It is not the linguistic system that gives determinacy to the meaning of an utterance but rather the context of the utterance.
Abrams and E. Hirsch imply, first scrutinize an utterance and then give it meaning ITC, We hear an utterance as already embedded within, not prior to determining, a knowledge of its purposes and interests ITC, Fish is effectively applying a wellknown and previously extensively articulated insight to the act of reading. The same applies to his claim that facts do not exist independently of, or prior to, the interpretations and viewpoints that construct them as such.
The problem here, as Fish effectively acknowledges, is that the text disappears. Whereas for the formalists the text was a stable object, for Fish there is nothing beyond intersubjective agreement, and the text is reduced to merely the area of overlap of subjective responses. Fish employs a naive notion of objectivity as somehow entirely independent of subjectivity. But philosophers for more than a century have been arguing that objectivity and subjectivity arise in the same, mutually constructive, process.
In this way we could talk about an objectivity which we understood to be constructed but which offered certain markers or foundations for such construction, rather than blandly saying that all objects are of equal status regarding the degree of intersubjective construction that constitutes them. Fish claims that a formalist analysis is incapable of analyzing an experiential, temporal process.
Notes 1. Although he does not quote him, Fish corresponds to Roland Barthes' "The Death of the Author" where he argued that the reader, not the writer, as the authority over the interpretation of the text. Fish addresses the criticism levied against the idea of the reader being the locus of interpretation and not the text itself. Fish wonders if not having one fixed literal meaning of a text actually means that there are "meanings as there are readers"?. He comes back to the "is there a text in this class?
Both these meanings are not indeterminate or none-normative, they are just determined in different manners and under different norms depending on how the interpreter understands the situation. Fish argues that the two possible meanings of the utterance "is there a text in this class?
This prior knowledge is not in fact prior nor later since it is activated at one and the same time with the reception of the utterance and its interpretation.
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