On Theories and Metaphors: A Comment on Mary Hesse's Paper

Abstract

A LONE AMONG the four conference papers, that of Mary Hesse focuses directly on the topic that was set for the Virginia conference-literary theory and philosophy of science. By considering her paper, I shall hope to clarify my thoughts on some relations between the two fields of study which momentarily came together in Charlottesville before they flew apart again intact, like colliding particles in a low-speed cyclotron. Hesse, by daring to examine and correlate both domains, has provided us with a bubblechamber picture that deserves to be pondered. Professor Hesse uses a single model of science for both philosophy of science and literary theory. She is a who believes that the logic of inquiry in science and literary scholarship is the same. (The scientific part of literary criticism is the part that is scholarly rather than cultural. That breaks symmetry, since natural science also contains both cultural and scholarly elements.) If we start from Professor Hesse's unitarian vantage point and accept her view that there is a scientific element in both domains, our question becomes, What is the nature of 'science' under this unitarian conception? Hesse argues against the relativistic description of science given by Kuhn and Feyerabend, and against the realist backlash represented in literary theory, for example, by Hirsch. She proposes a less extreme model than either of these. She particularly wishes to distinguish her view from that of the conservative realists by denying any need for their rigid laws, and types. (Hence her title, Texts without Types and Lumps without Laws.) Instead of dealing in real science actually deals in approximate local regularities, for which we use universalistic-sounding terms that are in fact economical expressions of the regularities learned so far. The generalizations of science in any field are not rigid universals, but flexible terms with fuzzy edges. When this model is transported to the field of literary interpretation, it implies for Hesse that we need no metaphysical link between the historical intention of the author and its hypothetical interpretation. We do not need to search for a perfect correspondence be-