What Is the Meaning of a Text?

Abstract

I SHALL NOT assert and defend an answer to the title question. My aim, instead, will be to undermine the widespread assumption that this question either requires or deserves an answer. Other questions would serve our purposes better. Hermeneutical theorists typically present their theories as claims about meaning. It is natural to suppose that something very much like the question, What is the meaning of a text? should serve as the point of reference for judging theories of interpretation. This supposition suggests that at most one of the available theories could be correct. If interpretation is a matter of discovering meaning, and is therefore bound to run amuck when informed by mistaken assumptions about what meaning is, then literary criticism, religious studies, classics, and history-in short, all disciplines involving the interpretation of texts-will consist largely in failure to deliver promised goods. This would not be as discouraging as it is if we felt more confident about discriminating the meager success from the massive failure. Even the natural sciences, after all, cultivate truth only by weeding out seemingly endless error. The problem is knowing how to sort the one from the other. In the absence of defensible criteria for resolving disputes about the nature of textual meaning, it becomes difficult to answer those critics who claim that the field of hermeneutical theory contains nothing but weeds. This paper urges a more benevolent-and, I think, more beneficial-view. There is no point in denying that recent discussions of meaning are confused as well as confusing, but the situation is by no means as hopeless as it seems. If, as I shall argue, the confusion stems in part from preoccupation with a misleading question, then dispensing with the question should improve the prospects of rational agreement among the friends of hermeneutics while encouraging critics to cease keeping their distance.