Reading with understanding: Interpretive method in Chinese philosophy

Abstract

Let me join Professor Mollgaard in encouraging reading. I favor philosophical reading. Mollgaard seems to reject this, although his argument seems directed more at philosophy as a discipline than at explaining philosophical reading. So let me fill the void by giving the missing account. I start with an ambiguity in the term "read": "1. Interpret written material; 2. Utter written words" (Encarta Diclionaty). Obviously, my approach favors the first definition. I will not respond to Mollgaard's mischaracterizations of my position beyond using them heuristically to illustrate points in my condensed argument about interpretation and meaning. The crux of our difference is this. Mollgaard's approach focuses on how to achieve a special status--authoritative interpreter. Mine eschews status or authority. It asks "what form of argument validly supports conclusions about meaning/interpretation." No single answer to this is the philosophical approach to meaning or interpretation. Philosophers debate about and advocate a range of argument forms. I will focus on one widely shared, core argument form and two important varieties. Quine, followed by Davidson, proposed a method for assessing meaning hypotheses. He called it "radical translation." We test meaning hypotheses indirectly. We look at how assigning different whole theories of meaning (references/denotations to terms and functions of these linked systematically to the structural form of sentences) affects our holistic account of what was written or uttered. The two varieties address different properties of the resultant set of translated sentences that count "in favor" of the meaning hypotheses that generate them. Two rival principles, "charity" and "humanity," give different answers: truth and reason. For the former, the greater truth of one set of resultant sentences identifies the correct interpretation. A correct meaning hypothesis yields more truth in translating the strings in the text. What, for example, would show that Mollgaard's printed tokens of "Hartsen" refer to me? Assuming it does makes more of those sentences turn out to be true than if we take them to refer to some other "Hansen." This creates a