A Companion to the History of Economic Thought - Chapter 32 pptx

538 V. BROWN CHAPTER THIRTY- TWO Textuality and the History of Economics: Intention and Meaning Vivienne Brown 32.1 INTRODUCTION To say that studying the history of economics involves interpreting economics works and associated archival materials that were written in the past may seem uncontroversial, but such an apparently simple formulation of what is done in studying the history of economics is far from straightforward. Issues of inter- pretation have been the subject of intense debate over recent decades, and these debates have spanned (at least) philosophy, literary theory, history, and cultural studies. This essay will focus on just one aspect of these debates by engaging with arguments about the objective of reconstructing the author’s intended mean- ing, and it will relate these arguments to the notions of “text” and “textuality.” Given the high opportunity costs of engagement in such apparently arcane theoretical debate, economists may well wonder whether there is any particular potential payoff for their understanding of the history of their own discipline. A presupposition of this essay is that these theoretical debates do have something to contribute to the history of economics in helping to explain how different interpretations of the same works keep being produced, and so have implications for the ways in which the history of economics may be understood. It is a commonsense presupposition that correctly interpreting a work gives us the meaning that its author intended; correctly reading Adam Smith’s works, for example, gives us the meaning that Smith intended. To query this commonsense presupposition may seem to some to imply that we have already crossed the Rubicon that separates rational from irrational discourse, but two questions may be raised at this stage which should caution against such a hasty conclusion. TEXTUALITY AND THE HISTORY OF ECONOMICS 539 First, to what extent is it to be expected that the history of economics should be characterized by a high or increasing degree of consensus over the meanings of the works that constitute its object of study? [See Brown (1997a) for a survey of the range of interpretations relating to Adam Smith.] This raises the question of how it is – if all are seeking to recover the same thing, the author’s intended meaning – that historians of economics (and other intellectual historians) can reach contrary interpretive conclusions on the basis of reading the same works. Secondly, what are the procedures, criteria, and evidence for assessing the rel- ative validity of different interpretations? If a correct interpretation of a work gives the author’s intended meaning, how is it established which ones of those on offer do indeed give that intended meaning, or approximate in some way to it? This raises the question of evidence, since in order to apply criteria for an assessment of the comparative merit of rival interpretations it is necessary to know what the evidence is to which those criteria relate. It is part of the present argument that these two apparently simple questions are not at all simple, and that trying to answer them has some radical implications for the way in which the history of economics, or any other form of intellectual history, is understood. In engaging with arguments that intellectual history should study (or should include the study of) authors’ intended meanings, section 32.2 will address the first component of this notion by examining differ- ent notions of “intention,” and section 32.3 will address the second component by examining notions of “meaning.” In section 32.4 the notions of “text” and “textuality” will be discussed as a means of overcoming some of the difficulties outlined in sections 32.2 and 32.3 concerning an author’s intended meaning. The essay concludes by very briefly returning to the two questions raised in the previous paragraph, concerning the heterogeneity of different interpretations in the history of economics and the evidence that might be relevant for evaluating them. 32.2 INTENTION Although historians of economics may think of the notion of “intention” as intuit- ively straightforward, this notion has been the subject of considerable philosophic and literary debate (e.g., Newton-de Molina, 1976; Davidson, 1980a; Patterson, 1990; Iseminger, 1992; Anscombe, 2000 [1957]). One categorization of notions of intention that are relevant for interpretive debates has been proposed by the philosopher Donald Davidson, as follows: There are, I think, three sorts of intention which are present in all speech acts. First of all, there are ends or intentions which lie as it were beyond the production of words, ends that could at least in principle be achieved by nonlinguistic means. Thus one may speak with the intention of being elected mayor, of amusing a child, of warning a pilot of ice on the wings; one may write with the intention of making money, of proving one’s cleverness, to celebrate the freedom of the will, or to neu- tralize a plaguing memory or emotion. Such ends do not involve language, in the sense that their description does not have to mention language. I call these intentions 540 V. BROWN “ulterior.” . . . Second, every linguistic utterance or inscription is produced with the intention that it should have a certain force: it is intended to be an assertion, or command, a joke or question, a pledge or insult. There can be borderline cases, but only when straddling a border is intended: so it is possible to intend an utterance of “Go