History and Theory 45 (October 2006), 448-454 © Wesleyan University 2006 ISSN: 0018-2656

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InterpretIve reasonIng. By laurent Stern. Ithaca: cornell University press, 2005. pp. xiv, 214.

Here are some claims that all might reasonably be taken to rest upon interpretive reasoning, despite their significantly different subject matters and degrees of plausibility:

(a) Wordsworth’s “tintern abbey” is about death.(b) the Organgrinder lied in Schubert’s Winterreise is manically life-

affirming.(c) the governess in Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw is mad.(d) I am kind.(e) you are kind.(f) Baby Boomers are narcissistic.(g) Baby Boomers are egalitarians.(h) The revolutions of 1848 failed because the proletariat was not yet fully

formed.(i) Some Bosnian Serb military leaders committed war crimes in the course

of their campaign of ethnic cleansing directed against Bosnian Muslims and croats.

What makes it natural to call such claims interpretive is that they attempt to cross a “gap between what we can . . . and what we do know” (27). Unlike, say, claims that report the results of standard measurements of length or volume for medium-sized objects, there is reasoned disagreement about whether these claims are true, or at least there is the appearance of reasoning on each side of a disagreement. In order to arrive at any of (a) to (i) for oneself rather than by hearsay, one must ”see” something “in” the phenomenon under description. Sometimes this “seeing in” can become very widely shared, as perhaps in (a) and (i), so that the claim in the end becomes (all but) a statement of (measurable) fact. Sometimes controversy about what is there to be seen persists between groups or individuals. But in any case, “seeing in” is crucial to justification.

The class of claims that rest on interpretive reasoning is unclear. Some evaluations rest on interpretive reasoning, and some do not. For example, “murder is wrong” is closer to a moral fact than to being a matter of interpretation (no matter how difficult it may be to distinguish specific cases of murder from self-defense, manslaughter, and so on). Nor, as Wittgenstein noted, is interpreting the same as understanding. We understand many ordinary literal sentences without interpreting them. For example, for adult English speakers “snow is white” raises

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no problems of understanding, and there is no paraphrase of this sentence that is clearer than the original. Interpretation, again, comes into play only when there is a gap between the words or deeds that confront us and what we may, after some initial puzzlement, take them to mean. perhaps all understanding (Verstehen) rests deeply on “pre-understanding” (Vorhaben) that emerges only through engagement in practices, as Heidegger suggests. But even if this is true, and even if the boundaries are fuzzy, there is still a distinction between cases in which normal adult speakers of a language are initially puzzled and interpretation (Deutung) is called for, and cases in which it is not.

Laurent Stern’s project is to develop a systematic theory of the justification of interpretive claims. His theory specifies two different stages of interpretation that are analytically distinguishable, even if they typically occur together in fact. The first stage consists in conforming to two constraints on interpreting, characterized by Stern as the factual constraint and the normative constraint. “We defend our interpretations by showing that they are consistent with the facts known to us [the factual constraint] and that they are the best available for our purposes [the normative constraint]” (187). Conforming to these two constraints alone, however, does not suffice to justify an interpretation. Facts that are not in dispute may be scanty, and different interpreters may have radically different purposes, including purposes as widely divergent as psychoanalytic therapy, religious conversion, or fomenting the proletarian revolution. Is there then anything further to which interpreters might appeal in order to justify their claims?

The answer comes in the second stage of interpretation (again, only analytically and not empirically distinguishable from the first). There are, Stern argues, two principles that govern good interpreting, and conformity to these principles can contribute justificatory force to an interpretation. Conformity to at least one of these two principles is in fact implicit in the reasoning of anyone who is genuinely interpreting, genuinely engaged in a form of thinking for him or herself, as opposed to simply parroting others, dogmatically asserting, or just gassing. Stern takes his model of the role of these principles in interpretive reasoning from Kant’s account of what one must presuppose about oneself in undertaking to make a judgment of taste. According to Kant, when undertaking to judge beauty in nature, as opposed either to judging the morally good or enjoying the merely agreeable, one must suppose that the feeling of pleasure that is the ground or subjective basis of one’s judgment does not rest on “any private conditions, pertaining to [oneself as] subject alone” (163, citing Kant’s Critique of Judgment). When and only when one makes this supposition is one genuinely judging what is beautiful. One can be wrong: there may be a private condition—something peculiar about oneself—that causes and explains a feeling of pleasure. Nonetheless, however, commitment to the effort not to rely on any private conditions or on anything peculiar to oneself is built into the activity of (genuinely) judging the beautiful.

