Authorial Intent Vs. Reader-Derived Meaning

From Summa Bergania

by David Bergan - December 14, 2001 (revised February 11, 2007)

The aim of this essay is to examine the relation between the meaning of a text and its author's intent. I had deceived myself into thinking that this topic was going to be simple. Then, once I started thinking about and eventually researching the subject, I quickly learned that my task was nothing short of Herculean. Before we can even ask intelligent questions about authorial intent we must first establish a foundation upon the uses and functions of language. And there is no better place to start any philosophical inquiry than Aristotle.

Affections of the soul

In De Interpretatione, Aristotle's remarks on the purpose of language are characteristically succinct.

Now spoken sounds are symbols of affections in the soul, and written marks symbols of spoken sounds. And just as written marks are not the same for all men, neither are spoken sounds. But what these are in the first place signs of--affections of the soul--are the same for all; and what these affections are likeness of--actual things--are also the same.^[1]

Language, then, for Aristotle is the transfer of 'affections in the soul' from one person to the next. It is a remarkably simple statement, cutting right to the point of human communication, but in the company of today's scientific understandings it may no longer be adequate. Biologists tell us that from studies of beehives, we know that bees communicate the location of pollen sources through extravagant dances.^[2] Molecular biologists study patterns of DNA with the help of cryptoanalysists and linguists. And for just over a half-century, humans have been conversing with silicon's excited electrons.^[3] It is unlikely that Aristotle knew much about the intricate communication of bees, and certain that he did not know anything about DNA and computers, so if his remark about affections of the soul is not completely adequate, at least we can say that his defense is his ignorance.

Is it appropriate to call these things languages? Bees waggle-dance to tell their comrades where to find flowers, which is very similar-if not identical-to a deaf person signing the road directions of how to get to the grocery store. Both cases result in the transfer of knowledge. Aristotle's definition of the soul does not make room for animals because they do not have a 'rational principle.' Yet at least in this one specific species, in this one specific piece of knowledge, bees behave as though they had a rational principle. They are not composing music, writing sonnets, or proving mathematical theorems, but they give and receive directions to a source of food in the same manner.

DNA is a step down from bees. The sender and receiver of information are merely organic molecules. Variations in the atomic structures of a very large chain synchronize our development. Both eyes are the same color. The hair on our right arm is the same as the hair on our left arm. Except for moles, scar tissue, and freckles, our skin is homogenous in its properties and appearance as well. This amazing synchronization occurs because every cell in the body has an exact replica of the master code and understands its role in the complex organization. Nerve cells do not tan. Bone cells do not hear. Muscle cells do not think. The division of labor inherent in the molecular biology of all living things results from a disbursement of a specialized information. What makes it unique from the information shared among people is that nothing is intelligently receiving the information.

Computers are like DNA in this respect, but are also different because they are programmed by people. Communication does not literally occur with the semiconductors in the processor. We do not tell the processor certain things in order that it may remember or think about them. Whatever we put into the computer we expect to be read by a human (either ourselves or someone else). When I ask a calculator to evaluate the natural logarithm of 37, I do not expect the calculator to keep the information and use it for its own purposes like the bee doing the waggle-dance wanted the other bees to use the information about pollen for themselves. Instead I want the calculator to convert my expression ln(37) into a decimal form and give it back to me. As such, I am essentially communicating with myself–it starts with me and ends with me. If I looked up the process of how to calculate a natural logarithm by hand, I could evaluate ln(37) with pencil and paper. The scratching on the paper is certainly of a different nature than the scratching of a handwritten note to my mother, yet both could be considered affections of the soul. The former being a procedural, logical affection and the latter hopefully being an emotional or informational affection.

However, unlike calculating ln(37) with paper and pencil, to calculate it on a computer requires that I code it in such a way that the computer can understand it. Modern computer programs do a good job of hiding the details to this process so that it looks like the computer is processing data in a similar way that humans do. All we have to do is type ln(37) and the computer quickly returns its decimal equivalent. What we do not see is that after typing "ln(37)" the computer first converts the text into binary, then looks up the algorithm for the natural logarithm, spins through the algorithm with its binary data, converts the binary form back into decimal, and then displays it on the screen.^[4] The point is not how marvelously complicated computers are, but that in order for the computer to do work for us, we need to put it in its native language. It would be something like telling a person who speaks only Russian to calculate our natural logarithm. We would have to first translate the problem into Russian before he could do the work.

