Law’s empire
Dworkin
Chapter 2 – Interpretive Concepts
The Semantic Sting
I shall call the argument I have just described, which has caused such great mischief in legal philosophy, the semantic sting. People are its prey who hold a certain picture of what disagreement is like and when it is possible. They think we can argue sensibly with one another if but only if, we all accept and follow the same criteria for deciding when our claims are sound, even if we cannot state exactly, as a philosopher might hope to do, what these criteria are. You and I can sensibly discuss how many books I have on my shelf for example, only if we both agree, at least roughly, about what a book is. We can disagree over borderline cases: I may call something a slim book that you would call a pamphlet. But we cannot disagree over what I called pivotal cases. If you do not count my copy of Moby-Dick as a book because in your view novels are not books, any disagreement is bound to be senseless. If this simple picture of when genuine disagreement is possible exhausts all possibilities, it must apply to legal concepts, including the concept of law Then the following dilemma takes hold. Either, in spite of first appearances, lawyers actually all do accept roughly the same criteria for deciding when a claim about the law is true or there can be no genuine agreement or disagreement about law at all, but only the idiocy of people thinking they disagree because they attach different meanings to the same sound. The second leg of this dilemma seems absurd. So legal philosophers embrace the first and try to identify the hidden ground rules that must be there, embedded, though unrecognized, in legal practice. They produce and debate semantic theories of law.
Unfortunately for these theories. this picture of what makes disagreement possible fits badly with the kinds of disagreements lawyers actually have. It is consistent with lawyers and judges disagreeing about historical or social facts, about what words are to be found in the text of some statute or what the facts were in some precedent judicial decision. But much disagreement in law is theoretical rather than empirical. Legal philosophers who think there must be common rules try to explain away the theoretical disagreement. They say that lawyers and judges are only pretending or that they disagree only because the case before them falls in some gray or borderline area of the common rules. In either case (they say) we do better to ignore the words judges use and to treat them as disagreeing about fidelity or repair, not about law. There is the sting: we are marked as its target by too crude a picture of what disagreement is or must be like.
An Imaginary Example
The Interpretive Attitude
Perhaps this picture of what makes disagreement possible is too crude to capture any disagreement, even one about books. But I shall argue only that it is not exhaustive and, in particular, that it does not hold in an important set of circumstances that includes theoretical argument in law. It does not hold when members of particular communities who share practices and traditions make and dispute claims about the best interpretation of these-when they disagree, that is, about what some tradition or practice actually requires in concrete circumstances. These claims are often controversial, and the disagreement is genuine even though people use different criteria in forming or framing these interpretations; it is genuine because the competing interpretations are directed toward the same objects or events of interpretation. I shall try to show how this model helps us to understand legal argument more thoroughly and to see the role of law in the larger culture more clearly. But first it will be useful to see how the model holds for a much simpler institution.
Imagine the following history of an invented community. Its members follow a set of rules, which they call “rules of courtesy,” on a certain range of social occasions. They say, “Courtesy requires that peasants take off their hats to nobility,” for example, and they urge and accept other propositions of that sort. For a time this practice has the character of taboo: the rules are just there and are neither questioned nor varied. But then, perhaps slowly, all this changes. Everyone develops a complex “interpretive” attitude toward the rules of courtesy, an attitude that has two components. The first is the assumption that the practice of courtesy does not simply exist but has value, that it serves some interest or purpose or enforces some principle-in short, that it has some point that can be stated independently of just describing the rules that make up the practice. The second is the further assumption that the requirements of courtesy-the behavior it calls for or judgments it warrants-are not necessarily or exclusively what they have always been taken to be but are instead sensitive to its point, so that the strict rules must be understood or applied or extended or modified or qualified or limited by that point. Once this interpretive attitude takes hold, the institution of courtesy ceases to be mechanical; it is no longer unstudied deference to a runic order. People now try to impose meaning on the institution-to see it in its best light-and then to restructure it in the light of that meaning.
The two components of the interpretive attitude are independent of one another; we can take up the first component of the attitude toward some institution without also taking up the second. We do that in the case of games and contests. We appeal to the point of these practices in arguing about how their rules should be changed, but not (except in very limited cases) about what their rules now are; that is fixed by history and convention. Interpretation therefore plays only an external role in games and contests. It is crucial to my story about courtesy, however, that the citizens of courtesy adopt the second component of the attitude as well as the first; for them interpretation decides not only why courtesy exists but also what, properly understood, it now requires. Value and content have become entangled.
How Courtesy Changes
Suppose that before the interpretive attitude takes hold in both its components, everyone assumes that the point of courtesy lies in the opportunity it provides to show respect to social superiors. No question arises whether the traditional forms of respect are really those the practice requires. These just are the forms of deference, and the available options are conformity or rebellion. When the full interpretive attitude develops, however, this assumed point acquires critical power, and people begin to demand, under the title of courtesy, forms of deference previously unknown or to spurn or refuse forms previously honored, with no sense of rebellion, claiming that true respect is better served by what they do than by what others did. Interpretation folds back into the practice, altering its shape, and the new shape encourages further reinterpretation, so the practice changes dramatically, though each step in the progress is interpretive of what the last achieved.
People’s views about the proper grounds of respect, for example, may change from rank to age or gender or some other property. The main beneficiaries of respect would then be social superiors in one period, older people in another, women in a third, and so forth. Or opinions may change about the nature or quality of respect, from a view that external show constitutes respect to the opposite view, that respect is a matter of feelings only. Or opinions may change along a different dimension, about whether respect has any value when it is directed to groups or for natural properties rather than to individuals for individual achievement. If respect of the former sort no longer seems important, or even seems wrong, then a different interpretation of the practice will become necessary. People will come to see the point of courtesy as almost the converse of its original point, in the value of impersonal forms of social relation that, because of their impersonality, neither require nor deny any greatsignificance. Courtesy will then occupy a different and diminished place in social life, and the end of the story is in sight: the interpretive attitude will languish, and the practice will lapse back into the static and mechanical state in which it began.
