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Notes on Truth, Beauty, and Goodness -- Phil A231 William Jamison - Instructor Lecture 2 It makes sense to say both (1) that there is no correct interpretation of a person’s ideas and (2) that there is a correct interpretation. It seems at first sight that this is a conflict – even a contradiction – because both statements are juxtaposed without including the differing contexts in which they would make sense. Imagine a context for (1) that enables it to make sense - that is, that there can be no correct interpretation of another person's ideas. I imagine a person making a statement before an audience as part of a presentation. A member of the audience later asks a question to clarify the statement. The speaker now reformulates the original statement – making an altogether different statement. Is this what we do when that happens? Perhaps the speaker should reply by saying the original statement over again only more slowly! But of course we understand by a question requesting clarification that the original statement as it was spoken was unclear not because of some difficulty hearing the words or lack of attention on the listener’s part while it was being uttered. Rather, we understand that the statement was intended to communicate something but failed to some extent. Perhaps the communication – the meaning – could somehow be more successfully communicated if the statement was rephrased or expanded into a full paragraph. But this kind of reformulation could go on. Generally, one more paragraph of information is taken as adequate in most cases. This is especially the case when the questioner reformulates the intended meaning in still other words with the intention of finding the speaker to agree that reformulation somehow encapsulates the meaning. This is quite a different thing than having two communication devices, say computers, connecting over a modem and passing digital information with checks going back and forth to insure a match of the information on both computers and the end of the communication session. Such a thing is not at all what happens between two people discussing ideas.
Or is it? If that is what we mean, it seems safe to say that the level of exactitude currently employed with digital technologies is not what occurs between persons. The checks persons make, as the example of the questioner asking for clarification, are levels of exactitude lower. We may even find disagreement depending on the goals we have that are independent of the communication itself. Say, a reporter asking a politician a clarification question may be intending on having the politician rephrase a statement to make it easier for the reporter to misrepresent what the politician intended, or make it seem like the politician intended to mean something other than what was best for the politician's popularity.
A famous example of this was the statement President Clinton made during the impeachment hearings on his relationship with Monica Lewinsky, “It depends on what the meaning of the word “is” is.” We can easily imagine the entire episode as a matter of putting a spin on the truth one way or the other. On the other hand (2) seems perfectly reasonable most of the time - that is, people understand one another reasonably well. We succeed in communicating. For an interesting discussion of the problems associated with translation see Umberto Eco "Experiences in Translation" http://www.7brands.com/translation_books_experiences_in_translation.htm
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