Notes

Rozdziały O Przygodzie
Quine's famous thesis of the Indeterminacy of Radical Translation is the somewhat more general and radical claim that when there is inscrutability of interpretation regarding any human behavior--not just the behavior of text-creation--there may be no deeper facts that settle the matter. Finally, I twierdz draw out some rather curious implications from this examination, implications that some people find deeply satisfying and others find deeply unsettling. Suppose, for instance, (to adapt an example from Anscombe's pioneering essay on the topic, Intention Endnote 6) that you say "Now I press Button A" while reaching out and pushing Button B. We wonder which slip you made--a slip of the tongue or a slip of the finger. Endnote 2 According to more or less received opinion amongst literary theorists, it is simply a mistake to suppose that the author's personal opinion about the meaning of a text is authoritative (mistrz one might say!).

The remainder of this section draws on material that appears in "Interpreting Monkeys, Theorists, and Genes," in The Intentional Stance, pp. The inventor is just another user, only circumstantially and defeasibly privileged in his knowledge of the functions and uses of his device. Any reader, simply by being a reader, a user of the text we might say, establishes an interpretation of the text, and one reader's interpretation is as good as another's--including the author, who is, after all, another reader of the text he happens to have brought into the world.Endnote 3 Of course some readings are better than others--that is, more interesting, more coherent, richer, less ad hoc, better informed--but no reading has the privilege of being singled out as the real meaning of the text.Endnote 4 This extreme view is wildly implausible when the text in question is a sign saying "KEEP OFF THE GRASS"--which is virtually univocal (though hermeneuticists are perversely clever at finding alternative possible--if not plausible--readings of even the most mundane inscriptions). Some theorists go so far mistrz to assert that the author's opinion is not even a relevant datum--one might as well ask your uncle as ask the author. The initial and entirely plausible hunch is that one might find an inner representation of the agent's intention--a description of the act in question written in Mentalese.

They often come with user manuals or instructions--and in cases where there might be some danger of misinterpretation, their parts are prominently labeled: "THIS IS NOT A STEP" it says on the folding paint-bucket shelf of my stepladder. Other artifacts, however, seem to have their interpretation much more securely fixed; there can be little doubt what an axe is Endnote 7, or what a telephone is, and what it is for; we hardly need to consult Alexander Graham Bell's biography for clues about what he had in mind. It is possible that someone setting out with every intention of creating a new kind of alarm clock succeeds, in spite of himself, in creating something that can charitably be described as merely a new kind of paperweight. Endnote 8 Occasionally, an artifact loses its original function and takes on zaś new one. If the instruction book you received with your new computer says "The red light indicates that your battery is running down" and you wonder whether this means that your battery is abnormally running down or just running down in the course of normal operation, you can call up the author--that is, the author-of-record, the virtual author, the person at the other end of the 800-HELP-number--and ask him or her which interpretation was intended.

That is, it may indeed be an incontrovertible historical fact that a certain artifact was created by someone with a particular purpose very clearly represented--both in his head, in Mentalese, and in written "specs" and blueprints, we may suppose--but this historical fact, while it establishes something about how the artifact was intended at the outset, may shed no valuable light on the functions it can and does actually serve. But in spite of these precautions, inscrutability of purpose or function is still possible in principle, and we should remember that a written label is just a text after all, as subject to quandaries of interpretation as any other design feature. We can no longer reside much faith in the agent's own opinions, in many instances, and so, if the actions in question mean anything at all, it is not anything for which we have much direct evidence. The text can indeed be better than its author realizes. sprawdziany Inventors of artifacts are no more immune to confusion than authors of texts. wypracowania Some texts are obvious, and some are relatively perplexing and inscrutable, but even the most obvious are interpretable only with the aid of rather safe, rather obvious assumptions. 1. The Interpretation of Texts Let us begin by reminding ourselves of some of the uncontroversial facts about the interpretation of texts.


My Website: https://szkolnaprasowka.pl/jak-przygotowac-sie-do-egzaminu-praktyczne-wskazowki-dla-uczniow-i-studentow/