A First Look at Interpretation
That is a birds-eye view from the perspective of history of how the tradition of courtesy changes over time. We must now consider the dynamics of transformation from closer in, by noticing the kinds of judgments and decisions and arguments that produce each individual’s response to the tradition, the responses that collectively, over long periods, produce the large changes we first noticed. We need some account of how the attitude I call interpretive works from the inside, from the point of view of interpreters. Unfortunately, even a preliminary account will be controversial, for if a community uses interpretive concepts at all, the concept of interpretation itself will be one of them: a theory of interpretation is an interpretation of the higher-order practice of using interpretive concepts. (So any adequate account of interpretation must hold true of itself) In this chapter I offer a theoretical account particularly designed to explain interpreting social practices and structures like courtesy, and I defend that account against some fundamental and apparently powerful objections. The discussion will, I fear, take us far from law, into controversies about interpretation that have occupied mainly literary scholars, social scientists, and philosophers. But if law is an interpretive concept, any jurisprudence worth having must be built on some view of what interpretation is, and the analysis of interpretation I construct and defend in this chapter is the foundation of the rest of the book. The detour is essential.
Interpreting a social practice is only one form or occasion of interpretation. People interpret in many different contexts, and we should begin by seeking some sense of how these contexts differ. The most familiar occasion of interpretation-so familiar that we hardly recognize it as such-is conversation. We interpret the sounds or marks another person makes in order to decide what he has said. So-called scientific interpretation is another context: we say that a scientist first collects data and then interprets them. Artistic interpretation is yet another. critics interpret poems and plays and paintings in order to defend some view of their meaning or theme or point. The form of interpretation we are studying-the interpretation of a social practice-is like artistic interpretation in this way: both aim to interpret something created by people as an entity distinct from them, rather than what people say, as in conversational interpretation, or events not created by people, as in scientific interpretation. I shall capitalize on that similarity between artistic interpretation and the interpretation of social practice; I shall call them both forms of “creative” interpretation to distinguish them from conversational and scientific interpretation.
Conversational interpretation is purposive rather than causal in some more mechanical way. It does not aim to explain the sounds someone makes the way a biologist explains a frog’s croak. It assigns meaning in the light of the motives and purposes and concerns it supposes the speaker to have, and it reports its conclusions as statements about his “intention” in saying what he did. May we say that all forms of interpretation aim at purposive explanation in that way, and that this aim distinguishes interpretation, as a type of explanation, from causal explanation more generally? That description does not seem, at first blush, to fit scientific interpretation, and we might feel compelled, if we are attracted to the idea that all genuine interpretation is purposive, to say that scientific interpretation is not really interpretation at all. The phrase “scientific interpretation,” we might say, is only a metaphor, the metaphor of data “speaking to” the scientist in the way one person speaks to another; it pictures the scientist as straining to understand what the data try to tell him. We can dissolve the metaphor and speak accurately, we might well think, only by eliminating the idea of purpose from our final description of the scientific process.
Is creative interpretation also, then, only a metaphorical case of interpretation? We might say (to use the same metaphor) that when we speak of interpreting poems or social practices we are imagining that these speak to us, that they mean to tell us something just the way a person might. But we cannot then dissolve that metaphor, as we can in the scientific case, by explaining that we really have in mind an ordinary causal explanation, and that the metaphor of purpose and meaning is only decorative. For the interpretation of social practices and works of art is essentially concerned with purposes rather than mere causes. The citizens of courtesy do not aim to find, when they interpret their practice, the various economic or psychological or physiological determinants of their convergent behavior. Nor does a critic aim at a physiological account of how a poem was written. So we must find some way to replace the metaphor of practices and pictures speaking in their own voices that recognizes the fundamental place of purpose in creative interpretation.
One solution is very popular. It dissolves the metaphor of poems and pictures speaking to us by insisting that creative interpretation is only a special case of conversational interpretation. We listen, not to the works of art themselves as the metaphor suggests, but to their actual, human authors. Creative interpretation aims to decipher the authors’ purposes or intentions in writing a particular novel or maintaining a particular social tradition, just as we aim in conversation to grasp a friend’s intentions in speaking as he does. I shall defend a different solution : that creative interpretation is not conversational butconstructive. Interpretation of works of art and social practices, I shall argue, is indeed essentially concerned with purpose not cause. But the purposes in play are not (fundamentally) those of some author but of the interpreter. Roughly, constructive interpretation is a matter of imposing purpose on an object or practice in order to make of it the best possible example of the form or genre to which it is taken to belong. It does not follow, even from that rough account, that an interpreter can make of a practice or work of art anything he would have wanted it to be, that a citizen of courtesy who is enthralled by equality, for example, can in good faith claim that courtesy actually requires the sharing of wealth. For the history or shape of a practice or object constrains the available interpretations of it, though the character of that constraint needs careful accounting, as we shall see. Creative interpretation, on the constructive view, is a matter of interaction between purpose and object.
A participant interpreting a social practice, according to that view, proposes value for the practice by describing some scheme of interests or goals or principles the practice can be taken to serve or express or exemplify. Very often, perhaps even typically, the raw behavioral data of the practice what people do in what circumstances-will underdetermine the ascription of value: those data will be consistent, that is, with different and competing ascriptions. One person might see in the practices of courtesy a device for ensuring that respect is paid to those who merit it because of social rank or other status. Another might see, equally vividly, a device for making social exchange more conventional and therefore less indicative of differential judgments of respect. If the raw data do not discriminate between these competing interpretations, each interpreter’s choice must reflect his view of which interpretation proposes the most value for the practice-which one shows it in the better light, all things considered.
I offer this constructive account as an analysis of creative interpretation only. But should notice in passing how the constructive account might be elaborated to fit the other two contexts of interpretation I mentioned, and thus show a deep connection among all forms of interpretation. Understanding another person’s conversation requires using devices and presumptions, like the so-called principle of charity, that have the effect in normal circumstances of making of what he says the best performance of communication it can be. And the interpretation of data in science makes heavy use of standards of theory construction like simplicity and elegance and verifiability that reflect contestable and changing assumptions about paradigms of explanation, that is, about what features make one form of explanation superior to another. The constructive account of creative interpretation, therefore, could perhaps provide a more general account of interpretation in all its forms. We would then say that all interpretation strives to make an object the best it can be, as an instance of some assumed enterprise, and that interpretation takes different forms in different contexts only because different enterprises engage different standards of value or success. Artistic interpretation differs from scientific interpretation, we would say, only because we judge success in works of art by standards different from those we use to judge explanations of physical phenomena.
