Pepper v Hart: a legal system discovering it had a theory of meaning it had never argued for.
Interpretation
The activity of determining what something means - and the question of whether the meaning is found or made.
- Theme
- Logic, language and interpretation
- Tradition
- Cross-tradition
- Term fixed
- 1819
In plain terms
A text does not interpret itself. Someone has to decide what it says, and the decision can be better or worse - which means there is something to get right, and no procedure for getting it.
The disputes are always the same shape. Does the meaning lie in what the author intended, in the words themselves, or in what a competent reader now makes of them? Each answer has cases it handles well. Intention explains why a slip of the pen is not a new meaning. The text explains why an author can be wrong about their own work. The reader explains why a two-thousand-year-old book still says something.
And every institution that runs on documents has had to pick an answer, usually without noticing that it was a philosophical question.
As a philosopher would put it
Schleiermacher makes interpretation a general art rather than a set of techniques for particular kinds of text, and sets the goal as understanding an author as well as, or better than, they understood themselves. Dilthey builds on it a methodological distinction between the human sciences, which understand, and the natural sciences, which explain.
Gadamer's Truth and Method rejects the recovery model. Understanding is not the reconstruction of an original meaning but a fusion of horizons between the text's situation and the reader's, and prejudice - in the sense of prior orientation - is the condition of understanding rather than an obstacle to it.
Betti and Hirsch objected that this abandons the possibility of validity, leaving no way to say a reading is wrong. Ricoeur's response is a hermeneutics of suspicion alongside one of trust: Marx, Nietzsche and Freud read for what a text conceals, which is a discipline rather than an abandonment. Derrida presses further, arguing that meaning is never fully determinate - which Gadamer regarded as an overstatement of his own point.
Where you meet it
Until 1993 English courts could not look at parliamentary debates when deciding what a statute meant. The exclusionary rule was long-standing: the words of the Act were the law, and what ministers had said about them was not.
Pepper v Hart changed it. The House of Lords held that where legislation is ambiguous or leads to absurdity, courts may consult Hansard for statements by the minister promoting the Bill. The case itself concerned a tax on school fees for teachers' children, and the minister's statement in committee contradicted the interpretation the Revenue was pressing.
The decision has been narrowed since and is criticised on grounds that are precisely hermeneutic: that a minister's remark is not the intention of Parliament, that the search costs are large, and that it invites ministers to speak for the record rather than to the House. What the case exposed is that a legal system had been operating a textualist theory of interpretation without ever having argued for it, and that changing to an intentionalist one produced difficulties nobody had priced.
What is actually disputed
Whether interpretations can be valid.
If understanding is always situated, and the reader's horizon is a condition of it rather than an interference, then there is no view from which to declare one reading correct - which strikes critics as making the whole practice unaccountable. Hirsch's answer is to separate meaning, fixed by the author, from significance, which varies with the reader; Gadamer's reply is that the separation is unavailable, since the meaning is only ever met from somewhere.
The practical stakes are highest in law and scripture, where a wrong reading has consequences and the institution cannot suspend judgement. Both fields have produced elaborate machinery - canons of construction, rules of exegesis - and neither treats that machinery as delivering a unique answer, which suggests they have already conceded the philosophical point while continuing to need a decision.
Commonly confused with
- Explanation 1948 Explaining says why something happened. Interpreting says what something means, and Dilthey built a distinction between whole sciences on the difference.
- opinion about a text Interpretations can be better or worse supported. That there is no algorithm does not make them arbitrary.
Defined against
- Definition A definition attempts to fix a meaning once; interpretation is what happens because that fixing never fully takes
Philosophers
- Friedrich Nietzsche Interpretation all the way down, with no text beneath it
- Paul-Michel Foucault Interpretation as a practice with a history and a politics
- Jacques Derrida The argument that determinate meaning is never fully available
- Martin Heidegger Understanding as a mode of being rather than a method
- Peter Abelard The medieval method of setting authorities against each other
Works
- Truth and Method The central modern text
- Of Grammatology The deconstructive challenge
- Sic et Non Conflicting authorities, and the method for handling them
- Being and Time Understanding as prior to method
- On the Genealogy of Morals Reading for what a text conceals
Schools
- Hermeneutics Where interpretation is the central subject
- Phenomenology Where understanding is treated as a mode of existence
- Post-Structuralism Where determinate meaning is questioned
- Purva Mimamsa Where scriptural interpretation becomes a rigorous discipline
- Early Scholasticism Where conflicting authorities are systematically reconciled
Related concepts
Meaning 1892 · Hermeneutic circle 1927 · Discourse 1966 · Language game 1953 · Truth c. 330 BC
Interpretation as a general philosophical problem, rather than a technique for reading scripture or law, emerges in the nineteenth century with Schleiermacher and Dilthey and becomes central with Gadamer.