Truth in Interpretation - Ronald Dworkin (2009)

my subject today is interpretation my question is there truth to be had in interpretation you're all familiar with the controversies that we our lawyers our professors our judges our justices have about interpretation some of them are very Grand does the Second Amendment properly interpret interpreted give us as individuals the right to have firearms does the Second Amendment apply to the states does the First Amendment apply to corporations and protect them when they make Hillary the movie some of the questions are much less Grand they're questions about the right interpretation of the Uniform Commercial Code or

precedents governing the law of negotiable instruments we disagree at every level and we are as a profession and individually one by one ambivalent about that disagreement is there truth to be had are we contesting what the truth is that is certainly to use a grand phrase the phenomenology of most lawyers we read we puzzle we puzzle again then we come to a judgment and it's a a judgment not a choice it doesn't feel like a preference it feels like a judgment about what the truth is imagine a judge who's just sentenced a villain to jail

or perhaps worse and then says at the end of his opinion of course that's the way I see it that's my opinion that's the way I read it but there are other interpretations and they're equally good we would want that judge sent to jail and yet and yet when we stand by and look at the character of the disagreement it seems odd to say there's truth to be had why because the disagreements in interpretation are intractable pervasive and endless we divide into tribes originalists moral readers and the rest we divide into these tribes and no

tribe has much to say that's going to influence let alone convince the other side the disagreement simply continues indeed this can be a personal situation a judge May write an opinion that feels right to him that day but he might discard it in favor of a different one that feels right to him another day there's not much he can say except I see it differently and that doesn't seem to sort well with truth it's that ambivalence which is my subject this afternoon how can we resolve it I want to approach that question however by making

it a bigger question law is only one area in which we interpret interpretation is a general pervasive feature it's a department of human reason and I want to ask is there truth in interpretation in general we interpret in many different ways and occasions you I hope are interpreting me right now as I speak you're trying to decide what it is that I mean to say sociologists interpret cultures and institutions historians interpret ages events and epics literary and artistic critics interpret poems plays and paintings priests and rabbis interpret sacred text psychoanalysts interpret your dreams and in

all of these different genre as I'll call them of interpretation there are different separate houses lawyers interpret Wills contracts constitutions and statutes and they debate among themselves whether the same approach is appropriate for each literary and artistic critics debate such apparently desperate questions as the importance of moral value in Discerning the meaning of a poem whether per Dela Francesca's great painting the Risen Christ in sanro really is a Christian painting or whether as some eminent critics CLA claim it's a pagan painting did Lady McBeth have a lover before she married Glamis now in all of

these as to all of these questions the same ambivalence arises on the one hand the phenomenology of criticism what what it feels like to do it is objective supposing there's truth to be had and The Interpreter seeks the truth on the other hand the nature of the disagreement is such that it seems odd indeed hubristic to suppose that there is any such truth the phenomenology it seems to me clear imagine a scholar who spends his entire life writing a tone 1200 pages on Hamlet and then the last page says well there it is that's how

I see it of course there are many other opinions equally good as mine wouldn't that be crazy two of the most eminent critics of the last century put the matter the case for objectivity this way f leas a great critic at at Cambridge said a real critical Judgment of its very nature always means to be more than merely personal essentially a critical judgment has the form this is so isn't it and his American counterpart the I think founder of the new criticism movement CL Brooks said this I suppose that the practicing critic can never be

too often reminded of the gap between his reading and the true reading of the poem The alternatives are desperate either we say that one person's reading is as good as another's or else we take the lowest common denominator of the various readings that have been made that is how it feels to the critic knowing that they disagree as Lis and Brooks in fact did and yet again the disagreements are intractable and pervasive just as we have tribes of legal interpreters so we have tribes of literary interpreters the new critics the old author intentions School the

structuralist the post structuralist the de constructural list every post and every D everything you can think of they're all in the field they talk to each other they do not convince they do not budge and on they go as separate drives so no wonder the skeptic iCal view the view that says lus and Brooks are deceiving themselves there is no right answer there are only different answers to questions of of interpretation across all the genres I mentioned no wonder that view is appealing but it's now time for me to suggest to you that the skeptical