Interpretation and Author’s Intention
The constructive account of interpretation will strike many readers as bizarre, however, even when it is limited to creative interpretation or, more narrowly still, to the interpretation of social practices like courtesy. They will object because they prefer the popular account of creative interpretation I mentioned: that creative interpretation is only conversational interpretation addressed to an author. Here is a representative statement of their complaint. “No doubt people can make claims of the sort you describe the citizens of courtesy making about social practices they share; no doubt they can propose and contest opinions about how these practices should be understood and continued. But it is a serious confusion to call this interpretation, or to suggest that this is in some way making sense of the practice itself. That is deeply misleading in two ways. First, interpreting means trying to understand something-a statement or gesture or text or poem or painting, for example-in a particular and special way. It means trying to discover the author’s motives or intentions in speaking or acting or writing or painting as he did. So interpreting a social practice, like your practice of courtesy, can only mean discerning the intentions of its members, one by one. Second, interpretation tries to show , the object of interpretation-the behavior or the poem or the painting or the text in question – accurately, as it really is, not as you suggest through rose-colored glasses or in its best light. That means retrieving the actual, historical intentions of its authors, not foisting the interpreter’s values on what those authors created.”
I shall confront this objection in stages, and the following advance outline of my argument might be helpful, though it is necessarily condensed. I shall argue, first, that even if we take the goal of artistic interpretation to be retrieving the intention of an author, as the objection recommends, we cannot escape using the strategies of constructive interpretation the objection condemns. We cannot avoid trying to make of the artistic object the best, in our opinion, it can be. I shall try to show, next, that if we do take the goal of artistic interpretation to be discovering an author’s intention, this must be a consequence of having applied the methods of constructive interpretation to art, not of having rejected those methods. I shall argue, finally, that the techniques of ordinary conversational interpretation, in which the interpreter aims to discover the intentions or meanings of another person, would in any event be inappropriate for the interpretation of a social practice like courtesy because it is essential to the structure of such a practice that interpreting the practice be treated as different from understanding what other participants mean by the statements they make in its operation. It follows that a social scientist must participate in a social practice if he hopes to understand it, as distinguished from understanding its members.
Art and The Nature of Intention
Is artistic interpretation inevitably a matter of discovering some author’s intentions? Is discovering an author’s intentions a factual process independent of the interpreter’s own values? We start with the first of these questions, and with a guarded claim. Artistic interpretation is not simply a matter of retrieving an author’s intention if we understand “intention” to mean a conscious mental state, not if we take the claim to mean that artistic interpretation always aims to identify some particular conscious thought wielding its baton in an author’s mind when he said or wrote or did what he did. Intention is always a more complex and problematical matter than that. So we must restate our first question. If someone wants to see interpretation in art as a matter of retrieving an author’s intention, what must he understand by an intention? That revised first question will reshape the second. Is there really so sharp a distinction as the objection supposes between discovering an artist’s intention and finding value in what he has done?
We must first notice Gadamer’s crucial point, that interpretation must apply an intention. The theater provides an illuminating example. Someone who produces The Merchant of Venice today must find a conception of Shylock that will evoke for a contemporary audience the complex sense that the figure of a Jew had for Shakespeare and his audience, so his interpretation must in some way unite two periods of “consciousness” by bringing Shakespeare’s intentions forward into a very different culture located at the end of a very different history. If he is successful in this, his reading of Shylock will probably be very different from Shakespeare’s concrete vision of that character. It may in some respects be contrary, replacing contempt or irony with sympathy, for example, or it may change emphasis, perhaps seeing Shylock’s relation to Jessica as much more important than Shakespeare, as director, would have seen it. Artistic intention, that is, is complex and structured: different aspects or levels of intention may conflict in the following way. Fidelity to Shakespeare’s more discrete and concrete opinions about Shylock, ignoring the effect his vision of that character would have on contemporary audiences, might be treachery to his more abstract artistic purpose. And “applying” that abstract purpose to our situation is very far from a neutral, historical exercise in reconstructing a past mental state. It inevitably engages the interpreter’s own artistic opinions in just the way the constructive account of creative interpretation suggests, because it seeks to find the best means to express, given the text in hand, large artistic ambitions that Shakespeare never stated or perhaps even consciously defined but that are produced for us by our asking how the play he wrote would have been most illuminating or powerful to his age.
Stanley Cavell adds further complexity by showing how even the concrete, detailed intentions of an artist can be problematic. He notices that a character in Fellini’s film La Strada can be seen as a reference to the Philomel legend, and he asks what we need to know about Fellini in order to say that the reference was intentional (or, what is different, not unintentional). He imagines a conversation with Fellini in which the filmmaker says that although he has never heard of the story before, it captures the feeling he had about his character while filming, that is, that he now accepts it as part of the film he made. Cavell says that he is inclined in these circumstances to treat the reference as intended. Cavell’s analysis is important for us, not because anything now turns on whetherit is right in detail, but because it suggests a conception of intention quite different from the crude conscious-mental-state conception. An insight belongs to an artist’s intention, on this view, when it fits and illuminates his artistic purposes in a way he would recognize and endorse even though he has not already done so. (So the imagined-conversation test can be applied to authors long dead, as it must be if it is to be of general critical use.) This brings the interpreter’s sense of artistic value into his reconstruction of the artist’s intention in at least an evidential way, for the interpreter’s judgment of what an author would have accepted will be guided by his sense of what the author should have accepted, that is, his sense of which readings would make the work better and which would make it worse.
Cavell’s imagined conversation with Fellini begins in Cavell’s finding the film better if it is read as including a reference to Philomel and in his supposing that Fellini could be brought to share that view, towant the film read that way, to see his ambitions better realized by embracing that intention. Most of the reasons Cavell is likely to have for supposing this are his reasons for preferring his own reading. I do not mean that this use of artistic intention is a kind of fraud, a disguise for the interpreter’s own views. For the imagined conversation has an important negative role: in some circumstances an interpreter would have good reason to suppose that the artist would reject a reading that appeals to the interpreter. Nor do I mean that we must accept the general claim that interpretation is a matter of retrieving or reconstructing a particular author’s intention once we abandon the crude conscious-mental-state view of intention. Many critics now reject the general claim even in a more subtle form, and in the next section we shall have to consider how this continuing quarrel should be understood. My present point is only that the author’s-intention claim, when it becomes a method or a style of interpretation, itself engages an interpreter’s artistic convictions: these will often be crucial in establishing what , for that interpreter, the developed artistic intention really is.