to sleep” as somewhere between an order and the expression of a wish, or to intend the remark “See you in July” as part promise and part prediction. Third, it is a necessary mark of a linguistic action that the speaker or writer intends his words to be interpreted as having a certain meaning. These are the strictly semantic intentions. (Davidson, 1993, pp. 298–9) This threefold categorization of “intention,” as ulterior intention, intention in saying something (illocutionary force), and semantic intention, will be followed below in examining the role of the author’s intentions in defining the meaning of utterances or works. The first category of intention is the ulterior intention in writing x. In Davidson’s description, this is an intention that could in principle be achieved by nonlinguistic means. A related, though not identical, notion of intention is given in Wimsatt and Beardsley (1954) as the “design or plan in the author’s mind” such that intention has affinities for “the author’s attitude towards his work, the way he felt, what made him write” (p. 4). This article criticized what it termed “the intentional fallacy” by arguing that the “design or intention of the author is neither available nor desirable as a standard for judging the success of a work of literary art” such as poetry (p. 3). This is an argument about poetic evaluation that is based on an account of meaning as internal to the poem (rather than, say, based on the author’s aspirations or the socio-historical context of writing), and so is discoverable by means of studying the poem’s semantics, syntax, figuration, and so on, according to the critic’s knowledge of a public language and its litera- ture. The poet’s prior intentions, if actually carried out, are regarded as redund- ant and, if not executed, are regarded as irrelevant; the thoughts and attitudes of the poem are therefore to be imputed to its persona or dramatic speaker, not to the actual author. This anti-intentionalist attack on Romantic aesthetics from the standpoint of New Criticism launched a major debate about literary intentionalism that spread far beyond its initial concern with poetic evaluation. The second category of intention in Davidson’s classification is what is meant by saying something, or what someone is doing in saying something. This cat- egory of intention derives from the work of J. L. Austin (1975 [1962]), in which utterances are conceived as speech acts or linguistic acts, and so are a form of action rather than something counterposed to action. Illocutionary acts are speech acts in which something is done or performed in saying something. For example, saying “I promise,” according to certain conventions of promise-making, is just to make a promise; and saying “I name this . . .X” is, under certain conventions, just to name something as X. More generally, in any speech act the author or speaker is doing something intentionally in writing or speaking, such as asserting, promising, or threatening, and this point or force of the writing or speaking is the intended illocutionary force. Speaking or writing with a certain intended illocutionary force is thus to perform an act, an illocutionary act, the point of the illocutionary act being the intended illocutionary force. Successful performance TEXTUALITY AND THE HISTORY OF ECONOMICS 541 of an illocutionary act requires that there is “uptake” of the act, in the sense that the audience or readership understands the intended illocutionary force of the utterance or work. This approach has been developed in the work of Quentin Skinner in the history of political thought and has achieved a wide influence in intellectual his- tory by this route (Skinner, 1988a–c; also critical articles in Tully, 1988). It is argued that to recover the historical meaning of a work it is necessary to recover the intended illocutionary force of the work in addition to understanding its sense and reference; or, alternatively, that to understand a work’s sense and reference in historical context it is necessary also to recover its intended illocutionary force. To understand the historical meaning of a work it is therefore necessary to understand what the author was doing in writing such a work, and to achieve this it is necessary to recover the author’s intentions in writing such a work, by placing it in its relevant historical context of argument and counter-argument as framed by the recognized linguistic conventions of the time. In an early statement of this position, it was argued that “the essential question which we therefore confront, in studying any given text, is what its author, in writing at the time he did for the audience he intended to address, could in practice have been intending to communicate” (Skinner, 1988a, p. 65). To answer this question requires the decoding of the author’s intentions by placing that utterance in the context of the linguistic conventions of the time, which would have been taken for granted by the intended audience, and with respect to which the author’s intentions in making that utterance would have been understood by those who were cognizant of those conventions. It was also argued in this paper that this historical approach requires that those intentions should be describable in terms that could have been accepted as correct by the author, even though the historian may be able to give a fuller or more convincing account of the author’s intentions than the author could have given, thus ruling out the use of later conceptual criteria that were not available to the author (1988a, p. 48). To