called “meaning” would be to second-guess common parlance. Therein,
I suggest, lies much of the problem: the fact that “meaning” has so many
different meanings has caused a good deal of confusion. 2 Problems arise
when a theorist tries to argue that meaning is such and such, and then
concludes, as a matter of elimination, that meaning therefore is not some-
thing else. 3
In Pentecostal circles, the tactic of asserting one meaning of “meaning”
to crowd out others is perhaps most obvious in Kenneth Archer’s argu-
ment for a postmodernist, quasi-Fishian view of meaning. 4 For Archer,
the fact that something called “meaning” is “produced” in the “trans-
action between the biblical text and the community” 5 is reason enough
(apparently) for saying that that sort of meaning is the proper object of
hermeneutics. Never mind the fact that other understandings of “mean-
ing” are just as common or (sometimes) just as grounded in existents
(see below)—the fact that something describable as “meaning” is created
during the reading event must mean (according to the implicative lines of
Archer’s argument) that other accounts of “meaning” are simply wrong,
and that “the community or individual is the sole arena in which meaning
is produced.” 6 The suggestion that there might be other legitimate uses of
the word “meaning” is never met head on—it is only pushed away by con-
stant reminders that readerly “meaning” is something real and observable.
Archer’s proceeding simply mistakes the multivalence of the word “mean-
ing” for competing understandings of a purported single given answering
to that same name.
Whenever competing defi nitions of a term are simultaneously active,
the most immediate threat is that discussion partners will be speaking past
each other (as they are in Archer’s account). But there is also the danger,
in some ways more invidious, that these different defi nitions will be mis-
taken for different aspects of a single thing. This appears to have happened
with the way competing uses of the word “meaning” have been handled
in some circles: different defi nitions of “meaning” have been confused for
different aspects or “levels” of a single thing called “meaning.” A simple
case of terminological confusion between meaning-as-intention, meaning-
as- literal-code, and meaning-as-readerly-effect not only has caused some
to think that conceding one understanding of meaning entails rejecting
the others, but has also led others to posit a more expansionist view of
meaning as some sort of fl uid property that joins two or three (local-
ized) “meanings” into one transcendent philosophical given—a morphing
blob of meaning, if you will. 7 On the terms of this expansionist defi nition,
68 J.C. POIRIER