We can, if we wish, use Cavell’s account to construct a new description of what the citizens of my imaginary community of courtesy are doing in interpreting their social practice, an account that might have seemed preposterous before this discussion. Each citizen, we might say, is trying to discover his own intention in maintaining and participating in that practice-not in the sense of retrieving his mental state when last he took off his cap to a lady but in the sense of finding a purposeful account of his behavior he is comfortable in ascribing to himself. This new description of social interpretation as a conversation with oneself, as joint author and critic, suggests the importance in social interpretation of the shock of recognition that plays such an important part in the conversations Cavell imagines with artists. (“Yes, that does make sense of what I have been doing in taking off my hat; it fits the sense I have of when it would be wrong to do this, a sense I have not been able to describe but can now.” Or, “No, it does not.”) Otherwise the new description adds nothing to my original description that will prove useful to us. It shows only that the language of intention, and at least some of the point in the idea that interpretation is a matter of intention, is available for social as well as artistic interpretation if we want it. There is nothing in the idea of intention that necessarily divides the two types of creative interpretation.
But now we reach a more important point: there is something in that idea that necessarily unites them. For even if we reject the thesis that creative interpretation aims to discover some actual historical intention, the concept of intention nevertheless provides the formal structure for all interpretive claims. I mean that an interpretation is by nature the report of a purpose; it proposes a way of seeing what is interpreted-a social practice or tradition as much as a text or painting-as if this were the product of a decision to pursue one set of themes or visions or purposes, one “point,” rather than another. This structure is required of an interpretation even when the material to be interpreted is a social practice, even when there is no historical author whose historical mind can be plumbed. An interpretation of courtesy, in our imaginary history, will wear an intentional air even though the intention cannot belong to anyone in particular or even people in general. This structural requirement, taken to be independent of any further requirement tying interpretation to a particular author’s intention, provides an exciting challenge, which will occupy us later, mainly in Chapter 6. What could be the point of insisting on the formal structure of purpose, in the way we explain texts or legal institutions, beyond the goal of retrieving some actual historical intention?
Intention and the Value of Art
I said, just now, that the author’s-intention method of artistic interpretation is disputed even in its most plausible form. Many critics argue that literary interpretation should be sensitive to aspects of literature-the emotional effects it has on readers or the way its language escapes any reduction to one particular set of meanings or the possibility it creates for dialogue between artist and audience, for example – whether or not these are part of its author’s intention even in the complex sense we have been noticing. And even those who still insist that the artist’s intention must be decisive of what the “real” work is like disagree about how that intention should be reconstructed. These various disagreements about intention and art are important for us not because we should take sides-that is not necessary here-but because we should try to understand the character of the argument, what the disagreements are really about.
Here is one answer to that question. Works of art present themselves to us as having, or at least as claiming, value of the particular kind we call aesthetic: that mode of presentation is part of the very idea of an artistic tradition. But it is always a somewhat open question, particularly in the general critical tradition we call “modernist,” where that value lies and how far it has been realized. General styles of interpretation are, or at least presuppose, general answers to the question thus left open. I suggest, then, that the academic argument about author’s intention should be seen as a particularly abstract and theoretical argument about where value lies in art. In that way this argument plays its part, along with more concrete and valuable arguments more directed to particular objects, in the overarching practices that provide us with the aesthetic experience.
This way of seeing the debate among critics explains why some periods of literary practice have been more concerned with artistic intention than others: their intellectual culture ties value in art more firmly to the process of artistic creation. Cavell points out that “in modernist art the issue of the artist’s intention . . . has taken on a more naked role in our acceptance of his works than in earlier periods,” and that “the practice of poetry alters in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, in such a way that issues of intention . . . are forced upon the reader by the poem itself”. That change reflects and contributes to the growth in those periods of the romantic conviction that art has the value it does, and realizes that value in particular objects and events, because and when it embodies individual creative genius. The dominance of that view of art’s value in our culture explains not only our preoccupation with intention and sincerity but much else besides-.our obsession with originality, for example. So our dominant style of interpretation fixes on authorial intention, and arguments within that style about what, more precisely, artistic intention is reflect more finely tuned doubt and disagreement athe character of creative genius, about the role of the conscious, the unconscious, and the instinctive in its composition and expression. Some critics who dissent from the authorial style more markedly, because they emphasize values of tradition and continuity in which an author’s place shifts as tradition builds, argue for a retrospective interpretation that makes the best reading of his work depend on what was written a century later.” Still more radical challenges, which insist on the relevance of the social and political consequences of art or of structuralist or deconstructionist semantics, or insist on narrative constructed between author and reader, or seem to reject the enterprise of interpretation altogether, deploy very different conceptions of where the conceptually presupposed value of art really lies.
This is a frighteningly simplistic account of the complex interaction between interpretation and other aspects of culture; I mean only to suggest how the argument over intention in interpretation, located within the larger social practice of contesting the mode of art’s value, itself assumes the more abstract goal of constructive interpretation, aiming to make the best of what is interpreted. I must be careful not to be misunderstood. I am not arguing that the author’s intention theory of artistic interpretation is wrong (or right), but that whether it is wrong or right and what it means (so far as we can think about these issues at all within our own tradition of criticism) must turn on the plausibility of some more fundamental assumption about why works of art have the value their presentation presupposes. Nor do I mean that a critic who is concerned to reconstruct Fellini’s intentions in making La Strada must have in mind as he works some theory that connects intention to aesthetic value: critical intention is no more a mental state than artistic intention. Nor do I mean that if he reports that intention as including a reworking of Philomel, though this was never recognized by Fellini, he must be conscious of having the thought that the film is a better film read that way. I mean only that in the usual critical circumstances we must be able to attribute some such view to him, in the way we normally attribute convictions to people, if we are to understand his claims as interpretive rather than, for example, mocking or deceitful. I do not deny what is obvious, that interpreters think within a tradition of interpretation from which they cannot wholly escape. The interpretive situation is not an Archimedian point, nor is that suggested in the idea that interpretation aims to make what is interpreted the best it can seem. Once again I appeal to Gadamer, whose account of interpretation as recognizing, while struggling against, the constraints of history strikes the right note.
Intentions and Practices
In reply to the objection I set out at the beginning of this discussion, I claim that artistic interpretation in our culture is constructive interpretation. The large question how far the best interpretation of a work of art must be faithful to the author’s intention turns on the constructive question whether accepting that requirement allows interpretation to make of the artistic object or experience the best it can be. Those who think it does, because they think genius is the nerve of art or for some other reason, must make more detailed judgments of artistic value in deciding what the pertinent intention of the author really is. We must now consider the objection as it applies specifically to the other form of creative interpretation, the interpretation of social practices and structures. How could that form of interpretation aim to discover anything like an author’s intention? We noticed one sense in which someone might think it can. A member of a social practice might think interpreting his practice means discovering his own intentions in the sense I described. But that hypothesis offers no comfort to the objection, because the objection argues that interpretation must be neutral and therefore that the interpreter must aim to discover someone else’smotives and purposes. What sense can we make of that suggestion in the context of social interpretation?