View though appealing for all the reasons I've suggested is in fact incoherent it's self-contradictory why imagine those those two critics Lis and Brooks both very eminent they' disagreed about the correct reading of many poems including Yates is wonderful among school children you many of you will know that poem it's the one that ends but who can tell the dancer from the dance Lis who didn't in general admire Yates adored that poem because he said it contains morally irresistible truth Brooks completely disagreed he said it's a poem about the metaphysical boundary between the natural and the

supernatural we might come back to that later on but now imagine a third critic who arrives on this scene and says you're both wrong you're making the mistake of thinking there's one true reading and the others are just mistakes you're both wrong there is no such truth now I ask you what could make the third critic's opinion right it can't be made right by metaphysics can't be made right by science it can't be made right by sociology the third opinion the no right answer opinion is itself an interpretation it's an interpretation of among school children

it needs an argument It suffers from exactly the same difficulties as the first two interpretations it can't convince anyone it's ephemeral it's not demonstrable if these characteristics count against Brooks and count against leave us they count against the skeptic as well but the skeptic says there is no truth in interpretation and he contradicts himself because he must claim Truth for his own interpretation this point which I believe to be very important is often obscured because we fail to make a necessary distinction between two phenomena uncertainty and skepticism people often treat skepticism as the default position

if no positive position lus or Brooks is convincing if there are any number of positions and none of them is convincing then the skeptic must be right there is no right answer but the true default is UN certainty that's what you're entitled to claim if no nothing persuades you to claim more to claim skepticism is to make an independent interpretation which puts you out on the limb of Truth as firmly as any positive interpretation does so appealing though it is popular though it is I think we must set interpretive skepticism aside skepticism of a grand

kind we must set it aside but that isolates the question if there is truth in spite of all this intractable disagreement where can that truth lie what can make an interpretation true there is a very popular answer to that question it's popular in law it's popular in many other places that's the psychological State answer an interpretation is an attempt to retrieve from history the intention of some author or Creator did Jessica shock's daughter hate hate her father because she was ashamed of her jewishness that simply asks on the psychological State view was that what Shakespeare

intended in writing her lines in the play now the the appeal of the psychological State theory is irresistible in some genres of interpretation conversation for example as I said I hope you're interpreting me as I speak but that means you're trying to capture a psychological state that is what I am trying to say to you what I hope you will understand that's my psychological State the psychological State theory is ridiculous in some other genres people who write historians who write about the meaning of the French Revolution are not trying to find out what was in

the mind of the jacoban as they rioted and killed it's ineligible I believe popular is it is that the psychological State theory is actually ridiculous in in law what did the congressman who voted for a statute intend he intended to get reelected and to please his contributors and that has nothing to do with how we read the statute in the middle in literary and artistic interpretation the author's intention Theory as it's called has waxed and waned flour and disappeared in the 19th century the age of Romanticism it was very popular in by the end of

the 20th after the new critics arrived it was deemed not eligible the French philosopher Paul rur in a very nice phrase said the author is only the first reader nothing more Tom stard playright had a what I think a wonderful image he said the relation between the playright and The Interpreter is like the relation between the passenger and the Customs inspector custom inspector finds things in the suitcase that the passenger has to agree are there but knows he didn't pack and that in stop pod's image captures the relationship between the Creator create something and the

critic who finds something in it that the author had not only no intention to put there but was ignorant until he learned was there so the psychological State theory is not eligible for the role that I seek I would like to find a general theory of interpretation that holds across these genre of interpretation and the psychological State theory is not that but it does its popularity does present a challenge to anyone composing a general Theory a general theory must explain why it is that the psychological State theory is irresistible in some genre not eligible in

other genre and controversial in the middle now you might ask what is this I'm clearly building up to an attempt to describe a general theory that fits all the genre meets that conditions and the others that we might want to impose I'm going to describe this this General I call it the responsibility theory of interpretation and I'm going to describe it in a skeleton way first perhaps cryptic way and then try and flesh it out with some examples we begin with the recognition that interpretation is a collective AC activity we interpret we can interpret statutes

