Re: Can we grasp an author's meaning?

[Matthew Hodgetts <matthew.hodgetts@gmail.com>]

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Your argument makes a lot of sense, Rab, although I guess that we
cannot be sure that your restricted list of viable possible
interpretations of whatever text we are trying to read is actually
restricted enough to allow us good enough an idea about what it means.
Perhaps 99% of possible interpretations can be rejected, yet the
remaining 1% still vary wildly. In any case it seems absurd to say
that since none of us go through so exhaustive a process when reading
anything that therefore nobody in history has ever understood anything
written to them.

I think that perhaps an important context in which the author writes
is the language in which it is written, (if we can call a language to
be a context!). If we speak the same language then in some sense we do
speak the same language, so we do share with the author a fairly
important context. So even if Derrida's argument follows through (and
I do not claim that it does) it doesn't matter, since we can simply
deny the truth of premise two.

Do you reckon this is too simplistic a response though? Perhaps there
is significantly different things that can be understood by a sentence
by different speakers of the same language?

Matt.


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