The philosophy of literary criticism reconsidered. On the ‘logic’ of interpretation

Abstract

It is shown it is logically impossible to give statements in literary criticism which can be classified as ‘interpretative statements’ a scientific basis. By ‘interpretative statements’ are understood such statements which intend to give more than a liguistic description of literary texts. The only way to reconstruct the logic underlying such statements is to reconstruct them in the framework of the logic of values and norms. ‘Interpretative statements’ are thus intrinsically normative statements. More in particular, it is shown that the central predicates occuring in ‘interpretative statements’ cannot be interpreted with respect to an empirical basis but only with respect to specific systems of norms. It is furthermore shown that statements about literary texts that occur in everyday conversions can be given an exact semantics, at least in principle. The main aim of the article to elaborate a fundamental distiction between interpretations of literary texts given in a public context, i.e. ‘institutionalizede interpretations’, and interpretations given in a private context, i.e. ‘everyday interpretations’.