Just so, according to Stern, with regard to interpreting. commitment to a principle, specifically to one of two principles, is implicitly built into the activity of (genuinely) interpreting. These two principles are laid out by Stern as follows:

Universalizability Principle: Every reasonable person who is familiar with the circum-stances understands what is at issue the way I do (9).

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Restrictive Principle: Only reasonable persons who are familiar with the circumstances understand what is at issue the way I do (10).

The first principle says that all competent people agree with me. The second, distinctly weaker principle, says that all people who agree with me are competent. (As formulated, the second principle does not require the existence of any people who agree with me; if there are none, then the Restrictive Principle is vacuously satisfied. I take it, however, that Stern means to include in this principle the conversational implicature that there are some such people. to rely on this second, restrictive principle is, he says, as much as to say “look here! I am not mad” (79): some competent people agree with me.) “It is,” Stern writes, “the burden of this study to establish conditions permitting appeal to one of these statements as if it were a principle” (10).

Stern then distinguishes two kinds of interpretations in terms of their reliance on these principles. Surface interpretations, including both natural interpretations in the indicative mood and natural interpretations in the subjunctive mood, rely on the Universalizability Principle. The subjects whose words or actions are being interpreted may be expected to agree with the proffered interpretation either in fact (indicative mood) or upon adequate reflection (subjunctive mood). Deep interpretations, in contrast, rely on the restrictive principle. they charge the subject with self-deception, that is, with not really knowing what she or he is doing, and the subjects who are being thus interpreted will not be expected to agree with them unless and until those subjects change significantly. Hence deep interpretations are issued with “a prophetic voice” (60). Assent from the subject under interpretation can be forthcoming only when the subject under interpretation grows up, joins the revolution, is born again, or otherwise undergoes conversion.

Here one may well wonder what genuine justificatory force is contributed to an interpretation by appealing to the Restrictive Principle. Children, for example, appeal to this principle when they say things like, “All my friends [whom I regard as competent] are doing it” (for example, “having innocent fun” by spending four hours a day on mySpace). “Four hours a day on mySpace” is here interpreted as “having innocent fun,” and the child may seek to bolster this interpretation by claiming that all who agree with him or her (“all my friends”) are reasonable. parents, however, will surely want to know exactly what this activity is like on its own terms, quite apart from the opinions of putatively reasonable others who participate in it. As the child will soon find out, saying “My friends say it’s fine, and they’re reasonable” just won’t do as a way of responding to parental anxieties.

With perhaps something like this line of worry about the Restrictive Principle in view, Stern notes that “the Restrictive Principle [is] a defective principle that is useful only as a temporary expedient” (191). Appealing to it may buy tendentious interpreters some time, in the hope that their contentious interlocutors may change and catch on to their point of view. But at the very end of a long day, reasons in favor of an interpretation will have to be given, which reasons are in principle acceptable to anyone who is competent. that is, in the end, appeal will have to be made to the Universalizability Principle, and “deep interpretations are [properly] understood as natural interpretations in the subjunctive mood that have a moral

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dimension” (191). We engage in deep interpretation and we tolerate the existence of various practices of deep interpretation because of our sense that new, morally significant points of view may always become available. History, after all, is complicated and full of surprises, and we may have to learn to look at things anew. But in the end, our interpretations will be justified, if at all, only by the emergence of general agreement that confirms appeal to the Universalizability Principle. For this reason, it is “unscrupulous” simply to “stand on” one’s deep interpretation and to appeal only to the Restrictive Principle (63). Scrupulous interpreters must undertake to bring into view genuine reasons for their interpretations, endorsable by all competent interpreters.

