Meaning as Concept and Extension: Some Problems

Abstract

We welcome the publication of E. D. Hirsch, Jr.'s Meaning and Significance Reinterpreted (Critical Inquiry 11 [December 1984]: 202-25) because it offers the opportunity to reconsider of meaning and interpretation that creates the possibility for one kind of rich encounter with literary texts. But Hirsch makes it plain that this essay is far more than call for theorists to conduct new examination of the vitality of his distinction between meaning and significance. It is more centrally revision of the underlying that distinction, revision whose key feature is Hirsch's adoption of concept-extension model of meaning and whose effect is substantial enough for Hirsch justifiably to claim that he is now offering a new theory (p. 223). Although we find much of the reasoning that leads to Hirsch's revision characteristically careful and persuasive, we believe that some of it is uncharacteristically fuzzy and weak. Indeed, in this response we want to suggest not only that Hirsch's new is less adequate to the complexities of our understandings and appropriations of texts than his old one but also that the principles underlying the new may unwittingly commit him to giving up that part of the old he most wants to maintain, that is, that meanings can be fixed securely enough to persist through time. In trying to explain where Hirsch's revision is inadequate, we shall suggest an alternative view of the relation between concepts and extensions in literary texts. Hirsch's revision results from his attempt to think through the difficult question that underlies the whole essay: How does the movement of time and circumstance affect the stability of meaning? The first part of his