embed the history of ideas in the intentions of the author as an historical figure purports to give a decidedly historicist inflexion to the history of ideas, but this has been somewhat displaced in later statements of Skinner’s position, where it is argued that an interpreter does not have to take the author’s statements about his intentions as a final authority on what those intentions (really) were. Whatever the hazards of overriding the author in any particular case, it is accepted in principle that sometimes the historian may have to discount an author’s state- ments about the meaning of a work, since the author may be “self-deceiving” or “incompetent” in this respect (Skinner, 1988b, p. 77). It is thus not the author but the interpreter who is the “final authority” concerning what the author was doing in a particular work (p. 77). This raises the question of the relationship between the intended illocutionary force and the actual illocutionary force of an utterance as interpreted by the historian. If establishing the actual illocutionary force of an utterance, or what is meant by an author’s saying x, is, ultimately, not determined by what the author thought was meant in saying x, then it is the actual, not the intended, illocutionary force of an utterance that is taken to con- stitute the meaning of that utterance or what the author was actually doing in the 542 V. BROWN work. If it is the interpreter who is the final authority on what the author was doing in a particular piece of work, then the author’s intentions are inferred from what that interpreter takes to be the actual illocutionary force. It follows from this that the actual illocutionary force of a work (as identified by the interpreter) may be intended or unintended by the author of the work, and that which of the two it is thought to be is an issue of interpretive judgment with respect to the texts concerned, rather than the result of some privileged information regarding the author’s actual intentions. This is indeed recognized in Skinner’s later reply to critics, where it is accepted that what the interpreter is in fact concerned with is the actual illocutionary force of an utterance; and that the meaning and context of the utterance are sufficient to determine its illocu- tionary force “regardless of whether the speaker issued the utterance with that intended force” (Skinner, 1988c, p. 277). This is consistent with an earlier argu- ment of Skinner’s that the author’s intentions in writing a work are in some sense “inside” the work; this contrasts with what is presented above as the first cat- egory of intention, which is held to lie “outside” the work in a merely contingent relationship with it (Skinner, 1988b, p. 74). Skinner’s conclusion, that “the best hypothesis to adopt at this stage will usually be to assume that he [the author, in this case Machiavelli] was doing what he was doing intentionally” (Skinner, 1988c, p. 277), thus simply assumes that the actual illocutionary force of an utter- ance or piece of writing was intended in that an author was indeed intentionally doing whatever it was that he or she is taken to have been doing. Such a response, however, effectively cedes the criticism directed against Skinner’s intentionalist position that, if the authority of the texts is held to be definitive in establishing what is meant by an author in saying x, then appeals to the author’s intentional doing of something in saying x become strictly redundant to establishing that it is x that is being said. This is related to the point that there are no grammatical tests for verbs of action to establish agency in terms of intentional doing: “No grammatical test I know of, in terms of the things we may be said to do, of active or passive mood, or of any other sort, will separate out the cases here where we want to speak of agency” (Davidson, 1980b, p. 120). In other words, a person’s “doings” may be intentional or not; and so a problem with Austin’s and Skinner’s accounts of illocutionary force is that interpreting what an author was doing in saying x is not sufficient to establish that it was an intentional doing on the author’s part (for this point, see Austin, 1975 [1962], pp. 105–7). The acceptance that this approach “leaves the traditional figure of the author in extremely poor health” (Skinner, 1988c, p. 276) thus acknowledges that the role of the author’s intentions in writing x is not after all the “main focus” of interpretive attention, which must instead be directed to the appropriate forms of discourse and their contextually determined conventions. The third category of intention in Davidson’s list is “semantic intention”; that is, the speaker or writer intends his or her words to be interpreted as having a certain meaning. An early statement of semantic intentionalism argued that it was the author’s intentions or determining will that provides a determinate object for interpretation, since a text has to “represent somebody’s meaning – if not the author’s, then the critic’s” (Hirsch, 1967, p. 3). Given the many different TEXTUALITY AND THE HISTORY OF ECONOMICS 543 interpretations that could conceivably be made of a piece of writing, the only one compelling normative principle of interpretation is the one of understanding what the author meant, since “if a text means what it says, then it means nothing in particular. Its saying has no determinate existence but must be the saying of an author or reader” (p. 13). The author’s “verbal meaning” is, by contrast, repro- ducible and determinate, and it is this that is represented by