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Natural and Nonnatural Interpretation| old_uid | 15839 |
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| title | Natural and Nonnatural Interpretation |
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| start_date | 2015/06/18 |
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| schedule | 14h-16h |
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| online | no |
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| summary | We routinely talk about “interpreting” natural events, which include the behaviour of particles and tectonic plates, for example, and also the behaviour of animate creatures, much of which we classify as intentional action. Just as routinely, we talk about “interpreting” artefacts, construed as the products of human behaviour. In this talk I shall argue (1) that the distinction between physical and abstract artefacts is far from straightforward, (2) that the difficulties involved in trying to articulate such a distinction are tied to the difficulties involved in distinguishing what Grice called natural and non-natural meaning—roughly, scientific interpretation is the epistemic quest for natural meaning, and utterance interpretation is the epistemic quest for non-natural meaning—and (3) that understanding why puts us in a position (a) to tackle the question of whether there is, as Dennett, for example, has argued, a single project of interpretation addressed to different objects (people, pots, paintings, texts, laws,…), or whether, as Lamarque, for example, has argued, there is only superficially a single project (that of “making sense”) because modes of interpretation and objects of interpretation are inextricably interlinked, and (b) to isolate what is really at issue in debates between processualists and post-processualists in archaeology. Rejecting the idea of general theories of meaning and interpretation does not require rejecting the possibility of a non-normative architecture within which various pairs of theoretically robust notions of meaning and intepretation can be located. And the right sort of an architecture opens up the possibility of providing (i) a generalized meaning-interpretation distinction characterized in terms of a single domain-independent evidential relation obtaining between domain-specific pairs of notions of meaning and interpretation, and (ii) a substantive intentional hierarchy of artefacts. |
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| responsibles | Ueda |
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