There are two possibilities. Someone might say that interpretation of a social practice means discovering the purposes or intentions of the other participants in the practice, the citizens of courtesy . for example. Or that it means discovering the purposes of the community that houses the practice, conceived as itself having some form of mental life or group consciousness. The first of these suggestions seems more attractive because less mysterious. But it is ruled out by the internal structure of an argumentative social practice, because it is a feature of such practices that an interpretive claim is not just a claim about what other interpreters think. Social practices are composed, of course, of individual acts. Many of these acts aim at communication and so invite the question, “What did he mean by that?” or “Why did he say it just then?” If one person in the community of courtesy tells another that the institution requires taking off one’s hat to superiors, it makes perfect sense to ask these questions, and answering them would mean trying to understand him in the familiar way of conversational interpretation. But a social practice creates and assumes a crucial distinction between interpreting the acts and thoughts of participants one by one, in that way, and interpreting the practice itself that is, interpreting what they do collectively. It assumes that distinction because the claims and arguments participants make, licensed and encouraged by the practice, are about what it means, not what they mean.
That distinction would be unimportant for practical purposes if the participants in a practice always agreed about the best interpretation of it. But they do not agree, at least in detail, when the interpretive attitude is lively. They must, to be sure, agree about a great deal in order to share a social practice. They must share a vocabulary: they must have in mind much the same thing when they mention hats or requirements. They must understand the world in sufficiently similar ways and have interests and convictions sufficiently similar to recognize the sense in each other’s claims, to treat these as claims rather than just noises. That means not just using the same dictionary, but sharing what Wittgenstein called a form of life sufficiently concrete so that the one can recognize sense and purpose in what the other says and does, see what sort of beliefs and motives would make sense of his diction, gesture, tone, and so forth. They must all “speak the same language” in both senses of that phrase. But this similarity of interests and convictions need hold only to a point : it must be sufficiently dense to permit genuine disagreement, but not so dense that disagreement cannot break out.
So each of the participants in a social practice must distinguish between trying to decide what other members of his community think the practice requires and trying to decide, for himself, what it really requires. Since these are different questions, the interpretive methods he uses to answer the latter question cannot be the methods of conversational interpretation, addressed to individuals one by one, that he would use to answer the former. A social scientist who offers to interpret the practice must make the same distinction. He can, if he wishes, undertake only to report the various opinions different individuals in the community have about what the practice demands. But that would not constitute an interpretation of the practice itself; if he undertakes that different project he must give up methodological individualism and use the methods his subjects use in forming their own opinions about what courtesy really requires. He must, that is, join the practice he proposes to understand; his conclusions are then not neutral reports about what the citizens of courtesy think but claims about courtesy competitive with theirs.
What about the more ambitious suggestion that interpof a social practice is conversational interpretation addressed to the community as a whole conceived as some superentity? Philosophers have explored the idea of a collective or group consciousness for many reasons and in many contexts, some of them pertinent to interpretation; I discuss some of these in a note. Even if we accept the difficult ontology of this suggestion, however, it is defeated by the same argument as is fatal to the less ambitious one. Conversational interpretation is inappropriate because the practice being interpreted sets the conditions of interpretation: courtesy insists that interpreting courtesy is not just a matter of discovering what any particular person thinks about it. So even if we assume that the community is a distinct person with opinions and convictions of its own, a group consciousness of some sort, that assumption only adds to the story a further person whose opinions an interpreter must judge and contest, not simply discover and report. He must still distinguish, that is, between the opinion the group consciousness has about what courtesy requires, which he thinks he can discover by reflecting on its distinct motives and purposes, and what he, the interpreter, thinks courtesy really requires. He still needs a kind of interpretive method he can use to test that entity’s judgment once discovered, and this method cannot be a matter of conversation with that entity or anything else.
We began this long discussion provoked by an important objection: that the constructive account of creative interpretation is wrong because creative interpretation is always conversational interpretation. That objection fails for the interpretation of social practices even more dramatically than it fails for artistic interpretation. The constructive account must face other objections: in particular the objection I consider later in this chapter, that constructive interpretation cannot be objective. But we should study that mode of interpretation further before we test it again.
Stages of Interpretation
We must begin to refine constructive interpretation into an instrument fit for the study of law as a social practice. We shall need an analytical distinction among the following three stages of an interpretation, noticing how different degrees of consensus within a community are needed for each stage if the interpretive attitude is to flourish there. First, there must be a “preinterpretive” stage in which the rules and standards taken to provide the tentative content of the practice are identified. (The equivalent stage in literary interpretation is the stage at which discrete novels, plays, and so forth are identified textually, that is, the stage at which the text of Moby-Dick is identified and distinguished from the text of other novels.) I enclose “preinterpretive” in quotes because some kind of interpretation is necessary even at this stage. Social rules do not carry identifying labels. But a very great degree of consensus is needed-perhaps an interpretive community is usefully defined as requiring consensus at this stage-if the interpretive attitude is to be fruitful, and we may therefore abstract from this stage in our analysis by presupposing that the classifications it yields are treated as given in day-to-day reflection and argument. Second, there must be an interpretive stage at which the interpreter settles on some general justification for the main elements of the practice identified at the preinterpretive stage. This will consist of an argument why a practice of that general shape is worth pursuing, if it is. The justification need not fit every aspect or feature of the standing practice, but it must fit enough for the interpreter to be able to see himself as interpreting that practice, not inventing a new one. Finally, there must be a postinterpretive or reforming stage, at which he adjusts his sense of what the practice “really” requires so as better to serve the justification he accepts at the interpretive stage. An interpreter of courtesy, for example, may come to think that a consistent enforcement of the best justification of that practice would require people to tip their caps to soldiers returning from a crucial war as well as to nobles. Or that it calls for a new exception to an established pattern of deference: making returning soldiers exempt from displays of courtesy, for example. Or perhaps even that an entire rule stipulating deference to an entire group or class or persons must be seen as a mistake in the light of that justification. Actual interpretation in my imaginary society would be much less deliberate and structured than this analytical structure suggests. People’s interpretive judgments would be more a matter of “seeing” at once the dimensions of their practice, a purpose or aim in that practice, and the postinterpretive consequence of that purpose. And this “seeing” would ordinarily be no more insightful than just falling in with an interpretation then popular in some group whose point of view the interpreter takes up more or less automatically. Nevertheless there will be inevitable controversy, even among contemporaries, over the exact dimensions of the practice they all interpret, and still more controversy about the best justification of that practice. For we have already identified, in our preliminary account of what interpretation is like, a great many ways to disagree.
