[Milton-L] Fish and Milton

[Harold Skulsky]

Intentionalism is the doctrine that the primary if not sole determinant of utterance meaning is the intention of the utterer. Intentionalism is false.

What follows is a parable. The characters are two itinerant males; call them Estragon and Vladimir. 

(1) After a long siience, Estragon says something to Vladimir. 

(2) Now the possibilities are these: Estragon either (a) managed to say, or (b) failed to say, WHAT HE MEANT TO SAY.

(3) In the absence of contextual cues to the contrary, Vladimir will follow the default strategy of assuming that Estragon succeeded in saying what he meant to say. (This assumption is one variant of the so-called Rule of Charity.)

(4) If it turns out that Estragon failed to say what he meant to say, his intention may still be retrievable, partly by referring to cases in which Estragon succeeded in saying something relevant, or by relying on background information about Estragon. But these external routes to Estragon's intention are strictly irrelevant to what Estragon actually succeeded in getting said. 

Point (4) is why intention is strictly irrelevant to the meaning of what one says -  to the meaning of one's utterance or text - and hence why intentionalism is false.

The charitable default assumption - that Estragon meant what he said - is workable because the mere possibility of getting across to Vladimir what Estragon means to say presupposes a SYSTEM OF COMMUNICATION -  a system used by the two of them. Call the system C. C will have the usual ingredients: (a) a language, (b) a grammar, (c) a lexicon (meaning assignment to parts of the language), (d) a set of lore, commonplaces, and assumptions shared by Estragon and Vladimir, (e) pragmatic and rhetorical rules for replacing the lexicon and for supplementing the grammar in response to contextual cues. (For present purposes we will ignore the Kripke-Wittgenstein strictures on the notion of C - though unlike certain fatuous continentals they actually have a case to make.)

Vladimir is Estragon's primary audience. But not infrequently a speaker (Estragon is perhaps Milton and Vladimir  is his first readers) expects to be overheard, or to have his utterance or text passed on to absent others. The more remote in time and culture the others are (call them Posterity), the more difficult it will be for them to gain access to C, and hence to have a fair shot at finding out what Estragon managed to get said in the system of communication he was actually using. They may (by accident or design) replace C with an alternative C-prime, but it would be self-deceiving or sophistic to expect an application of C-prime to deliver what Estragon managed to get said in C, much less what Estragon intended to say in C. 

Some gifted "readers" in Posterity may produce ingenious readings by applying an alternative system C-prime, either a prevailing system or one of their own concoction. Some of these readings may well be surprising -  though, given that they don't rely on C, the surprisingness itself should not be surprising. What's more, some of the surprising readings may be breathtakingly beautiful -  though in such a case it seem inescapably clear that the credit for the surprise and beauty does not go to Estragon, and in fact that the text involved is not Estragon's at all, despite exact physical resemblance. A text in C is ipso facto not a text in C-prime.

The moral of the parable of Vladimir and Estragon: our profession becomes a laughing stock among the professions when it abandons the workaday and, for the most part, breathtakingly unbeautiful business of doing its homework in an effort to get straight what Estragon actually got said. (Cf. Leopold von Ranke's embattled definition of history.)