But now consider what justificatory force is provided by appeal to the Universalizability principle, and consider exactly what Stern is asking us to do. According to Stern, the Universalizability Principle is, first, a principle that we have imposed on ourselves qua interpreters and that we always already presuppose. moreover, it is, second, a principle to which appeal may be made in order to justify an interpretation. Again: “it is the burden of this study to establish conditions permitting appeal to one of these statements as if it were a principle” (10). I am inclined to say that the first claim is trivial and that the second claim is confused. The first claim—we always already qua interpreters presuppose the Universalizability principle—says no more than that interpreters aspire to afford us knowledge of the phenomena they are interpreting. Since genuine, well-established knowledge-claims are such that no reasonable person disagrees or may disagree with them, it is then trivially true that interpreters must strive to win the agreement of every reasonable person in the very long run. So to strive is just part of what it is to play the knowledge game. There is no special or distinctive connection between the Universalizability principle and interpreting (as opposed to other forms of knowledge seeking).

On the other hand, to appeal to the Universalizability principle in order to justify a specific interpretation is likely to be bootless. In order to get genuine justificatory force out of this appeal, the interpreter is going to have to show that all competent interpreters in fact do agree with the proposed interpretation. First, that is likely to be hard work. Where are the competent to be found, and by what marks are they to be known? Second, even if they are found and even if they agree with the interpretation proposed, skeptical critics are surely going to want to know why they agree. are there good reasons in view—reasons directly pertaining to the subject matter at hand—for their agreement? If there are, then it is these reasons that are the source of justificatory force, not the simple fact of opinion among the competent. If there are not, then the opinions at hand are not to be trusted, no matter whether they are those of the competent or not.

The underlying difficulty here is neither that the Universalizability Principle is false nor that it is not genuinely presupposed in the activity of interpreting in a way that aims at knowledge. It is rather that appeal to this principle does no distinctive epistemic work when there is a dispute about whether a given interpretation is well-founded. As Stern himself admits, “the usefulness of the two principles cannot be shown within the context of an interpretive controversy” (192). What he offers us is a model of the justification of interpretations that is all

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at once abstracted from actual controversies, explanatory, and normative (191). The trouble is that the model is so abstracted from contexts of actual interpretive activity and debate about interpretations that it is hard to see what explanatory or normative force it has.

consider, in contrast, how interpreters actually do their work and enter into argument with their interlocutors. Interpreters work from families of cases: cases of, for example, dramatic changes in relations of production, or cases of excessive emotionalism and obsessive thinking, or cases of religious commitment. As they work through these cases, they construct a story about the motives, interests, and powers that are in play in these cases, in various but nonetheless interrelated ways. In light of this interpretive construal of motives, interests, and powers, they begin to see further similarities among further cases, and they invite their interlocutors and readers to look at these cases for themselves in light of their construals. Here, if they are scrupulously argumentative, they do seek the agreement of others in general. But the fact that they are aiming for this does not do any justificatory work. Rather, that work is done by their ability plausibly to encompass for many attentive observers the details of a large range of cases under an imaginatively plausible story about motives, interests, and powers. Like effective “perceptualist” critics of works of art, they help us to “see” what is going on as the playing out of motives, interests, and powers that we can take ourselves to share.1 crucial to the success of the interpretation is that readers and interlocutors should come to “see” themselves in the story that is told—that is, that they come to accept the thought that they too possess the motives, interests, and powers that are ascribed to the subjects whose words and action are under interpretation. That this should happen is roughly what Gadamer means in speaking of the fusion of horizons between an author and a reader, and roughly what Freud means in regarding it as part of a cure that the patient should “accept” the interpretation. A justified interpretation is, in sum, one that wins the agreement of many or all reasonable interpreters (as Stern sees) by covering the details of a significant family of cases under a story that enables us to recognize ourselves along with the interpretands as possessing distinctive motives, interests, and powers (as Stern does not see).

It is striking that Interpretive Reasoning contains no philosophical anthropology or philosophical psychology at all, that is, no account of general human motives, interests, or powers, and no account of the role of a story about them in “covering” a family of cases. It is, instead, too abstractly epistemological. And it is striking that there is no mention of a range of theorists of interpretation who have developed philosophical anthropologies that are attentive to details and who have thought about the organizing role of these anthropologies in the construction of interpretations: Hans-Georg Gadamer, Charles Taylor, Rudolf Makkreel, Alasdair MacIntyre, T. W. adorno, Jürgen Habermas, and richard Bernstein come to mind.

