The Philosophy of Umberto Eco by Sara G. Beardsworth Randall E. Auxier

Author:Sara G. Beardsworth,Randall E. Auxier
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780812699654
Publisher: Perseus Books, LLC
Published: 2017-03-12T16:00:00+00:00

I. THE PUBLICITY OF MEANING

We take it as a given that interpretations must be public. The whole point of uttering something with the intention of getting information across to an audience is that what the speaker intends to communicate should be available to his audience. This part of the SCM is correct. Proponents of publicity include a who’s who of twentieth-century theorists of language, including Frege, Wittgenstein, Quine, Davidson, Dummett, Grice, Lewis, Derrida, and, of course, Eco.5 It’s hard to imagine what its challenge could be short of mysticism. We presume that anyone pressing a nonpublic account of interpretation has lost his or her way.

In the standard Gricean framework this constraint takes the form of a requirement on what counts as speaker-meaning; it requires that the speaker intend for the audience to be able to retrieve his or her communicative intention. The details of the account matter little here, if for no other reason than that most commentators reject the original Gricean details (including Grice, who revised the account often and wound up with something so oblique and scholastic you would need a Ph.D. in psychology to unravel it); yet virtually everyone embraces his basic idea.6 But in order for the speaker to reasonably expect his audience to retrieve his communicative intention, he must render his intention transparent to them; there should be publicly available cues to guide them. If he means his words literally, it’s pretty easy to see how the story would go; the speaker presumes his audience shares his linguistic conventions, and so, with a literal utterance he presumes they’ll recognize that what he means is what his words (literally) mean (as determined by their shared conventions in the context in which they were used). Of course the process is subtle; presumably something about the context indicates which language is being spoken, that they were spoken literally, and so forth. And when this intent parts ways from the literal, the speaker thereby carries a duty to get across that he is so doing, as well as one to render transparent to his audience the ways in which he is parting ways from the literal. His utterance might be so absurd that his audience can’t take him to be speaking literally without assuming he’s gone mad; or it might be so false that they assume the speaker would have to take them for ignoramuses to presume that he means his words literally. And so it goes. Theories disagree with, and diverge over, the processes behind this sort of interpretation but they agree about the end game—to retrieve the speaker’s communicative intention.

There are linguistic exceptions; presumably no matter how much we try we can’t make our use of the first-person pronoun “I” pick out someone else even if that’s our speaker intention; even if a madman thinks he’s someone else, what he says when he utters “I’m Barack Obama” is false unless he’s Barack Obama. Other sorts of contextual constraints work in a like fashion. But, by and large, the model is clear enough.

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