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Doing What Comes Naturally: Change, Rhetoric and the Practice of Theory in Literary andLegal Studies

1. Introduction: Going Downthe Anti-Formalist Road

I It is one of the theses of this book that many of the issues in interpretive theory can be reduced to a few basic questions in the philosophyof language. Consider, for example, the discussion of "presupposition"in Ruth Kempson

Presupposition and the Delimitation of Semantics

( Cambridge, 1975). Kempson begins by observing that presuppositioncan be defined "in one of two ways--either as a relation between statements (parallel to entailment, synonymy, etc.) or as a property of thespeaker's belief in uttering a sentence" (p.2). The difference is between a

formal

notion of presupposition in which it is a feature of sentences as they exist in the abstract apart from any particular occasion of use, and presupposition as a fact about what is in a speaker's mind--hisunderstanding of the world and of the situation in which he now findshimself--at the moment of utterance. As Kempson observes, the possibility of deriving meaning from the formal properties of sentences cannot survive the serious assertion of a speaker-based theory of presupposition, for "if presuppositions in terms of speaker-belief are consideredto be a part of the semantic interpretation of sentences, then it seemsthat the meaning of sentences must be in terms of speaker-hearer relations and not . . . in terms of the relation between a symbol or set of symbols and the object or state described" (pp.2-3). And if that is so, "one must give up the standard claim that the meaning of a sentence isa function of the meaning of its constituent parts" (p.60). This follows because if the presuppositions of an utterance vary with the beliefsof speakers and hearers--that is, if no sentence has "a unique set of presuppositions"--then "every sentence can be analyzed with . . . asmany different sets of presuppositions" as there are different possiblecontextualizations and there is no regular and predictable way to assigna meaning, or even a range of possible meanings, to a particular sentence.Meaning, in short, becomes entirely contextual and "cannot bedetermined independent of the speaker of a sentence in a particular situation" (p.60). Once this conclusion has been reached, others immediately follow:One is thus faced with an analysis of meaning which claims thatevery sentence has an indeterminate number of indeterminablemeaning representations. And if the meanings of sentences are indeterminable, then meaning relations between sentences such asentailment, contradiction, by definition cannot be predicted. More

over . . . it would follow that the grammaticality of sentencescannot be determined either, independent of the situation in whichthey are uttered. But this has the immediate consequence that one'sgrammar would not be predictive.By producing this sequence of entailments, Kempson (however inadvertently and even reluctantly) makes a very important point: onceyou start down the and-formalist road, there is no place to stop; removethe connection between observable features and the specification of meaning, and you also remove everything else that is supposedly independent of context; entailment, contradiction, grammaticality itself,all become as variable and contingent as presupposition. This, however,is not the conclusion Kempson reaches; and indeed it is the specter of reaching it that drives her in the opposite direction:We are thus faced with the conclusion that a theory which incorporates a speaker relative concept of presupposition as part of itssemantic representation is in principle unable to fulfill any of thefour conditions I set up initially (1.1) as a prerequisite for anysemantic theory and therefore must be relinquished. (p.60)Those conditions include "a systematic relation between the meaning of lexical items and the syntactic structure of the sentence," a "finite setof predictive rules," the mechanical separation of non-deviant fromanomalous sentences, and predictability of meaning relations betweensentences. Kempson is quite right to observe that a speaker-relative concept of presupposition and therefore of meaning makes the fulfilling of those conditions impossible since the variability of speakers and the dif ficulty of determining what is in their minds precludes generality andmakes every speech situation unique. The surprise is in the last phrase:"and therefore must be relinquished." Her reasoning is that since speaker-relative presupposition, if taken seriously, would create grave (indeed, insurmountable) difficulties for a semantic theory, we cannottake it seriously. The conclusion is not reached because the evidence forspeaker-relative presupposition is weak or because the connection between speaker-relative presupposition and meaning is specious, but because to pursue this line of thought would be to give up the pursuit of theory. In short, for Kempson this line of thought is unthinkable in thesense that her deepest assumptions mark it as obviously absurd. Surelyany thesis that is incompatible with the assumed goal of linguistics--the goal of building a theoretical model of language--must be rejectedout of hand; after all, the "four demands" that speaker-relative presupposition fails to satisfy "are agreed in principle by all linguists" (p.2).If Kempson were to give credence to this thesis, she would be denyingher membership in the community of linguists and (in effect) denyingthe most significant aspect of her being.I would not be misunderstood. I am not criticizing Kempson forrejecting arguments that are stigmatized in advance by the beliefs shenecessarily holds as a practicing linguist. She has no choice, if by chokeone means a judgment reached independently of any predispositions or

biases. It is just those predispositions and biases--those assumptions concerning what must be the case in the matter of language--that fill her judgment, and one would be making if not an impossible at least Herculean demand if one were to ask her to set them aside.Again, I would not be misunderstood. I am not saying that Kempson is beyond criticism simply because the context of which she is anextension prevents her from seeing certain arguments as respectable oreven makable. In my very strong opinion the arguments she clings to,the arguments that underwrite the project of formal linguistics, arewrong. And it is part of

argument that I can say that despite thesympathetic analysis I make of her "epistemological condition." Thisdoes not mean that I am not in the same condition--embedded in conviction--but that precisely because I am embedded in conviction, mysense of the rightness of my arguments is no less strong than hers andis in no way diminished by my ability to give an account of its source.That at least is the burden of several of the essays in this volume, especially of those that assert the inconsequentiality (in certain terms) of theory.This, however, is to get ahead of my story, and for the time beingI would like to linger a little longer on the issues Kempson raises, formuch of what I want to say builds on the thesis from which she drawsback in horror, the thesis that the meaning of a sentence is

not

a function of the meaning of its constituent parts; or to put it another way,that meaning cannot be formally calculated, derived from the shape of marks on a page; or to put it in the most direct way possible, that thereis no such thing as literal meaning, if by literal meaning one means ameaning that is perspicuous no matter what the context and no matterwhat is in the speaker's or hearer's mind, a meaning that because it isprior to interpretation can serve as a constraint on interpretation. Itmight seem that the thesis that there is no such thing as literal meaning is a limited one, of interest largely to linguists and philosophers of language; but in fact it is a thesis whose implications are almost boundless, for they extend to the very underpinnings of the universe as it isunderstood by persons of a certain cast of mind. It is a cast of mindKempson displays when she concludes that if a unit of meaning cannotbe identified independently of the beliefs of speakers and hearers, theentire enterprise of formal linguistics falls apart, since the first principleof that enterprise demands what the speaker-relative account of presupposition denies.The far-reaching effects of the unavailability of literal meaningare even more evident in the decision of a Minnesota court in a caseargued in 1924. The point at issue is the "parol evidence rule," a rulethat prohibits the introduction of oral evidence in order to alter or varythe meaning of a contract that is deemed to be complete in itself. Obviously it is a rule designed to hold interpretation in check by insistingthat it respect a self-sufficient and self-declaring (literal) meaning. Thealternative, as the court sees it, is chaos: