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3. An Apology of the Literal Sense |
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Every discourse on the freedom of interpretation must start from a defense of literal sense. In 1985 Ronald Reagan, during a microphone test before a public speech, said p (namely, "In a few minutes I'll push the red button and I'll start bombing the Soviet Union," or something similar). P wasas Linear Text Manifestationan English sentence that according to common codes means exactly what it intuitively means. Once provided an intelligent machine with paraphrase rules, p could be translated as "the person uttering the pronoun "I" will in the next approximately two hundred seconds send American missiles toward the Soviet territory." If texts have intentions, p had the intention to say so. |
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The newsmen who heard p wondered whether its utterer too had the intention to say so. Asked about that, Reagan said that he was joking. He said soas far as the intentio operis was concernedbut according to the intentio auctoris he only pretended to say so. According to common sense, those who believed that the sentence-meaning coincided with the intended authorial meaning were wrong. |
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In severely criticizing Reagan's joke, some newsmen, however, tried to make an innuendo (intentio lectoris) and inferred that the real intention of Reagan was to suggest nonchalantly that he was such a tough guy that, if he wanted, he could have done what he only pretended to do (also because he had the performative power of doing things with words). |
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This story is scarcely suitable for my purposes because it is a report about a fact, that is, about a "real" communicative intercourse during which senders and addressees had the chance of checking the discrepancies between sentence-meaning and authorial meaning. Let us suppose, then, that this was not a piece of news but a piece of fiction (told in the form "Once a man said so and so, and people believed so and so, and then that man added so and so . . . "). In this case we have lost any guarantee about the authorial intention, this author having simply become one of the characters of the narration. How to interpret this story? It can be the story of a man making a joke, the story of a man who jokes but shouldn't, the story of a man who pretends to joke but as a matter of fact is uttering a menace, the story of a tragic world where even innocent jokes can be taken seriously, the story of how the same jocular sentence can change its meaning according to the status and the role of its utterer. . . . Would we say that this story has a single sense, that it has all the senses listed above, or that only some of them can be considered as the "correct" ones? |
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