All of these are interesting objections to Aristotle's definition of language. If we thought it necessary we could try to invent a new one that includes these cases. Such an attempt would be fascinating. But since the subject of this paper is the relationship between meaning and authorial intention, the scope of our work will rest inside inter-human communication where Aristotle's definition fits nicely.

Pre-language man and the origin of language

We do not have any anthropological evidence of what pre-language man was like. Indeed such evidence would be impossible to find, because if they had left any drawings or marks for us, those marks would be a primitive language and thus the remains of man after the origin of language and not before. Hence, if humans ever lived without language, all our attempts to understand them in that state would be purely the result of our imagination. Jean-Jacques Rousseau looked at the way language is taught in civilization-from mother to child-and concluded that one of the chief difficulties of the invention of language is that language had to have been taught in just the opposite manner.

[Note that] the child having all his needs to explain and consequently more things to say to the mother than the mother to the child, it is the child who must make the greatest efforts of invention, and that the language he uses must be in great part his own work, which multiplies languages as many times as there are individuals to speak them. A wandering and vagabond life contributes further to this, since it does not give any idiom the time to gain consistency. For to say that the mother teaches the child the words he ought to use to ask her for a particular thing shows well how one teaches already formed languages, but it does not teach us how they are formed.^[5]

Furthermore, supposing that the above difficulty could be conquered, an even more challenging one lies ahead:

For if men needed speech in order to learn to think, they had even greater need of knowing how to think in order to discover the art of speech; and even should we understand how the sounds of the voice were taken for the conventional interpreters of our ideas, it would still remain to be seen what could have been the specific interpreters of this convention for ideas that, having no perceptible object, could be indicated neither by gesture nor by voice.^[6]

Rousseau reasons that the invention of language contains the same structure as the familiar chicken-and-egg paradox. We needed speech to begin thinking, yet we needed thinking to formulate speech.

Rousseau's two difficulties are interesting to ponder, but other philosophers imagined the invention of language without running into any paradoxes. Saint Augustine had the following analysis of how he as a child learned his native language:

When they (my elders) named some object, and accordingly moved towards something, I saw this and I grasped that the thing was called by the sound they uttered when they meant to point it out. Their intention was shown by their bodily movements, as it were the natural language of all peoples: the expression of the face, the play of the eyes, the movement of other parts of the body, and the tone of voice which expresses our state of mind in seeking, having, rejecting, or avoiding something. Thus, as I heard words repeatedly used in their proper places in various sentences, I gradually learnt to understand what objects they signified; and after I had trained my mouth to form these signs, I used them to express my own desires.^[7]

At first glance, this does not seem to answer Rousseau's first paradox, since baby Augustine was raised in a society that already had language, and he learned it from his elders. However, the second sentence brings up something that Rousseau's paradoxes do not consider: a universal natural language. One of the hallways in Madison High School^[8] used to have a poster declaring, "Everybody smiles in the same language." The slogan was surrounded by a dozen poorly drawn cartoon heads, each representing a different nationality with their own speech bubble saying "I am fine" in their various languages. It is doubtful that a philosopher designed this sign, yet the idea of it reinforces Augustine's concept of a universal language.

We may not speak Russian, but we can tell when Garry Kasparov is upset after losing a chess game. We can tell when a baby is content. We can tell when a cat is afraid. A good poker player can tell when someone is holding aces. When Aristotle discussed affections of the soul, he limited his discussion to only those affections that are represented in speech and writing. Nonverbal communication, the signs that animals and humans alike both share, was likely the key to developing the first syntactical language. Symbols.

Aristotle's definition related the function of speech to affections of the soul and the function of writing to speech through the concept of symbols. The word "tree" symbolizes the thing in our backyard that has a trunk and leaves on it. As such, when we hear the pronunciation of tree, it brings this image to our minds, and when we see the particular four-letter combination in written form, it brings the spoken form to mind.

In mathematics, the symbols are in the form of numbers and signs that represent arithmetic operations. In algebra, we add another set of symbols. Unlike the previous symbols, the letters we use in algebra do not stand for any one fixed thing, hence why we call them variables. In 4 + n = 7, n symbolizes the number 3; but in 4 + n = 9, n symbolizes 5.

Abbreviations can be thought of as symbols of symbols. SDSU symbolizes South Dakota State University, which is the name that symbolizes the actual campus.

Meaning (attempt 1)

So far we do not have any objection to the statement that all words are affections of the soul. Does it then follow that all spoken and written language has meaning?

