the time and might be much more clear because the way we are interpreting Wimsatt and Beardsley really takes the sails out of, like, that they're just objecting to a certain kind of biographical writing which they didn't like and we probably wouldn't like either, as a way. But they allow in so much stuff about actual intentions that it really. It doesn't argue against anything that I was just doing or I'm not clear about the scholarship of this either. I'm not sure that it matters so much for our purposes. Like just having these issues on the board and talking about the different methods is probably all we need. But it would be nice to know more definitively.

55:07 Wes: Yep.

55:08 Mark: And I should ask you. So just to presage so tentatively we had for the episode after next we're going to do the Sandman, the comic book series by Neil Gaiman. So I've already been spending quite a lot of time with this. I know that Dylan and Seth have both read the thing in its entirety before, and it really raises some interesting narrative problems right off the bat because basically you're dealing with the main character is a God and it has no. You know, the character's emotions have very little in common with any normal people. So sort of the Doctor who problem of, well, you have to have then a regular person with Doctor who that you can identify with, because you're not going to identify with this character. But it's Even more crazy than that, just because of this person's powers. And then the rules that have to be. How are you going to have any narrative interest at all? How is there going to be conflict? So he can't be all powerful. There have to be other powers. There have to be rules that are somehow written in the laws of the universe or that somehow the character in his own nature writes on himself. And so part of it is being exposed to this weird, cryptic new set of universal laws. It's kind of metaphysical. Figures. What if the universe were like this? Have you started that at all? Did you have any.

56:23 Wes: I haven't started, no. Okay, sorry.

56:26 Mark: I'll just dangle that. And I'm not even sure because we had a guest from Vertigo comics that is going to be on with us and she has not actually confirmed. So I'm not even sure that that's going to happen on schedule. I think we might have to pick another topic. I've just been thinking about that today.

56:38 Wes: Okay. We have a recording on Sunday on something else.

56:41 Mark: Yes. And this was going to be the one right after that, but it might be.

56:44 Wes: And then Sandman would have been two weeks after.

56:47 Mark: Yes. And then we already have the stuff about the St. John. St. John's Chancellor chairman. What is his. We have a guest from President. Yeah, the president of St. John's University. Is that right? Is going to be a guest?

57:00 Wes: No, St. John's College.

57:01 Mark: St. John's College is going to be a guest a few episodes from now. So we already had his topic. And then we're going to do the

57:10 Wes: Alan Bloom's closing of the American Mind,

57:13 Mark: which I've now read half of. So I'm very eager to actually do that.

57:16 Wes: I've read that like two or three times in the past. That was sort of like a bible to me at one point.

57:21 Mark: The fact that we have those two slots already taken up that we're going to be right after Sandman means if we bump Sandman from here, then it's not happening soon. It's going to be six weeks at the earliest. Later, unfortunately. And we'll have to think of another topic. Or maybe we'll just go straight to Bloom, because I think our calendar can afford that.

57:40 Wes: Okay.

57:40 Mark: All right. Thank you supporters for listening. You got all that inside information.

57:46 Wes: Woohoo.

57:47 Mark: I hope you encourage other people to want to get in on this. We'll keep making them available, at least the next couple at the $1 level on Patreon, though that will be later, as with the last one, than it is available to the five dollar people, so. Well, thanks, Wes.

58:05 Wes: Thank you.

58:05 Mark: Good to follow up. So long, everybody.

58:09 Wes: Am I saying goodnight or am I?

58:12 Mark: Whatever you want to say.

58:13 Wes: So long.

58:14 Mark: It's a morning show.

58:16 Wes: It's a morning show.