or sacred texts or paintings because others have done that in the past we join a tradition and as we interpret objects so we interpret the tradition that we have joined TS Elliot said once that a poet interprets the history of poetry as he creates a new poem and I'm making the same claim which I'll try and illustrate in a moment on behalf of interpretation second interpreters those who have joined and continue this tradition or practice of interpretation suppos that the practice has some point it's not an idle exod exercise it embodies some value and it

embodies a an interpretive responsibility that flows from that value and people who join un interpretive tradition agree generally about the purpose that it serves but agree only at a very high level of abstraction lawyers interpreting documents and constitutions might agree that the aim is somehow to serve Justice critics might agree that the aim of artistic or literary criticism is to identify and make available or when appropriate to deny artistic excellence yes we can agree but as soon as we make the description even somewhat less abstract then we fall into disagreement consider two American lawyers disagreeing

about the right way to interpret the Constitution they disagree about the nature of constit constitutional law why be probably because they disagree about the best conception of democracy they begin with the idea that there is a division of power and authority between interpreters and original creators but they disagree because they disagree about the best interpretation of democracy of about where that balance of power lies what the responsibility of the judge is they disagree about democracy perhaps because they disagree about the more basic principles of legitimacy they might disagree about legitimacy because they disagree about dignity

Independence and a vast array of other values I'm not of course suggesting that this tree structure of principle branching out with a thousand points of potential disagreement is visible to the interpreters no their interpretive approach to fall back on a overused metaphor is the tip of the iceberg it's what is available self-consciously that they identify as making them members of some tribe but the great the great ice mass that lies below the surface of Consciousness formed by Instinct training and experience unavailable to them is nevertheless there exercising its influence giving The Interpreter a sense that

there is truth to be had and obscuring from him the true basis of his claim the true basis of the controversy I'm suggesting with that illustration with others I hope to offer you I'm suggesting that we think of Truth in interpretation in the following way the true interpretation of some object a poem a painting a provision of the constitute is the reading of that which best acquits the responsibility of interpreters given by the best interpretation of the practice they have joined interpretation is multiply interpretive it's interpretive all the way down now one one thing this

picture of interpretation as interpretive responsibility rising out of a deeper interpretation one advantage of this is that it serves what I believe to be a useful way to distinguish families of interpretive genre and uh to be very quick about it these these families can be distinguished in the following way among no doubt others first we distinguish collaborative interpretation this is the set of interpretive genres in which The Interpreter properly takes himself or herself to be in partnership with someone who came before and created the object of interpretation the musician playing a not is in partnership

with the composer the critic studying a play is in partnership with the playright the judge is in partnership with someone who he identifies as having made the law that he interprets I distinguish collaborative from explanatory interpretation explanatory interpretation includes history the historian of the Holocaust does not take himself to be a partner of the Nazis in any respect explanatory interpretation studies history not the details of History not what happened when but the meaning of historical events and epochs by drawing from the raw data what he takes to be important and to provide an important lesson

for his audience there's a third family of interpretation which I I would call conceptual interpretation I won't say any more about it this afternoon except to note that in my view all of philosophy is conceptual interpretation of Concepts that we share our main subject is collaborative interpretation because law belongs to collaborative interpretation like conversation and like literary interpretation but I'll talk first about literary interpretation I want to suggest to you that we best understand disagreements between or among critics by tracing out the underground or assumed and sometimes quite self-conscious attitude of the critic to the

Apparently different question question where does the value of literature lie I'm suggesting that this view of interpretation erodes the difference that seems natural between two questions what makes a poem good and what does this particular poem mean I'm going to read you something from a recent compendious that's an understatement anthology of about 1,600 pages of literary criticism and in the introduction by the four compilers of this Anthology we find this theories of literature and theories of reading have affinities with one another here are four instances first the formalist idea of literature is a well-made artistic

object corresponds to the notion of reading as careful explication and evaluation of dense poetic style second when viewed as the spiritual expression of a gifted Seer poetry elicits a biographical approach to criticism focused on the poet's inner development thir dense historical symbolic Works presuppose a theory of reading as exegesis or decipherment fourth literature conceived as social text or discourse calls for cultural critique while we can separate theories of literature from theories of interpretation they often work hand in hand I don't ask you to agree with the forpart analysis offered in this introduction to that massive

