Fact, Theory, and Literary Explanation

Abstract

The modern critic works inductively, focusing on local of text and seeking to build up an interpretation which will accommodate their apparent complexities. When he does develop an interpretation which fits all facts, he considers that validity of interpretation has been established. The problem is, however, that same seem strangely able to confirm for different critics very different interpretations. Despite widely accepted view that a rich multiplicity is characteristic of literary meaning, wealth of interpretation that critical practice has developed in recent years has come to seem more and more an embarrassment: to have many meanings is too much like having no meaning. It may be, however, that much of this critical inflation is an almost mechanical consequence of a seldom recognized relationship between fact and hypothesis: that hypothesis-interpretive assumption -does not follow from observation of fact but necessarily precedes and structures it, so that agreement between hypothesis and fact is to some degree foreordained. The implications of this relationship have been powerfully developed in philosophy of Sir Karl Popper,' who argues that all our knowledge is inherently and permanently hypothetical, that knowledge can never begin with the facts but only with a conjecture about facts, and that test of a conjecture (read hypothesis or theory) is not degree to which it finds confirmation in facts-the significance of which it effectively constructs-but degree to which it risks refutation by independent which it does not have immediately in view. In this conception knowledge is not built up inductively from local fact to gradually justified generalization, but deduc-