the text and forms the determinate object for analysis. It is acknowledged that there can be no cer- tainty that any particular interpretation is the author’s intended verbal meaning, and so the central issue for the validity of an interpretation hinges on a probabilistic judgment as to whether it is the author’s intended meaning. If the author’s verbal meaning which is represented by a text is the determin- ate object of analysis for an interpreter, the notion of intended verbal meaning has to be developed in such a way that it may be accessible to interpreters – and here lies a central difficulty with this version of intentionalism that is similar to the one faced by Skinner’s intentionalism. Early in the book, it is said that “meaning is that which is represented by a text; it is what the author meant by his use of a particular sign sequence; it is what the signs represent” (Hirsch, 1967, p. 8), but the crucial issue is the relationship between the first two propositions in this passage and the third one; that is, between what the author meant by using a particular sign sequence and what that sign sequence represents (or is taken to represent by an interpreter). What the sign sequence represents is taken to be determined by the author’s determining will, but yet the construal of an author’s willed meaning is then explained with reference to a linguistic account of the probable implications of utterances within a system of “types” and “genres” of which the interpreter is required to have had prior experience. It thus turns out that author and interpreter are required to have a “shared” understanding of what is to be the relevant framework of interpretation, and this shared require- ment is registered in the shifts in Hirsch’s definitions of author’s verbal meaning from that which is subject to the determining will of the author to that which is shared by author and interpreter (pp. 31, 49, 66, 77). It is this shared framework, denominated in terms of types and genres, that is used to establish the author’s unconscious as well as conscious verbal meanings; in the knowledge of the appro- priate types and genres, the interpreter attributes the author with intending the unattended as well as attended meanings of the text, on the basis that these are the meanings that are implied by the text. An author may not be fully self- conscious in that he or she may not be paying full attention to all the implications of what is being uttered, but the criteria for construing the author’s unconscious verbal meanings are the same as for the conscious ones, since both are held to be part of the intended verbal meaning. Thus what the author is thought to have intended (whether consciously or not) is inferred from what are construed to be the linguistic implications of the signs. Arguments concerning the author’s will and self-consciousness thus turn out to be redundant, since what really matters for interpretation and the assessment of the validity of interpretation is the proposed linguistic analysis of implication, types, and genres, and so on, and this is illustrated in the later discussion (in chapter 5) of the evidence required for the probabilistic process of validation 544 V. BROWN which is concerned solely with issues of textual construal, but which ends by acknowledging that interpretation in the end amounts to “guessing what the author meant” (Hirsch, 1967, p. 207). The inherent weakness of pinning interpre- tation to a refined process of guessing the author’s intentions lies in the funda- mental distinction between what the author intended to do and what the author did (whether or not these are construed as conscious or unconscious), but these two notions are elided right at the beginning, where it is written: “that a man may not be conscious of all that he means is no more remarkable than that he may not be conscious of all that he does” (p. 22). The problem here is not just that intentionalism needs to encumber interpretation with theories of unconscious doings, but that, as observed above, not all doings are intentional. A recent study reformulates this intentionalist argument by combining post- analytic philosophy, semantic holism, procedural individualism, and pyscho- analytic theory (Bevir, 1999, 2000; see the Round Table discussion in Rethinking History, 4(3) (2000), 295–350). According to this “weak intentionalism,” authorial intentions are “the final intentions of authors as they make an utterance” and so they are equated with the meaning that the utterance had for the author at the point of writing the work rather than being prior to the utterance (1999, p. 69). For readers, hermeneutic meaning is the meaning that they ascribe to a work, and so the main difference between authors and readers is only that authors “appear to play a more active role than readers,” such that whereas authors “intend to convey meaning,” readers “merely happen to grasp meaning” (1999, pp. 53–4). Meaning is thus attributed to works by individuals and does not inhere in the work; it is the meaning a work has for a specific individual and not something that the work has independently of individuals (1999, pp. 54, 74). To be a historical meaning this hermeneutic meaning has to have been a meaning for an individual who was a historical figure in the past. It follows that the historian of ideas studies the beliefs that were expressed by the author in writing the work (or readers later reading it) such that “when people make an utterance, they express ideas or beliefs, and it is these ideas or beliefs that constitute the objects