We can now look back through our analytical account to compose an inventory of the kind of convictions or beliefs or assumptions someone needs to interpret something. He needs assumptions or convictions about what counts as part of the practice in order to define the raw data of his interpretation at the preinterpretive stage; the interpretive attitude cannot survive unless members of the same interpretive community share at least roughly the same assumptions about this. He also needs convictions about how far the justification he proposes at the interpretive stage must fit the standing features of the practice to count as an interpretation of it rather than the invention of something new. Can the best justification of the practices of courtesy, which almost everyone else takes to be mainly about showing deference to social superiors, really be one that would require, at the reforming stage, no distinctions of social rank? Would this be too radical a reform, too ill-fitting a justification to count as an interpretation at all? Once again, there cannot be too great a disparity in different people’s convictions about fit; but only history can teach us how much difference is too much. Finally, he will need more substantive convictions about which kinds of justification really would show the practice in the best light, judgments about whether social ranks are desirable or deplorable, for example. These substantive convictions must be independent of the convictions about fit just described, otherwise the latter could not constrain the former, and he could not, after all, distinguish interpretation from invention. But they need not be so much shared within his community, for the interpretive attitude to flourish, as his sense of preinterpretive boundaries or even his convictions about the required degree of fit.
Philosophers of Courtesy
Institutional Identity
In Chapter 1 we reviewed classical theories or philosophies of law, and I argued that, read in the way they usually are, these theories are unhelpful because paralyzed by the semantic sting. Now we can ask what kind of philosophical theories would be helpful to people who take the interpretive attitude I have been describing toward some social tradition. Suppose our imaginary community of courtesy boasts a philosopher who is asked, in the salad days of the interpretive attitude, to prepare a philosophical account of courtesy. He is given these instructions: “We do not want your own substantive views, which are of no more interest than those of anyone else, about what courtesy actually requires. We want a more conceptual theory about the nature of courtesy, about what courtesy is in virtue of the very meaning of the word. Your theory must be neutral aboour day-to-day controversies; it should provide the conceptual background or rules governing these controversies rather than taking sides.” What can he do or say in reply? He is in a position like that of the social scientist I cited, who must join the practices he describes. He cannot offer a set of semantic rules for proper use of the word “courtesy” like the rules he might offer for using “book.” He cannot say that taking off one’s hat to a lady is by definition a case of courtesy, the way Moby-Dick might be said to be a book by definition. Or that sending a thank-you note is a borderline case that can properly be treated as either falling under courtesy or not, as a large pamphlet can properly be treated either as a book or not. Any step he took in that direction would immediately cross the line the community drew around his assignment; he would have provided his own positive interpretation, not a piece of neutral background analysis. He is like a man at the North Pole who is told to go any way but south.
He complains about his assignment and is given new instructions. “At least you can answer this question. Our practices are now very different from what they were several generations ago, and different as well from the practices of courtesy in neighboring and distant societies. Yet we know the practice we have is the same sort of practice as those. There must therefore be some feature all these different practices have in common in virtue of which they are all versions of courtesy. This feature is surely neutral in the way we want, since it is shared by people with such different ideas of what courtesy actually requires. Please tell us what it is.” He can indeed answer this question, though not in the way the instructions suggest.
His explanation of the sense in which courtesy remains the same institution throughout its career of changes and adaption and across different communities with very different rules will not appeal to any “defining feature” common to all instances or examples of that institution. For by hypothesis there is no such feature: courtesy is at one stage regarded as a matter of respect, and at another as something very different. His explanation will be historical: the institution has the continuity-to use the familiar Wittgensteinian figure-of a rope composed of many strands no one of which runs for its entire length or across its entire width. It is only a historical fact that the present institution is the descendant, through interpretive adaptations of the sort we noticed, of earlier ones, and that foreign institutions are also descendants of similar earlier examples. The changes from one period to another, or the differences from one society to another, may be sufficiently great so that the continuity should be denied. Which changes are great enough to cut the thread of continuity? That itself is an interpretive question, and the answer would depend on why the question of continuity arises. There is no feature that any stage or instance of the practice just must have, in virtue of the meaning of the word “courtesy,” and the search for such a feature would be just another example of the lingering infection of the semantic sting.
Concept and Conception
Can the philosopher be less negative and more helpful? Can he provide something in the spirit of what his clients want: an account of courtesy more conceptual and less substantive than the theories they already have and use? Perhaps. It is not unlikely that the ordinary debates about courtesy in the imaginary community will have the following treelike structure. People by and large agree about the most general and abstract propositions about courtesy, which form the trunk of the tree, but they disagree about more concrete refinements or subinterpretations of these abstract propositions, about the branches of the tree. For example, at a certain stage in the development of the practice, everyone agrees that courtesy, described most abstractly, is a matter of respect. But there is a major division about the correct interpretation of the idea of respect. One party thinks respect, properly understood, should be shown to people of a certain rank or group more or less automatically, while the other thinks respect must be deserved person by person. The first of these parties subdivides further about which ranks or groups are entitled to respect; the second subdivides about what acts earn respect. And so on into further and further subdivisions of opinion.
In these circumstances the initial trunk of the tree-the presently uncontroversial tie between courtesy and respect-would act, in public argument as well as private rumination, as a kind of plateau on which further thought and argument are built. It would then be natural for people to regard that tie as special and in the way of conceptual, to say, for example, that respect is part of the “very meaning” of courtesy. They mean, not that anyone who denies this is guilty of self-contradiction or does not know how to use the word “courtesy,” but only that what he says marks him as outside the community of useful or at least ordinary discourse about the institution. Our philosopher will serve his community if he can display this structure and isolate this “conceptual” connection between courtesy and respect. He can capture it in the proposition that, for this community, respect provides the concept of courtesy and that competing positions about what respect really requires are conceptions of that concept. The contrast between concept and conception is here a contrast between levels of abstraction at which the interpretation of the practice can be studied. At the first level agreement collects around discrete ideas that are uncontroversially employed in all interpretations; at the second the controversy latent in this abstraction is identified and taken up. Exposing this structure may help to sharpen argument and will in any case improve the community’s understanding of its intellectual environment.
