we respect and not change the words the author put on the page—the
original words?” 36 When we ask where Meaning lies, the most sensible
response would come from considering what a text is , in terms of its origi-
nary moment. On those terms, it is clear that the author’s intention is the
only legitimate object of hermeneutical inquiry. 37 We write texts to convey
our intentions. If others read our texts in a way that is consistent with their
reason for existing, they will read them to recover those intentions.
CONCLUSION
In their recent book on René Descartes, Peter Machamer and J.E. McGuire
refer to Descartes’s struggle to philosophize, so to speak, in the face of
common parlance. Descartes knew there was little chance of changing the
way people speak about the physical world, and that the philosopher must
make a special effort to rise above the mistaken conceptualities expressed
through everyday language, simply to deal with things as they really are.
As Machamer and McGuire put it:
Presumably we must speak like the vulgar, but think like the philosopher.
So we can talk about action if we wish, or about one body’s possessing all
the motion; these strategies are [conceptually wrong, as far as Descartes
is concerned, but] necessary for communication among people. However,
philosophically, we should not be fooled. From the philosophical perspec-
tive we must realize that such speech is only a façon de parler. 38I have argued that many within the recent generations of hermeneuts
have allowed themselves to be fooled by everyday language regarding the
nature of textual meaning. Specifi cally, they have looked upon references
to the meaning of a text as if they referred to the text’s meaning as a thing
in itself, separable (even) from the author’s intention, when in fact the
language they were engaging was not philosophically charged and was
never intended to express such an idea. It’s funny, sometimes, how rumors
get started.
NOTES
- Jeffrey Stout claimed, some thirty years ago, that there is no way of decid-
ing between these competing meanings of “meaning” (“What is the
Meaning of a Text?” New Literary History 14 [1982]: 12).
76 J.C. POIRIER