compilation but I ask you to consider the underlying hypothesis which is that in order to understand why an interpreter interprets as he does we have to understand what his theory is of excellence in the object he interprets and therefore his sense of what his responsibility is I mentioned yates's among school children a 60 yearold smiling public Man visits a school room and is attracted by a particular school girl bending over her desk yates's most eminent biographer Roy Foster notes that three days before he wrote this poem Yates visited a Catholic School St uterin in Ireland

and that he often referred to his visit as a senator the Irish Senate when discussing educational reform in Ireland forer also tells us that the lyan figure as Yates called her of the little school girl was actually M gone yates's long ago Lover now like himself Hollow of Chief so foster reads this as a critique of public education and reads the particular reference to this mythological figure as a reference to his now elderly once beautiful lover I mentioned this in that detail because decades earlier Clon Brooks whom I mentioned before warned us exactly against this

interpretation died before Foster was born probably he warned us against it he said it would be a terrible mistake to read this poem as a political comment and of course he said it would be an even worse mistake to identify the lyan figure with Ward Gun a an identification to which biographers are particularly and erroneously drawn now how shall we understand this we might say well Brooks is offering a an account of the poem as as a piece of literature and Foster is explaining how the poem came to be written in the way that it

did difference between interpretation collabor to an explanation like history I don't think that will work Brooks looked forward to this interpretation he disliked as a mistake and Foster offers it as a reading of the poem not as a piece itself of biography now in order to understand this disagreement in order to see how these two critics disagreed with one another rather than simply complimented each other we have to attend to their theories of what is great in literature Brooks as I said a new critic held that a poem has its deep value as an expression

of an idea which has to be contained with in the poem itself it has to be there in the poem independent of any information we can bring to it about the poet or the moment in which he lived it must resist he emphasized paraphrase it must be something that can only be said in a poem that couldn't be put any other way giving us a sense as he he thought of this particular particular poem giving us a sense of deep metaphysical truth he thought this was a platonic exercise this poem halfway to the great bantian

poems that late that Yates wrote later so here you have two poet two critics whose work I think can only be understood in that way now I'm going to read you the uh a passage from another famous poet Samuel Taylor cerid writing at the height of the Romantic Movement explaining why interpretation must be just must be the recovery of the genius of the poet the psychological State Theory his colorage what is poetry is so nearly the same question with what is a poet that the answer to the one is involved in the solution of the

other for it is a distinction resulting from the poetic genius itself which sustains and modifies the images thoughts and emotions of the poet's own mind he diffuses a tone and spirit of unity that blends and as it were fuses each into each by that synthesis and magical power to which we have exclusively appropriate created the name of imagination well you can you can see from that immediately the spirit the ground of the author's intention School of criticism which flourished in the Romantic Period we retrieve the genius of the poet which fuses itself into the right

understanding of the power contrast that with the image created as I told you by Tom staart here's another illustration I think even more dramatic the 18th century French painter antoan vau painted as most of you will be familiar with his work scenes that on the surface are scenes of frivolity gayety and so he was regarded by his 18th century contemporary interpreters who celebrated the joyous freedom and almost effeminate lightess of his paintings a relief after the sour days of Louie the Sun King that had come to an end by the more sober 19th century the

critic's opinion of vau had gone 180 de in the other direction vau was regarded as Melancholy tragic a painter of isolation despair recently I read in the New York Review of Books A another comment on vau the critic according to this writer wants to steep VTO paintings in the world he the critic contemporarily inhabits and vice versa V's own moment of novelty gets overlaid with the many versions of the modern that ensued the painting of the Piero Gales Taps into the Revival of mime theater in 1830s Paris and the resuscitation of that Revival in Marcel

car's great film of 1945 Leon par not to mention Sean's pictorial diance with pero figures in the 1880s and picassos after the Great War and these give us a larger sense of what vau was up to Giles suggests a car the paint one of his paintings Giles suggests a characteristic modernist anxiety now look what has happened this this collidoscope of different interpretations of the painters has come to an interpretation that reads vau through the lens of seon and pic and L on Fond par all of which it isn't that the critic has discovered something new