studied by historians of ideas” (1999, p. 142). Bevir’s account of weak indi- vidualism is used to criticize Skinner’s conventionalism and the contextualism of J. G. A. Pocock (e.g., Pocock, 1985). Bevir’s argument also needs to address the issue of the relation between con- scious and unconscious intentions. It is argued that, since sincerity is logically prior to insincerity, the conscious is logically prior to the unconscious, and rationality is prior to irrationality, the historian of ideas should presume that the author’s beliefs that are expressed in the work are sincere, conscious, and rational. It turns out, however, that this is an initial presumption only, and that historians should acknowledge that the author’s beliefs may be insincere, uncon- scious, or irrational. An author’s intentions may thus include pre-conscious intentions (which are unknown to the author) and unconscious intentions (about which the author may be wrong) as well as conscious intentions. In this case, the beliefs expressed by the author are not his or her actual beliefs, and so the historian of ideas should study not the beliefs that are expressed by the author but the actual beliefs of the author, since “when people’s actual beliefs differ TEXTUALITY AND THE HISTORY OF ECONOMICS 545 from their expressed ones, historians have to go beyond the expressed beliefs if they are to recover the actual ones” (Bevir, 1999, p. 267). But in this case the actual beliefs are those expressed by the work, not those expressed by the author (Bevir, 1999, p. 71). But how may the historian decide that the author’s expressed beliefs are insincere, unconscious, or irrational? The injunction to the historian is to make sense of the material, since “the logic of their [the historians’] discipline remains such that they should invoke insincerity, the unconscious, or the irrational only if they cannot make sense of the material without doing so” (Bevir, 1999, p. 173), but the material that has to be made sense of here is not the expressed beliefs of the author but the works themselves. The reasons for deciding whether the author’s expressed beliefs are sincere and so on are based on the historian’s injunction to make sense of the material. The logic of the historian’s discipline is thus that the work has to be made sense of by invoking whatever authorial beliefs – sincere or insincere, conscious or unconscious, rational or irrational – are thought necessary to achieve this (Brown, 2002). Bevir’s weak intentionalism thus requires attributing beliefs to authors which they may not have been aware of having, or which they might even have rejected as not their own, and in this respect his account is similar to Skinner’s. In casting the author’s pre-conscious and unconscious intentions as intentions none the less, the historian is required to provide a rationalized reconstruction of the author that relies on some modern understanding of psychoanalytic theory, and which may not correspond with the self-consciousness of the actual historical figure, even though it is the historical experience of that figure that ostensibly ensures that the intended meaning is an historical meaning. As with Skinner’s and Hirsch’s accounts, what drives the interpretation of the work is the need to attend to the actual beliefs (or actual illocutionary force or actual implications) as interpreted in the work under study, and any imputation of author’s meaning is an inference based on that interpretive requirement. What is missing in such talk of the dependence of the work’s meaning on the intentions of the author is any evidence of the author’s intentions independently of the interpretations of the works (and other archival materials) that are being proposed by the historian. This is another instance of the difficulty faced by Skinner’s and Hirsch’s approach, that there is but one entity – the works and other archives in question – and so there is no evidence of the author’s conscious and unconscious intentions inde- pendently of the interpretations being offered of the works, and which could be called upon to assess the extent to which any particular interpretation is a valid reconstruction of those intentions (cf., Hirsch, 1967, p. 165). Bevir’s argument that objectivity is achieved by comparing rival interpretations with respect to various criteria does not meet this point, since what are being compared – according to his account – are rival interpretations of the works, not rival interpretations of the author’s expressed beliefs. This section has considered examples of the three different categories of auth- orial intentions that are presented in Davidson’s passage, and it has argued that none of these provides a coherent account of the argument that the meaning of works is given by the (conscious and unconscious) intentions of their authors. This is not to say that accounts of authorial intentions would not be interesting or 546 V. BROWN worth having if they could be found. The difficulty that is common to such approaches is (at least) twofold. First, there is the issue of the evidence of what those intentions were. If such evidence does not exist independently of the inter- pretations of the works and other archives that are at issue, then there is no independent evidence in principle relating to the author’s intentions – as opposed to the evidence relating to the interpretation of the works. This implies that such claims about providing knowledge of the author’s intentions are epistemologically empty. Secondly, imputing particular intentions to the author on the