The distinction between concept and conception, understood in this spirit and made for these purposes, is very different from the more familiar distinction between the meaning of a word and its extension. Our philosopher has succeeded, we are supposing, in imposing a certain structure on his community’s practice such that particular substantive theories can be identified and understood as subinterpretations of a more abstract idea. In one way his analysis, if successful, must also be uncontroversial, because his claim that respect provides the concept of courtesy-fails unless people are by and large agreed that courtesy is a matter of respect. But though uncontroversial in this way, his claim is interpretive not semantic; it is not a claim about linguistic ground rules everyone must follow to make sense. Nor is his claim timeless: it holds in virtue of a pattern of agreement and disagreement that might, as in the story I told earlier, disappear tomorrow. And his claim can be challenged at any time; the challenger will seem eccentric but will be perfectly well understood. His challenge will mark the deepening of disagreement, not, as with someone who says Moby-Dick is not a book, its superficiality.
Paradigms
There is one more task-less challenging but no less important-the philosopher might perform for his constituents. At each historical stage of the development of the institution, certain concrete requirements of courtesy will strike almost everyone as paradigms, that is, as requirements of courtesy if anything is. The rule that men must rise when a woman enters the room, for example, might be taken as a paradigm for a certain season. The role these paradigms play in reasoning and argument will be even more crucial than any abstract agreement over a concept. For the paradigms will be treated as concrete examples any plausible interpretation must fit, and argument against an interpretation will take the form, whenever this is possible, of showing that it fails to include or account for a paradigm case.
The connection between the institution and the paradigms of the day will be so intimate, in virtue of this sperole, as to provide another kind of conceptual flavor. Someone who rejects a paradigm will seem to be making an extraordinary kind of mistake. But once again there is an important difference between these paradigms of interpretive truth and cases in which, as philosophers say, a concept holds “by definition,” as bachelorhood holds of unmarried men. Paradigms anchor interpretations, but no paradigm is secure from challenge by a new interpretation that accounts for other paradigms better and leaves that one isolated as a mistake. In our imaginary community, the paradigm of gender might have survived other transformations for a long time, just because it seemed so firmly fixed, until it became an unrecognized anachronism. Then one day women would object to men standing for them; they might call this the deepest possible discourtesy. Yesterday’s paradigm would become today’s chauvinism.
A Digression: Justice
The distinctions and vocabulary so far introduced will all prove useful when we turn, in the next chapter, to law as an interpretive concept. It is worth pausing, however, to see how far our account of interpretive concepts holds of other important political and moral ideas, and in particular the idea of justice. The crude picture of how language works, the picture that makes us vulnerable to the semantic sting, fails for justice as it does for courtesy. We do not follow shared linguistic criteria for deciding what facts make a situation just or unjust. Our most intense disputes about justice about income taxes, for example, or affirmative action programs-are about the right tests for justice, not about whether the facts satisfy some agreed test in some particular case. A libertarian thinks that income taxes are unjust because they take property from its owner without his consent. It does not matter to the libertarian whether or not the taxes contribute to the greatest happiness in the long run. A utilitarian, on the other hand, thinks that income taxes are just only if they do contribute to the greatest long-run happiness, and it does not matter to him whether or not they take property without the owner’s consent. So if we applied to justice the picture of disagreement we rejected for courtesy, we would conclude that the libertarian and utilitarian can neither agree nor disagree about any issue of justice.
That would be a mistake, because justice is an institution we interpret. Like courtesy, it has a history. we each join , that history when we learn to take the interpretive attitude toward the demands, justifications, and excuses we find other people making in the name of justice. Very few of us self-consciously interpret this history the way I imagined the people in my story interpreting courtesy. But we each-some more reflectively than others-form a sense of justice that is an interpretation nonetheless, and some of us even revise our interpretation from time to time. Perhaps the institution of justice started as I imagined courtesy starting: in simple and straightforward rules about crime and punishment and debt. But the interpretive attitude flourished by the time the earliest political philosophy was written, and it has flourished since. The progressive reinterpretations and transformations have been much more complex than those I described for courtesy, but each has built on the rearrangement of practice and attitude achieved by the last.
Political philosophers can play the various roles I imagined for the philosopher of courtesy. They cannot develop semantic theories that provide rules for “justice” like the rules we contemplated for “book.” They can, however, try to capture the plateau from which arguments about justice largely proceed, and try to describe this in some abstract proposition taken to define the “concept” of justice for their community, so that arguments over justice can be understood as arguments about the best conception of that concept. Our own philosophers of justice rarely attempt this, for it is difficult to find a statement of the concept at once sufficiently abstract to be uncontroversial among us and sufficiently concrete to be useful. Our controversies about justice are too rich, and too many different kinds of theories are now in the field. Suppose a philosopher proposes, for example, this statement of the concept: justice is different from other political and moral virtues because it is a matter of entitlement, a matter of what those who will be affected by the acts of individuals or institutions have a right to expect at their hands. This seems unhelpful, because the concept of entitlement is itself too close to justice to be illuminating, and somewhat too controversial to count as conceptual in the present sense, because some prominent theories of justice the Marxist theory, if there is one, and even utilitarianism-would nevertheless reject it. Perhaps no useful statement of the concept of justice is available. If so, this casts no doubt on the sense of disputes about justice, but testifies only to the imagination of people trying to be just.
In any case, we have something that is more important than a useful statement of the concept. W e share a preinterpretive sense of the rough boundaries of the practice on which our imagination must be trained. We use this to distinguish conceptions of justice we reject, even deplore, from positions we would not count as conceptions of justice at all even if they were presented under that title. The libertarian ethic is, for many of us, an unattractive theory of justice. But the thesis that abstract art is unjust is not even unattractive; it is incomprehensible as a theory about justice because no competent preinterpretive account of the practice of justice embraces the criticism and evaluation of art.