According to our work so far, one could not say or write anything that does not symbolize something real. As Wittgenstein says, "Every word has a meaning. This meaning is correlated with the word. It is the object for which the word stands."^[9] Even if a human randomly picked out words and strung them together, they would symbolize real things and therefore ought to have some meaning. "At jelly rhino fast marry liquid travesty." Each word brings about a separate mental image of what it symbolizes. But we cannot (at least I cannot) fit one mental image for the whole sentence. Does this rob the sentence of meaning? More groundwork is required...

Syntax and Semantics

Syntax is the proper spelling and placement of a word in a sentence. To learn a word's syntax is to learn how to use it properly. Semantics is the effect of using the word; the word's meaning. Syntax tells me that the word "quickly" is spelled as I have just written it, and it is an adverb-which means I have to use it to modify verbs, adjectives, and other adverbs. Semantics tells me that I use the word to refer to something that is the opposite of "slowly" and something related to rapidly or swiftly. What we call formal English is a large set of rules governing syntax and semantics.

However, Wittgenstein's main area of interest was that proper use of syntax and semantics is not necessary to convey meaning.

[Consider the language] meant to serve for communication between builder A and an assistant B. A is building with buildingstones: there are blocks, pillars, slabs, and beams. B has to pass the stones, and that in the order in which A needs them. For this purpose they use a language consisting of the words "block", "pillar", "slab", "beam". A calls them out; B brings the stone which he has learnt to bring at such-and-such a call.^[10]

When A calls, "Slab!" he is hardly using a complete sentence by formal English, yet it is sufficient to get the proper block from the assistant. We could say that this command is short for "Bring a slab to me." but we could just as easily say that "Bring a slab to me." is long for "Slab!" The first could be a symbol of the second, just as easily as the second could be a symbol of the first.

This gets interesting once we take the example a bit further. Let's say that Builder A lives in a tall apartment building. When he gets home from work he steps into the elevator, turns to the man on his right (whom he does not know) and says "Slab!" At the minimum, this statement would get a raised eyebrow. Now why is it that less than an hour prior to the confusing elevator incident, "Slab!" was a perfectly legitimate form of communication? The syntax, semantics, tone of voice, attitude, facial expression, and gestures were identical in both uses of the sentence. How then is there perfect clarity in one instance and perfect confusion in the other?

Wittgenstein says that in each instance there is a different language-game that we play. "Slab!" makes sense in the first language-game that the builder plays at work, but not in the one he plays in the elevator. The syntax and semantics, therefore are not the same. Each game has its own rules.

Now it is interesting that throughout the many diverse language-games humans play, we rarely need to be taught the rules for any of them. A rookie builder could figure out that when his boss shouts "Slab!" he wants him to bring him a slab. People that do not understand when one certain language-game ends and another begins are thought of as being either really foolish or downright crazy. Someone who says "Big Mac and fries" at a Pizza Hut is going to get strange looks the first time he says it, an irritated waitress the second time, and a polite escort out of the restaurant the third time he says it.

Ambiguity

Whenever a symbol refers to two or more different things, it is ambiguous. If you call my house and ask to speak with "Bergan" the reply will be "which one?" Ambiguity can occur on many different levels in all sorts of language. In mathematics, if I were to write 6 + 5 * 3, it could be interpreted as (6 + 5) * 3 or 6 + (5 * 3). The first results in 33, the second in 21. Fortunately, there is a worldwide standard in mathematics that gives multiplication priority over addition. Thus anyone who has been properly taught math will correctly assume that expression means 6 + (5 * 3).

In math ambiguity is cut to the minimum. In language it is always a thorn. On the lowest level we have homonyms, which can be divided into the subsets of homophones, homographs, and those which are both homophones and homographs. Homophones sound alike but are spelled differently, like beet and beat or lead and led. These are only a problem in speech because their different spellings clearly specify which symbol is to be interpreted in writing. Homographs are spelled alike, but sound differently, like wind-the cool breeze on a summer's day, and wind-what we do to an old-fashioned watch. These are only a problem in writing. For instance, I could write, "The wind destroyed the watch," and we would not know whether the watch was destroyed by a tornado or a strong but careless person applying too much torque-unless I read the statement out loud.

By far, it is the homonyms of the third category that are the most troublesome. Virtually every word that has more than one definition is capable of causing ambiguity. As Adler points out, even the tame word "read" has several different usages.

If you looked up "read" in the large Oxford Dictionary, you would find, first, that the same four letters constituted an obsolete noun referring to the fourth stomach of a ruminant, and the commonly used verb which refers to a mental activity involving words or symbols of some sort...

