What Is a Text?
International Philosophical Quarterly 42 (4):493-508 (2002)
| Abstract | The paper defends a principle of procedural individualism according to which meanings are always subjective or inter-subjective. Texts do not have meanings in themselves, but rather are objects to which individuals attach various meanings. The paper then deploys this analysis of meaning to address debates about textuality. It considers the stability of the text: although texts are indeterminate in that future individuals might attach unforeseen meanings to them, they have determinate content at any given time in that the meanings people have attached to them are fixed. And it considers the relationship of textual meaning to authorial meaning: authors and readers alike attach meanings to texts, with confusions arising when philosophers assume that one or the other must constitute the meaning of the text itself | |||||||||
| Keywords | No keywords specified (fix it) | |||||||||
| Categories | No categories specified (fix it) | |||||||||
| Options |
|
|||||||||
Download options| PhilPapers Archive |
Upload a copy of this paper Check publisher's policy on self-archival Papers currently archived: 5,653 |
| External links |
 |
| Through your library | Configure |
Similar books and articlesDieter Freundlieb (1991). Epistemological Realism and the Indeterminacy of Meaning. Is Systematic Interpretation Possible? Journal for General Philosophy of Science 22 (2):245-261.
Mark Bevir (2012). In Defence of Historicism. Journal of the Philosophy of History 6 (1):111-114.
Eric Margolis & Stephen Laurence (1998). Multiple Meanings and Stability of Content. Journal of Philosophy 95 (5):255-63.
William Child (2006). Interpreting People and Interpreting Texts. International Journal of Philosophical Studies 14 (3):423 – 441.
Igorʹ A. Melʹčuk (2012). Semantics: From Meaning to Text. John Benjamins Pub. Co..
Cecil H. Brown (1976). Semantic Components, Meaning, and Use in Ethnosemantics. Philosophy of Science 43 (3):378-395.
Mark Siebel (2008). The Ontology of Meanings. Philosophical Studies 137 (3).
James Blachowicz (1994). Unarticulated Meaning. Erkenntnis 40 (1):43 - 70.
Mark Siebel (2008). Review: The Ontology of Meanings. [REVIEW] Philosophical Studies 137 (3):417 - 426.
Arkadiusz Chrudzimski (1999). Are Meanings in the Head? Ingarden’s Theory of Meaning. Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 30 (3):306-326.
Corine Besson (2012). Empty Natural Kind Terms and Dry-Earth. Erkenntnis 76 (3):403-425.
Richard Heck (forthcoming). Is Compositionality a Trivial Principle? Frontiers of Philosophy in China.
Analytics
Monthly downloads
Sorry, there are not enough data points to plot this chart.
|
Added to index2011-01-09Total downloads0Recent downloads (6 months)0How can I increase my downloads? |
My notes
Discussion
