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Meaning, intention, and application: Speech act theory in the hermeneutics of Francis Watson and Kevin J. Vanhoozer
Trinity Journal, Fall 2002 by Blue, Scott A
85Ibid., 455.
86Watson, Text, Church and World, 11.
87Vanhoozer, Is There a Meaning in This Text? 375. 88bid., 377.
"Watson, Text and Truth, 98. %Ibid., 115.
9*Vanhoozer, Is There a Meaning in This Text? 219. 921bid.
93Watson, Text and Truth, 118 (emphasis added). 9Ibid.
9-'*Vanhoozer, Is There a Meaning in This Text? 251 (author's emphasis).
%Ibid.
97Ibid., 252.
98E. D. Hirsch Jr., The Aims of Interpretation (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1976), 79-80.
`Dale Leschert, "A Change of Meaning, Not a Change of Mind: The Clarification of a Suspected Defection in the Hermeneutical Theory of E. D. Hirsch, Jr.," JETS 35 June 1992):184-85.
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100 Ibid., 185.
101 Ibid., 187.
102 E. D. Hirsch Jr., "Meaning and Significance Reinterpreted," Critical Inquiry 11 (1984):204.
103 Ibid., 206.
1mHirsch draws upon the relationship between extension and concept. An extension of a concept is "all the individual instances- past, present, and future - that are subsumed under the concept" ("Meaning and Significance Reinterpreted," 207).
10lbid., 210. Certain applications may therefore belong to a text's meaning rather than its significance. Hirsch thus moves closer to Gadamer's view of meaning and application. He states, "I am now very much in agreement with Gadamer's idea that application can be part of meaning" (ibid., 212). He does, however, disagree with Gadamer's belief that meaning is different in every interpretation. While Gadamer believes that application necessitates a difference in meaning, Hirsch holds that meaning possibly remains the same with varying applications. Application thus splits significance and meaning. Rather than meaning remaining stringently fixed, as his earlier work supports, Hirsch now holds "that meaning can tolerate a small revision in mental content and remain the same-but not a big revision" (ibid., 221). What is the criterion for this distinction? "We normally decide that two contents are close enough to represent the same meaning when we are able to subsume both contents under the same sort of speech-intention that we deem to have been probable in the historical circumstances" (ibid.).
106E. D. Hirsch, "Transhistorical Intentions and the Persistence of Allegory," New Literary History 25 (1994): 552.
Hirsch introduces two groups for whom allegory is not needed: the originalists and the anti-originalists. The former "wish to bind interpretation to the explicit (and implicit) content of the original meaning," while the latter "wish to dispense with authorial intent altogether" ("Transhistorical Intentions," 555).
1MIbid., 558. However, those refusing the necessity of using allegory as a tool for interpreting "transoccasional writings" risk "turning our written inheritance into a dead letter" (ibid., 562). Similarly, those refraining from any constraint on allegory, "or its fraternal twin anti-intentionalism," risk "turning a literary work or the Constitution into a'blank piece of paper" (ibid., 562).
109 Thiselton, New Horizons, 13.
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