- Hans-Georg Gadamer’s Truth and Method is rife with category errors
arising from a failure to differentiate between alternative defi nitions of
“meaning.” See Eduardo J. Echeverria, “Gadamer’s Hermeneutics and the
Question of Relativism,” in Hermeneutics at the Crossroads , ed. Kevin
J. Vanhoozer, James K.A. Smith, and Bruce Ellis Benson, Indiana Series in
the Philosophy of Religion , ed. Merold Westphal (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 2006), 72.
- Gordon Baker notes: “To acknowledge one conception of meaning does
not render illegitimate a different conception of it” ( Wittgenstein’s Method:
Neglected Aspects , ed. Katherine J. Morris[Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2004],
284).
- According to Stanley Fish, “Meaning is an event , something that happens,
not on the page, where we are accustomed to look for it, but in the interac-
tion between the fl ow of print (or sound) and the actively mediating con-
sciousness of a reader-hearer” ( Surprised by Sin: The Reader in Paradise
Lost [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1967], x). In an updated ver-
sion of this conceit, Fish would replace the solitary reader with the com-
munity: “[I]t is interpretive communities, rather than either the text or the
reader, that produce meanings and are responsible for the emergence of
formal features” ( Is There a Text in this Class? The Authority of Interpretive
Communities [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1980], 14).
- Kenneth J. Archer, “Pentecostal Story: The Hermeneutical Filter for the
Making of Meaning,” Pneuma 26 (2004): 43. Archer recently developed
his views further in “Pentecostal Hermeneutics and the Society for
Pentecostal Studies,” Pneuma 37 (2015): 317–139.
- Kenneth J. Archer, A Pentecostal Hermeneutic: Spirit, Scripture and
Community (Cleveland, TN: CPT Press, 2009), 237 (cf. 232). A similar
view is found in Ulrich Luz: “[B]iblical texts do not have a simple fi xed
meaning, which would be identical with their original meaning; they have
power (cf. Rom. 1:16; 1 Cor. 1:18) to create new meanings for and with
new people in new situations. ... Interpreting most biblical texts means not
re production but production of meaning out of the transmitted wordshells
and with the help of the power of the text. ... The meaning of a biblical
text (and of many literary texts) is a ‘potential’ of meaning” ( Matthew in
History: Interpretation, Infl uence, and Effects [Minneapolis: Fortress,
1994], 19).
- On the “fl uidity” of meaning (on these accounts), cf. Stephen Prickett’s
reference to “[t]he Barthesian fl ux of meaning” ( Words and The Word :
Language, Poetics and Biblical Interpretation [Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1986], 27).
- As Pol Vandevelde notes, “[E]ven those who dismiss the original intention
or modify it do not deny it” ( The Task of the Interpreter: Text, Meaning,
and Negotiation [Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2005], 37).
THERE IS NOTHING OUTSIDE THE INTENTION: ADDRESSING “MEANING”... 77