1. “Perceptualist” models of criticism of works of art have been notably developed by Arnold Isenberg, “critical communication,” Philosophical Review 57 (July 1949), 330-344, and Stanley Cavell, “Aesthetic Problems of Modern Philosophy,” in Cavell, Must We Mean What We Say? (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1969), 73-96. For an overview of this model of critical understanding, which contrasts it with other models, see richard Eldridge, An Introduction to the Philosophy of Art (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 2003), chapter 6, “Understanding Art,” 128-149.

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Stern’s concentration on the abstract “logic” of justification also leads him to underestimate the extent to which interpreting is a social activity, in which one is seeking to align oneself with and against others under a general narrative of human motives, interests, and powers. “Each of us,” he writes, “is alone in deciding when to apply and when to suspend a rule governing the interpreting activity” (147). In one way, this is surely right. Each of us is individually responsible for arranging cases under a plausible narrative or for judging whether a narrative covering such an arrangement is plausible. It is no argument to say “many people think this story is a good one.” One must judge for oneself, so long as one is seeking knowledge. about all this Stern is right. But individual responsibility does not imply social isolation. That is, it does not follow that when one either constructs or judges interpretations one is making use only of powers that are inherently possessed by individuals independent of socialization. Yet Stern seems to take it to follow, in, for example, referring to confronting skepticism as “this paradigm of a solitary inquiry” (148), as though a thinking individual mind somehow ab novo raised epistemological questions for itself. Against this, it is at least plausible to hold that what motivates a confrontation with skepticism is some unease that is felt by the inquirer in relation to practice and social life as they stand. And it is plausible to hold that the powers of “renarrating” what is going on that are exercised in interpreting are powers that been in part socially developed. In a famous paper, Alasdair MacIntyre once suggested that we might be better served to talk of “Hamlet’s Epistemology” and “Hume’s Madness” rather than the other way round.2 Hamlet, that is to say, has good reasons in his social situation to raise skeptical questions: the ghost of his father is demanding that he do something violently disruptive in order to right the social order, and this is a demand that may well deserve careful scrutiny. Hume, in contrast, seems to regard skeptical worries as stemming “naturally” and without specifically motivating context from reflection alone, at least for some; it may be madness thus to doubt. Here MacIntyre’s neo-Hegelian suggestion is that we are, insofar as we are inquiring subjects, at bottom always already located in a social and historical space. Perhaps this suggestion is wrong. But it is disappointing to see no encounter with it in Interpretive Reasoning.

the most interesting and important claim that Stern makes suggests, perhaps more than he realizes, a dramatic idea about the nature of philosophy in general. To raise skeptical worries and to respond to them, and perhaps also to do philosophy in general, are matters of taking up an interpretive stance on one’s own experience. In thinking, for example, about whether experience is “originally and basically” “of” ideas or rather of “physical” objects, or about whether I am now living in an unjust society, I must, Stern argues, ask, “Do I speak about my own experiences [with a universal voice, successfully], or am I deceiving myself on this matter?” (156). I must, in giving my characterization of the nature of (my) experience ,undertake to overcome “all ‘private conditions’” in myself (163). I might be wrong in saying what I say about the nature of my experience, and if I am, then there will be “a shift in focus from what is at issue [the nature of experience] to

2. Alasdair MacIntyre, “Epistemological Crises, Dramatic Narrative, and the Philosophy of Science,” The Monist 60 (1977), 453-472.

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the interpreter” (164): perhaps I am mad, or self-deceived, or the victim of an ideology, or in some other way unable to attend to and be articulate about my own experience. to say all this is to say that one’s very identity and sanity as a human subject are at stake—up for testing and possible repudiation—within the activity of doing philosophy. This strikes me as an authentic and important insight into the depth, strangeness, intimacy, and instability of philosophical thinking as such. What, however, historians have perhaps always already known is that interpretive questions about the nature of experience, as also about more specific stretches of discourse and action, arise within specific sociohistorical contexts and are answered, if at all, by the partly socially enabled construction of a better narrative of the details of human motives, interests, and powers across ranges of cases. Abstract epistemology is neither chthonically self-creating nor sufficient unto the day.

rIchard eldrIdge

Swarthmore College