I n t e r p r e t a t i o n1 4 5Once again, this is not to suggest that anything goes. There may be
some conceivable situation in which ‘Shall I compare thee to a
summer’s day?’ could mean ‘Just scratch a bit under the shoulder
blade, will you?’ Perhaps there is a tribe in the Amazon basin in
whose language, by an amazing coincidence, the sounds of
Shakespeare’s line corresponds exactly to the sounds they make
when they ask to be scratched a bit under the shoulder blade. Or
perhaps some mighty cataclysm in the future will transform the
English language so radically that when people murmur to us ‘Shall
I compare thee to a summer’s day?’, we instantly oblige by scratching
their backs. For us and for now, however, that is not what
Shakespeare’s line signifies.
One reason for this is that meaning is a public affair. There could
not be a meaning that only I was in possession of, as there could be
a plot of land that only I owned. Meaning is not a matter of private
property. I cannot privately decide to make the phrase ‘herme-
neutical phenomenology’ mean ‘Meryl Streep’. Meaning belongs
to language, and language distils the sense we collectively make of
our world. It is not free- floating. Rather, it is bound up with the
ways we go to work on reality – with a society’s values, traditions,
assumptions, institutions and material conditions. In the end, we
speak as we do because of the things that we do. To change a
language decisively, you would have to change at least some of this.
Meaning is not fixed in the sense that it is inherent in a specific set
of words. If this were so, there could be no possibility of transla-
tion. If meaning is relatively determinate, it is because it is more
than just a verbal affair. It signifies a compact between human
beings in a specific place and time, embodying their shared ways of
acting, feeling and perceiving. Even when people conflict over such
things, they must agree to some extent on what it is they are