One uncommon meaning of "to read" is to think or suppose. This meaning passes into the more usual one of conjecturing or predicting, as when we speak of reading the stars, one's palm, or one's future. That leads eventually to the meaning of the word in which it refers to perusing books or other written documents. There are many other meanings, such as verbal utterance (when an actress reads her lines for the director); such as detecting what is nor perceptible from what is (when we say we can read a person's character in his face); such as instruction, academic or personal (when we have someone read us a lecture).

The slight variations in usage seem endless: a singer reads music; a scientist reads nature; an engineer reads his instruments; a printer reads proof; we read between the lines; we read something into a situation, or someone out of the party.^[11]

Similar to multiple definitions, archaic definitions can become a bugbear in reading older texts. The word gentleman, for example, used to refer to a man that owned land. Nowadays it does not have any such connotations and merely refers to a good or, more specifically, a polite man. Umberto Eco pointed out that this sort of confusion occurs when a contemporary reader comes upon the line in Wordsworth's poem 'I wander lonely as a cloud' that reads "A poet could not but be gay."^[12]

Even when we understand every word in a sentence, ambiguity can arise from the position of the words. Consider, "The farmer threw the cow over the fence some hay." At first it seems that the farmer must have extraordinary strength, but after a moment's reflection we realize that the hay was probably tossed over the fence rather than the cow. But what if the receiver of the sentence did not intuitively recognize that it only makes sense that the hay was thrown and not the cow? A species of giants might not have any problems picturing the cow tumbling over the fence. Nor would a child, unaware of the size and weight of a cow, immediately understand, either. Computer programmers often run into this sort of trouble because anything that is not precisely well defined will cause the algorithm to go amuck. Computers lack the common sense that fixes confusing situations.

Combining ambiguity of multiple definitions with ambiguity of sentence structure can be disastrous. The poet's lament, "Time flies like an arrow," is a classic case. Human usually have no trouble identifying this simile as a remark on how quickly time passes. However, a reader with no poetry in his soul could be confused. Instead of making 'time' the subject, let us consider time as an adjective for flies. There are horseflies, fruit flies, and dragonflies, so it should not be that unusual to see a time fly. Horse flies are attracted to porch lamps, so it is perfectly reasonably that time flies like an arrow. Then again, English has that peculiar rule where sentences can have the invisible, implied subject "you." Couple this with the verb form of time (as in, I time cars to see how fast they are) and we have the third interpretation: (You) time flies like an arrow.^[13]

So far all of these examples seem ridiculous, and they are. If they were not so ridiculously obvious, they would not make the point that alternate, non-intended interpretations can be construed. These examples have been short and composed only of simple words. Once the size of the sentences and complexity of the subject increase, we can only expect that the possibility for ambiguity is greater.

Before leaving the subject of ambiguity, which is perhaps the most important subtopic for authorial intent, I want to point out two other examples. The first of these is the possibility for code words. A shrewd general could write, "The old lady met the florist at the grocery store," which could actually mean anything but a rendezvous in a supermarket. Words are symbols and the objects they symbolize are completely arbitrary. Hence, the letters that make up 'old lady' could be assigned to symbolize 'a squad of marines' if not 'my grandmother.' Code words may only seem to exist in covert intelligent missions, but we will also find them in nearly every good short story. Whenever something outside of the main plot symbolizes something in the plot, it is a usage of code words.

The other instance of ambiguity relates to Wittgenstein's two builders. By taking the situation at work one step further we can make it into total confusion. Let's say assistant B tells builder A to count the number of slabs in a pile. The response is "Five slabs!" Now according to the aforementioned convention, after A shouts, "Five slabs!" B should then bring him five slabs. But in this situation, if B did that, he would be reprimanded for bringing unnecessary slabs. The same exact phrase in the same setting has two different meanings.

Vagueness

Unlike ambiguous statements that have multiple meanings, vague statements seem to grasping at any sort of meaning at all. Probably the most famous song from the Beatles' Magical Mystery Tour album had a chorus declaring, "I am the Eggman, they are the Eggman, I am the Walrus!" That line doesn't fit with anything in the song, nor real life. Apparently Lennon wrote it because he found out that a teacher was having his students analyze Beatles songs for meaning, so he intentionally put in nonsense to keep them looking.^[14]

Other examples of vagueness include paradoxes such as the phrase "married bachelors," riddles like "This weighs a lot going forward, but not going backwards," and Lewis Carroll's nonsense verse. At times Carroll's nonsense verse does not even use real words, such as the first stanza of Jabberwocky:

Twas brillig, and the slithy toves

Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;

All mimsy were the borogoves,

And the mome raths outgrave.^[15]

On a quest for meaning, vagueness is the archenemy. It takes words that ordinarily have meaning and sucks them into a void.

