- Vandevelde, The Task of the Interpreter , 8. There is a sense in which
Vandevelde does defend the reality of what he calls the second “level” of
meaning, in that he refers to public language as something that precedes
the author’s expression of his or her intention, and which forms a grid that
limits the ways in which the intention can be encoded. He calls this the
“semiotic” side of “verbal meaning” ( The Task of the Interpreter , 70). It is
debatable, however, whether this limitation amounts to much—from an
author’s viewpoint, it might be comparable to a complaint about the ines-
capability of pixelation by someone who cannot even see the pixelation of
a picture. On a more purely theoretical level, however, it should be said
that the defi nitional difference between intentional and semiotic meaning
still obtains, and that the interference caused by the limits of public lan-
guage is a logistical rather than a logical concern. - Vandevelde, The Task of the Interpreter , 159.
- Whose Community? Which Interpretation? Philosophical Hermeneutics for
the Church , The Church and Postmodern Culture (Grand Rapids: Baker
Academic, 2009), 61. - Whose Community? Which Interpretation? , 54. The reference to desirability
might be an echo of Wimsatt and Beardsley’s “The Intentional Fallacy.”
Regardless of its source, the question arises: why is a philosophical analysis
raising the question of a given approach’s desirability? - Whose Community? Which Interpretation? , 54. Westphal consistently por-
trays Hirsch’s overriding concern as a fear of relativism, and feels able, in
the light of that concern, to allay such fears by showing that the scheme he
aims at is something rather less than “anything goes.” This, of course,
misses the essence of Hirsch’s argument. - Whose Community? Which Interpretation? , 112.
- L. William Oliverio Jr., Theological Hermeneutics in the Classical Pentecostal
Tradition: A Typological Account , Global Pentecostal and Charismatic
Studies 12 (Leiden: Brill, 2012), 348. - “The Word of the Spirit in the Interpretation of Holy Scripture from the
Perspective of a Charismatic Biblical Theologian,” JPT 18 (2009): 167–168. - Sextus’s reference to “the signifying voice” is an obvious echo of Aristotle,
De Interpretatione 16a3: “The things that are in the voice are symbols of
the affections in the soul, and written things are symbols of the things that
are in the voice.” On Sextus’s argument, see A.A. Long, Hellenistic
Philosophy: Stoics, Epicureans, Sceptics , 2nd ed. (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1986), 132. - E.D. Hirsch, Jr., Validity in Interpretation (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 1967), 4. Kevin J. Vanhoozer comes near this view when he remarks,
“Texts have neither meanings nor intentions apart from being considered
someone’s ” (“Discourse on Matter: Hermeneutics and the ‘Miracle’ of
80 J.C. POIRIER