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ture. A text can foresee a Model Reader entitled to try infinite conjectures. The empirical reader is only an actor who makes conjectures about the kind of Model Reader postulated by the text. Since the intention of the text is basically to produce a Model Reader able to make conjectures about it, the initiative of the Model Reader consists in figuring out a Model Author that is not the empirical one and that, at the end, coincides with the intention of the text. |
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Thus, more than a parameter to use in order to validate the interpretation, the text is an object that the interpretation builds up in the course of the circular effort of validating itself on the basis of what it makes up as its result. I am not ashamed to admit that I am so defining the old and still valid "hermeneutic circle." |
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The logic of interpretation is the Peircean logic of abduction. To make a conjecture means to figure out a Law that can explain a Result. The "secret code" of a text is such a Law. One could say that in the natural sciences the conjecture has to try only the Law, since the Result is under the eyes of everybody, while in textual interpretation only the discovery of a "good" Law makes the Result acceptable. But I do not think that the difference is so clear-cut. Even in the natural sciences no fact can be taken as a significant Result without having first and vaguely decided that this fact among innumerable others can be selected as a curious Result to be explained. |
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To isolate a fact as a curious Result means to have already obscurely thought of a Law of which that fact could be the Result. When I start reading a text I never know, from the beginning, whether I am approaching it from the point of view of a suitable intention. My initiative starts to become exciting when I discover that my intention could meet the intention of that text. |
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How to prove a conjecture about the intentio operis? The only way is to check it against the text as a coherent whole. This idea, too, is an old one and comes from Augustine (De doctrina christiana 23): any interpretation given of a certain portion of a text can be accepted if it is confirmed and must be rejected if it is challenged by another portion of the same text. In this sense the internal textual coherence controls the otherwise uncontrollable drives of the reader. |
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Once Borges suggested that it would be exciting to read the Imitation of Christ as if it were written by Celine. The game is amusing and could be intellectually fruitful. I tried: I discovered sentences that could have been written by Celine ("Grace loves low things and is not disgusted by thorny ones, and likes filthy clothes . . . "). But this kind of reading offers a suitable "grid" for very few sentences of the Imitatio. |
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