Interpretation: The Space of Text

Abstract

Turning towards another kind of space, Richard Smith foregrounds ‘Interpretation: The Space of Text’ (Chap. 8). It is easy to forget that text too is an institutional space of educational research and one with distinctive forms in academic journal articles and books, forms that are often strange and less innocent than they appear at first reading. If we suppose that text is a neutral and transparent medium for representing research findings, then we are unlikely to pay the attention we should to the forms that texts take, and in particular, we may not subject their more rhetorical and figurative manifestations to the criticism they deserve. As an example, he offers here a reading of a recent UK White Paper [sic] on Higher Education. Texts of course need to be interpreted: reflection on what constitutes sound interpretation moves us further away from the domination of empiricist paradigms of research in education and in social science more widely, and foregrounds the virtues of the good interpreter rather than shibboleths such as accuracy and rigour that have their roots in scientific and empiricist paradigms. The strictures upon the written as opposed to the spoken word that can be found in a naive reading of Plato (especially of a notorious passage in Phaedrus) have played a part in obscuring the significance of text and interpretation, as has the tendency to think of interpretation as a methodology of criticism rather than as a methodology of the production of knowledge and ideas. Interpretation, whether of texts or of people, can never achieve certainty, but the good interpreter can offer us grounds for confidence in her readings, and this is all the warrant that we are entitled to seek and that we need.