Logic, Form and Matter

1 I go along with Sharpe and others (e.g. Stein Olsen, The Structure of Literary Understanding, 1978) in thinking of interpreting as one among several critical activities. Interpretation may but need not lead up to evaluatiQn whilst evaluation always presupposes interpretation. A line cannot always be drawn in critical practice, but there are obvious cases of interpretative judgements (e.g. that The Turn of the Screw is a ghost story and not a story about a neurotic) as against evaluation ones (e.g. that The Turn of the Screw is great despite certain flaws of construction-or because of unresolvable ambiguities.) For a divergent view separating interpretation from criticism on the ground that these tw6 activities have different objects, see E. D. Hirsch, Jr. "Objective Interpretation", PMLA, 1960, reprinted in On Literary Intention, ed. D. Newton-de-Molina, 1976. 2 Anonymous works certainly demand great care in the construal of intended meanings, but such construal is not in principle impossible; The fact therefore that some works come to us without explicitly stated authorship does not license the inference that we must treat all works as anonymous. Further, the question of failed intentions is an interesting one, but it is not something Sharpe can make much use of. Consider e.g. a critic's misconstrual of unintentional humour as satire. 3 Cf. Anthony Savile, "The Place of Intention in the Concept of Art", PAS, LXIX, 1968-69. 4 For Wollheim's distinction vis-a.-vis Goodman's between "multiple" and "single" arts and the ensuing type-token problems (which I have deliberately avoided discussing so as to keep to issues actually raised by Sharpe's paper), see his "Are the criteria of identity for works of art aesthetically relevant?" in Art and Its Objects, second edition, 1980. 5 The terms "inner" and "outer horizon" should not be understood in the sense in which E. D. Hirsch, Jr. uses them in Validity in Interpretation, 1967. I have borrowed them from the Husserlian context without commitment to their doctrinal homeground. 6 The inner horizon contracts or expands only, of course, in the sense that our view of it does. The fact that a mist obscures a landscape does not mean that it doesn't have the features that would be seen in broad daylight. LOGIC, FORM AND MATTER