Andy's post (love the title) and Bryan's response discuss the impracticality of monism. They believe that, if a work did indeed have one sole interpretation, it would be impossible to know for sure what that one interpretation is.
In response, I suggest that the impossibility of being able to know a thing is not the same as that thing not existing. Knowledge of a thing does not correlate with its existence. It may be near impossible, given our current level of technology, to know that there is a never-before-seen fossil buried deep under silt and sand at the bottom of the Mariana Trench, but our ignorance of this fact has no impact on whether or not that fossil is actually there. Similarly, the near-impossibility of discovering and verifying the one true meaning of a text would not alter the fact that there is one true meaning of a text.
No comments:
Post a Comment