basis of an interpretation of the works may involve an interpretive reconstruction of the author’s intentions, which the author as historical agent neither would nor could have assented to if they were put to him or her. This implies that such recon- structions of the author’s alleged intentions cannot make claim to be invoking the historical author’s intentions as they existed in time for him or her as a self- conscious agent, and so the strictly historical significance of such interpretations is open to question. What remains of such claims to have discovered or recovered the author’s intentions thus amounts either to a rhetorical (in the narrow sense of merely persuasive) gesture, or a complimentary gesture bestowed upon valued interpretations which are simply supposed to have successfully reconstructed the author’s intentions (cf., Ankersmit, 2000, pp. 325–6). 32.3 MEANING The intentionalist approaches reviewed in section 32.2 have in common the argu- ment that the meaning of a work is given by the psychological or mental state (or content of the mental state) of the author, whether this is construed in terms of the author’s intentions, determining will, beliefs, or viewpoint. The meaning of the work is thus determined by some psychological or mental entity that exists in a relation of exteriority to the works but yet is held to determine the proper interpretation of those works. This meaning, determined externally, is then somehow intrinsic to the work and so can be “grasped,” “found,” “uncovered,” or “recovered” in the act of interpretation. It is this that explains the tension in intentionalist arguments between the exteriority of the source of meaning with respect to the author’s intention and the interiority of that same meaning with respect to the work itself. Caught between these two alternative sites for the definitive center of a work’s meaning, these intentionalist arguments inevitably have to recognize that it is indeed the latter that is definitive but, as argued above, this renders precarious the notion of author’s intention. There is one version of the intentionalist argument, however, that does not encounter this problem. This version identifies the author’s intended meaning with the interpretation of the work such that what emerges from a process of interpretation just is the author’s intended meaning, since that just is what inter- pretation delivers (Knapp and Michaels, 1985; for a discussion, see Mitchell, 1985). Instead of positing the author’s intended meaning as something which has or did have an independent existence vis-à-vis the work, the author’s intended meaning is by definition held to be that which an interpretation renders. This TEXTUALITY AND THE HISTORY OF ECONOMICS 547 version of the intentionalist argument overcomes the problems outlined in the previous section, since there is no longer any claim that the author’s intention had a historical existence independently of interpretations of the work or that it is something that the author as a historical figure could have recognized or identified as his or her own. Such an argument is therefore not subject to the criticisms advanced in section 32.2, but this is achieved by making the argument tautologous. If any interpretation is by definition a rendering of the author’s intended meaning, then the significance of its being so is surely lost. If its being the author’s intended meaning no longer operates as a constraint on what may be claimed in an interpretation (over and above what the evidence of the work can sustain), then surely there is no longer any point in claiming it to be so. According to Hirsch’s argument, once the assumption of an author’s intended meaning is removed, then no interpretation can correspond to the meaning of the text, because the text itself has no determinate meaning and can say different things to different readers (Hirsch, 1967, pp. 5, 11). Similarly, according to Bevir’s argument, meanings cannot be ascribed to texts in themselves; unless the inter- preter specifies for whom the text had that particular meaning, then the inter- preter is merely saying how he or she chooses to read the text, and in this case “we should not make the mistake of assuming he is offering us an interpretation of the text itself; we might enjoy his reading, but we should not bother to ask ourselves whether it is true or not for there is no object of which it seeks to give an adequate account” (Bevir, 2000, p. 391). If the notion of author’s intended meaning according to these intentionalist arguments is not accepted, however, this implies that all there can be are meanings that are the product of different readings. According to intentionalist arguments such as Hirsch’s and Bevir’s, such readings suffer the lack of not offering an account of the author’s meaning, but if the author’s meaning (as something other than an interpretation of the work) is not accessible, then the notion of a reading is a more coherent notion than author’s meaning. What is construed as a weakness from within an inten- tionalist argument is thus regarded as a strength once that intentionalist argu- ment is recognized as deeply problematic. Furthermore, it is not the case that there is no “object” of which a reading seeks to give an adequate account, since that object is provided by the text/work. Indeed, even within intentionalist accounts this has to be the case, since there is no object apart from the works of which an account can be given. As argued above, even according to the intentionalist ac- counts of Skinner, Hirsch, and Bevir, all