Philosophers, or perhaps sociologists, of justice can also do useful work in identifying the paradigms that play the role in arguments about justice that I said paradigms would play in arguments about courtesy. It is paradigmatic for us now that punishing innocent people is unjust, that slavery is unjust, that stealing from the poor for the rich is unjust. Most of us would reject out of hand any conception that seemed to require or permit punishing the innocent. It is a standing argument against utilitarianism, therefore, that it cannot provide a good account or justification of these central paradigms; utilitarians do not ignore that charge as irrelevant, but on the contrary use heroic ingenuity to try to refute it. Some theories of justice do contest much of what their contemporaries take as paradigmatic, however, and this explains not only why these theories-Nietzsche’s, for example, or Marx’s apparently contradictory thoughts about justice-have seemed not only radical but perhaps not really theories of justice at all. For the most part, however, philosophers of justice respect and use the paradigms of their time. Their main work consists neither in trying to state the concept of justice nor in redefining paradigms but in developing and defending what are plainly full-blooded conceptions of justice, controversial theories that go well beyond paradigms into politics. The libertarian philosopher opposes income taxes and the egalitarian philosopher calls for more redistribution because their conceptions of justice differ. There is nothing neutral about these conceptions. They are interpretive but they are committed, and their value to us springs from that commitment.
The Chain of Law
The Chain Novel
I argued in Chapter 2 that creative interpretation takes its formal structure from the idea of intention, not (at least not necessarily) because it aims to discover the purposes of any particular historical person or group but because it aims to impose purpose over the text or data or tradition being interpreted. Since all creative interpretation shares this feature, and therefore has a normative aspect or component, we profit from comparing law with other forms or occasions of interpretation. We can usefully compare the judge deciding what the law is on some issue not only with the citizens of courtesy deciding what that tradition requires, but with the literary critic teasing out the various dimensions of value in a complex play or poem.
Judges, however, are authors as well as critics. A judge deciding McLoughlin or Brown adds to the tradition he interprets; future judges confront a new tradition that includes what he has done. Of course literary criticism contributes to the traditions of art in which authors work; the character and importance of that contribution are themselves issues in critical theory. But the contribution of judges is more direct, and the distinction between author and interpreter more a matter of different aspects of the same process. We can find an even more fruitful comparison between literature and law, therefore, by constructing an artificial genre of literature that we might call the chain novel.
In this enterprise a group of novelists writes a novel seriatim; each novelist in the chain interprets the chapters he has been given in order to write a new chapter, which is then added to what the next novelist receives, and so on. Each has the job of writing his chapter so as to make the novel being constructed the best it can be, and the complexity of this task models the complexity of deciding a hard case under law as integrity. The imaginary literary enterprise is fantastic but not unrecognizable. Some novels have actually been written in this way, though mainly for a debunking purpose, and certain parlor games for rainy weekends in English country houses have something of the same structure. Television soap operas span decades with the same characters and some minimal continuity of personality and plot, though they are written by different teams of authors even in different weeks. In our example, however, the novelists are expected to take their responsibilities of continuity more seriously; they aim jointly to create, so far as they can, a single unified novel that is the best it can be.
Each novelist aims to make a single novel of the material he has been given, what he adds to it, and (so far as he can control this) what his successors will want or be able to add. He must try to make this the best novel it can be construed as the work of a single author rather than, as is the fact, the product of many different hands. That calls for an overall judgment on his part, or a series of overall judgments as he writes and rewrites. He must take up some view about the novel in progress, some working theory about its characters, plot, genre, theme, and point, in order to decide what counts as continuing it and not as beginning anew. If he is a good critic, his view of these matters will be complicated and multifaceted, because the value of a decent novel cannot be captured from a single perspective. He will aim to find layers and currents of meaning rather than a single, exhaustive theme. We can, however, in our now familiar way give some structure to any interpretation he adopts, by distinguishing two dimensions on which it must be tested. The first is what we have been calling the dimension of fit. He cannot adopt any interpretation, however complex, if he believes that no single author who set out to write a novel with the various readings of character, plot, theme, and point that interpretation describes could have written substantially the text he has been given. That does not mean his interpretation must fit every bit of the text. It is not disqualified simply because he claims that some lines or tropes are accidental, or even that some events of plot are mistakes because they work against the literary ambitions the interpretation states. But the interpretation he takes up must nevertheless flow throughout the text; it must have general explanatory power, and it is flawed if it leaves unexplained some major structural aspect of the text, a subplot treated as having great dramatic importance or a dominant and repeated metaphor. If no interpretation can be found that is not flawed in that way, then the chain novelist will not be able fully to meet his assignment; he will have to settle for an interpretation that captures most of the text, conceding that it is not wholly successful. Perhaps even that partial success is unavailable; perhaps every interpretation he considers is inconsistent with the bulk of the material supplied to him. In that case he must abandon the enterprise, for the consequence of taking the interpretive attitude toward the text in question is then a piece of internal skepticism: that nothing can count as continuing the novel rather than beginning anew.
He may find, not that no single interpretation fits the bulk of the text, but that more than one does. The second dimension of interpretation then requires him to judge which of these eligible readings makes the work in progress best, all things considered. At this point his more substantive aesthetic judgments, about the importance or insight or realism or beauty of different ideas the novel might be taken to express, come into play. But the formal and structural considerations that dominate on the first dimension figure on the second as well, for even when neither of two interpretations is disqualified out of hand as explaining too little, one may show the text in a better light because it fits more of the text or provides a more interesting integration of style and content. So the distinction between the two dimensions is less crucial or profound than it might seem. It is a useful analytical device that helps us give structure to any interpreter’s working theory or style. He will form a sense of when an interpretation fits so poorly that it is unnecessary to consider its substantive appeal, because he knows that this cannot outweigh its embarrassments of fit in deciding whether it makes the novel better, everything taken into account, than its rivals. This sense will define the first dimension for him. But he need not reduce his intuitive sense to any precise formula; he would rarely need to decide whether some interpretation barely survives or barely fails, because a bare survivor, no matter how ambitious or interesting it claimed the text to be, would almost certainly fail in the overall comparison with other interpretations whose fit was evident.
We can now appreciate the range of different kinds of judgments that are blended in this overall comparison. Judgments about textual coherence and integrity, reflecting different formal literary values, are interwoven with more substantive aesthetic judgments that themselves assume different literary aims. Yet these various kinds of judgments, of each general kind, remain distinct enough to check one another in an overall assessment, and it is that possibility of contest, particularly between textual and substantive judgments, that distinguishes a chain novelist’s assignment from more independent creative writing. Nor can we draw any flat distinction between the stage at which a chain novelist interprets the text he has been given and the stage at which he adds his own chapter, guided by the interpretation he has settled on. When he begins to write he might discover in what he has written a different, perhaps radically different, interpretation. Or he might find it impossible to write in the tone or theme he first took up, and that will lead him to reconsider other interpretations he first rejected. In either case he returns to the text to reconsider the lines it makes eligible.