An Introduction to the Philosophy of Art

of when and in what way we have gone wrong...The use and understanding

of language...depends on tacit consensual regularities which are multiplex

and fluid; except in very gross ways, these regularities are uncodified, and

probably uncodifiable.^15

Through tactful engagement with these regularities, we roughly and mostly

manage to understand one another, as speaker-writers and auditor-readers.

These claims are unexceptionable. Allowing for some differences of idiom

and emphasis, however, they are all endorsed by Fish as well. Fish’s central

point is that the linguistic norms on which understanding dependsaretacit,

consensual, fluid, significantly uncodified, and connected with the existence

of common practical purposes and background experiences. In talking about

the instability of the text, Fish is not insisting that understanding never takes

place; he is rather arguing that it cannot be arrived at by any sort of detached,

purpose-independent, quasi-scientific procedure of attending to language as a

well-bounded and exact formal calculus. There is no way simply to hear a

sound pattern or see a mark andthenin a neutral way, independent of shared

purposes and background and via a process of calculation, simply to“read

off”an intended message. As Fish puts it,

Public and constituting norms...are not embedded in the language (where

they may be read out by anyone with sufficiently clear, that is, unbiased, eyes)

but inhere in institutional structures within which one hears utterances as

already organized with reference to certain assumed purposes and goals...

What constrains [us in understanding] are the understood practices and

assumptions of the institution and not the rules and fixed meanings of a

language system.^16

Fish and Abrams agree, then, that literary texts are produced and understood

by writers and readers making use of fluid linguistic tools, where the avail-

ability and developing use of these tools constitutes the meaning, as opposed

to having a preformed“mental meaning”translated into language. Hence

they agree that there is no possibility of finding a determinate meaning

preformed in the mind of the author prior to the text, and they agree

that there is no need to do so. They agree that when there are sufficiently

shared backgrounds of linguistic practice and of expectations about the

(^15) Ibid., pp. 293–94.
(^16) Fish,“Is there a Text in this Class?,”p. 526A.
152 An Introduction to the Philosophy of Art