that the interpreter can do is governed by the text: for Skinner, the historian seeks to give an account of the actual illocutionary force; for Hirsch, the interpreter seeks to construe the implications of the text; and for Bevir, the historian of ideas seeks to make sense of the materials. Inevitably, all that intentionalist interpretations can ever hope to achieve is to provide read- ings of the texts/works, and this is made evident in their own writings. The differences between these various positions may be illustrated by refer- ence to the issue of the “symmetry” or “asymmetry” of information between the analyst and the agent being studied (e.g., Sent, 1998). In the case of interpreting works in intellectual history, the analyst is the intellectual historian and the agent is the author of the work. Is there symmetry of information between the historian [...]... This may be illustrated by the ways in which purposive argument is ascribed to a piece of writing Instead of saying that author A meant such-and-such, or that author A argued such-and-such, it could be said (as in this essay) that the work or text says such-and-such, or that it argues such-and-such, thereby ascribing purposive argument to the work or text rather than to the author Expressing the arguments... “textile” and “texture” also derive from the same Latin word This etymology of the word “text” is apparent in expressions that refer to the “weaving” of a story, the “thread” of an argument, or the “texture” of a piece of writing A “text” may thus be taken to be a weaving or a network of analytic, conceptual, logical, and theoretical relations that is woven with the threads of language This implies that language... BROWN and the author? The author presumably has some access to the contents of his or her own mind that is denied to the historian In addition, the author’s information about the biographical, historical, and intellectual circumstances of the writing of the work is different from the historian’s information about these topics Both may have equal information about the contents of the works, however, on the. .. meta-language for analyzing the language and argument of a text; and each interpreter is in turn an author, each interpretation in turn another work Any work, any piece of connected writing, however, is a self-referential entity Words and expressions refer backward and forward; an argument makes a point, leads into another or draws to a conclusion; and narrative structures provide commentary or a sense... threads are to be followed in pursuing a reading Such threads may also relate in different ways to what is known (if at all) of the biography or the stated intentions of the author, or of the economic, social, political, philosophic, theological, artistic, cultural, or intellectual motifs of the time As more is learnt about the possible historical contexts that may assist a reading of a text, so there... assumption that there are no significant problems with missing or corrupted editions of the work (an assumption that is not always appropriate) Assuming that the historian and author have the same information about the contents of the work, there seems to be a major asymmetry in terms of knowledge of the author’s mind and knowledge of the circumstances of writing the work How do the different approaches... argument and the linguistic threads and filaments by means of which the text TEXTUALITY AND THE HISTORY OF ECONOMICS 549 is woven Issues of language – style, figuration, rhetoric, the polysemy of words – are thus not extraneous to the meaning ascribed to the text in the process of reading but are a constitutive part of it Reading a text thus requires a practice of “close reading” that examines the woven... imply that the meaning of any particular piece of writing is determined by the intentions of the author of that piece Sections 32. 2 and 32. 3 have outlined some of the difficulties involved in sustaining intentionalist arguments, and this section has tried to present an alternative approach to interpretation or reading The rejection of authorial intended meaning as determining the meaning of a text is... of the self are negotiated, refracted, contested, and sublimated TEXTUALITY AND THE HISTORY OF ECONOMICS 551 32. 5 CONCLUSION In the Introduction to this essay, two issues of interpretation were raised: To what extent is it to be expected that the history of economics should be characterized by a high or increasing degree of consensus, and what are the procedures and criteria for assessing the relative... language is not a transparent medium through which arguments are expressed, the invisible and self-effacing carrier of a message from the mind of the author to the mind of the reader, but is interwoven with or provides the very filaments of the substantive arguments themselves Construing a piece of writing as a “text” in this sense thus foregrounds the issue of the relation between the weaving of the argument . corrupted editions of the work (an assumption that is not always appropriate). Assuming that the historian and author have the same information about the contents of the work, there seems to be a major asymmetry. executed, are regarded as irrelevant; the thoughts and attitudes of the poem are therefore to be imputed to its persona or dramatic speaker, not to the actual author. This anti-intentionalist attack. thought was meant in saying x, then it is the actual, not the intended, illocutionary force of an utterance that is taken to con- stitute the meaning of that utterance or what the author was actually