about the life of VTO or his times or what was in his mind it isn't as if one critic has seen something in the picture that others have missed rather what different critics see in the picture and why is itself a subject for interpretation and I think it can only be understood against the background of something like the responsibility theory that I'm urging upon you that is what has happened is that from the 18th to the 19th century from the frivolity to the the soba and then into the 20th and 21st century which is preoccupied

with the notion of literature as an expression of the modernist those changes in a sense of what would make the poem great have been reflected or the painting what would make the painting great have been reflected in distinct senses of what the painting is now very briefly I want to say a bit about history because history is an example of a different family of interpretation interpretive genes the explanatory family the great 19 century pride of British history was mcau mcco in the first paragraph one of his famous books writes as follows please forgive the hubris

the history of our country during the last 160 years is eminently the history of physical of moral and of intellectual development this view of what the history of Britain in the last 100 years should be seen to embody angered Herbert Butterfield who wrote a book called The Wig theory of history and took McCauley to be the arch wig the wig historian Butterfield wrote can say that events take on their due proportion when observed through the lapse of time he can say that events must be judged by their ultimate issues which since we can trace them

no farther we must at least follow down to the present he can say that it is only in relation to the 20th century at one happening or another in the past has relevance or significance for us it is easy to see the fight between Christianity and paganism as a play of forces and discuss it so to speak in the abstract with one eye on us situation but it is much more Illuminating to watch it as the interplay of personalities and people much more interesting if we can take the general statement with which we began and

pursue it in its concrete incidence till we discover into what manifold detail it differentiates itself it is along this line that the historian carries us truly and Carries us away from the world of General ideas of course a Marxist historian writes very differently and a historian who thinks climate is the greatest influence on human events writes still differently yet and we cannot I think understand the different interpretive styles that historians bring to the interpretive part of their craft not just what happened when but what meaning we should take from it we cannot understand that without

understanding the more basic deep sense of what is important for us now in what happened to them then I return though I promise only briefly to the subject which I began which is law to repeat the general lesson I hope to take from all of this rumination is a responsibility theory of interpretation we interpret say a clause in the Constitution correctly when we acquit the responsibility we rightly identify as the role of The Interpreter for example a judge or a Justice the interpretation is therefore interpretive of the tradition in which it interprets it's interpretive as

we might say all the way down we are therefore wrong to suppose as we do in some moods but not others that there's no right answer we must explain the scope and the intractability of the disagreements we have and our judges have about what the law is but we can't explain it through the in coherence of interpretive skepticism we must explain it in the way I tried to do that is by pointing to the very elaborate substructure of any interpretive approach hidden typically from The Interpreter but so dense and so ramified into a thousand other

values that the opportunity if we might put it that way for disagreement is endless the attempt to recapture the nodal points of that disagreement I think is a great project for legal philosophy and legal history we must avoid therefore at all times the slander of the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing in which Senators some Senate has suppose that the law is easily discerned and that anyone who doesn't vote any justice who doesn't vote as the senator wishes is making the law up imposing his own preferences that is a slander justices are trying not to make up

the laww but to find the law they disagree about what it is but I believe we can explain why they disagree in a way that doesn't rely on the incoherent no right answer thesis there is I think some practical bite in this exercise many academic lawyers and some judges take a kind of comfort from the no right answer form of skepticism the teacher in his classroom says to the Delight of the law students there's much to be said on both sides of this issue there is no right answer the judge sometimes feels I believe that

when he has reached the point at which he has no more arguments that will convince he's reached the end of his responsibility to examine and that I think is a mistake a mistake he must acknowledge once he recognizes theoretical foundation on which his instincts rest very few academic lawyers and even fewer judges have the time inclination or perhaps even capacity for political philosophy but there must be room in every career for recognizing the structure of opinion I've described and from time to time in a cool moment from examining and examining critically that ice mass that

Li Li beneath intuition we must not make the opposite mistake a mistake that fuels what I called the committee the Judiciary Committee slander and that is the mistake of thinking that in the end there's an algorithm that law is really a science that experts can pursue and find the right answer Chris Christopher Columbus Langell built a temple to that mistaken idea in Cambridge Massachusetts but we must recognize his idea as a mistake law is not literature but law is closer to poetry than it is to physics or even sacrilege economics thank you very much St