The Great Dichotomy

Abstract

Nothing in the history of literary studies is stranger than the great dichotomy that has grown up in the last 25 years: that between writers who for the most part have sought either to show that all meaning is indeterminate or to somehow disconnect linguistic meaning from extra-linguistic reality, and those who have labored to show how intended meanings are communicated with sufficient clarity and that such meanings are connected to a reality consisting of much more than language systems. The currents making up what is generally called poststructuralism have been the dominant ones, but during the same years that the greater part of the best-known theorists and a host of epigones have played variations on the principles of indeterminacy and infinite deferral of meaning, a significant number of theorists have devoted themselves to a variety of researches into what makes possible that communication the denial of which the poststructuralists seek constantly to communicate.

It is no doubt possible to justify the most extreme ‘liberty of interpreting’ when criticism is frankly concerned with the practical uses to which poems may be put by readers irrespective of their authors’ intentions in composing them; they can then be made to say or mean whatever is most relevant to our interest or needs; and who can rightly object if this is what we want to do and is plainly advertised as such?

R. S. Crane, The Languages of Criticism and the Structure of

Poetry, 33.

Shared communication proves the existence of a shared, and largely true, view of the world. But what led us to demand the common view was the recognition that sentences held true — the linguistic representatives of belief — determine the meaning of the words they contain.

Donald Davidson, “The Method of Truth in Metaphysics,” 168.