Meaning (attempt 2)

Aristotle still holds that words are the affections of our soul. His definition gives us a sender-oriented view of language. If we are to find meaning, however, it might be important to look at language in the opposite paradigm. Shouting "Slab!" to your fellow builder is a statement that has meaning because the assistant understands the command. Shouting "Slab!" in an elevator brings about confusion because the stranger does not know what language-game you are playing. We can even say "bububu" and have that stand for "If it doesn't rain, I shall go for a walk," as long as whoever receives the statement can understand that the former is a symbol for the latter. But the receiver can only understand the statement if he himself knows how to make the same statement. Therefore, knowing the meaning of a word or sentence is a matter of understanding the word or sentence. Understanding, in turn, is a matter of being able to use the word or sentence. Thus the culmination of Wittgenstein's analysis is, "Meaning is use."

This simple analytical statement reveals much about communication. If the receiver cannot use the statement he received (that is, if he cannot say it to someone in the same context as he heard it), it does him no good-and therefore has no meaning. Since I cannot utter the words "I am the walrus!" in such a way that it would be a symbol of an affection of my soul, I therefore cannot receive any meaning from the Beatles saying it.

The grand analogy of communication

Ultimately, the process of communication is identical to a physical property of sound: sympathetic vibrations. If you have two tuning forks with the same frequency, both at rest, striking one of them can cause the other to vibrate synchronously. If you have two strings that are at the same pitch and pluck one, the other will vibrate with it. Affections of the soul seem to be the same way. If we receive something in either spoken or written form that causes an affection in our own soul, then that thing has meaning for us. Think of the soul as your own unique harp. Each string represents an affection. Then, if we read a sentence and a string in our soul does not vibrate, we call it vague. And if a sentence^[16] causes two or more strings to vibrate we call it ambiguous.

Syntax and semantics are not relevant unless their abuse causes ambiguity or vagueness. With computers, failing to use exactly proper syntax always causes ambiguity or vagueness. They can only use the language-games that are programmed into them; they cannot invent their own. But humans have common sense, which lessens the restrictions on our language. We glide easily from one language-game to another and frequently invent new ones that cater to the situation. In any context where the command "Slab!" vibrates an affection in someone else's soul, there is meaning. If this command fails, however, and you still want your assistant to bring you a slab, you need to shift to a different language-game (such as formal English) to explain the rules of the specific language-game that you want your assistant to play. If you have no language-games in common with another person (not even gestures, math, or music), then it is impossible to vibrate any affections in his soul, which means communication will not occur. But as Augustine mentioned, there seems to be a universal language-game of facial expressions, tones of voice, and basic gestures, that would allow some sort of communication in any face-to-face meeting.

Truth

After what I have just written, it seems as though the process of communication is wholly subjective. Any statement can have meaning so long as it vibrates an affection in somebody. Jabberwocky may not communicate meaning to me, but I cannot say for certain that it will not communicate meaning to everybody.

Truth is not subjective, so if truth and meaning have any relation to one another, then the model collapses. Fortunately, even Aristotle did not correlate affections of the soul with truth.

Just as some thoughts in the soul are neither true nor false while some are necessarily one or the other, so also with spoken sounds. For falsity and truth have to do with combination and separation. Thus names and verbs by themselves-for instance 'man' or 'white' when nothing further is added-are like the thoughts that are without combination or separation; for so far they are neither true nor false. A sign of this is that even 'goat-stag' signifies something but not, as yet, anything true or false-unless 'is' or 'is not' is added (either simply or with reference to time)...

Every sentence is significant (not as a tool but, as we said, by convention), but not every sentence is a statement-making sentence, but only those in which there is truth or falsity. There is not truth or falsity in all sentences: a prayer is a sentence but is neither true nor false. The present investigation deals with the statement-making sentence; the others we can dismiss, since consideration of them belongs rather to the study of rhetoric or poetry.^[17]

Truth, then, is not a relationship between people and their souls' affections. Truth is the comparison of one person's affections to the way things really are. I may tell you that the carpet in my room is blue. Assuming you know all the words in that sentence, the affection regarding my carpet would vibrate. Then since it is the Christmas season, suppose that you go out and purchase a blue bedspread for me. Once you deliver the bedspread you are probably going to be upset, because my carpet is not blue, but green. My carpet being green did not take any meaning out of my statement that the carpet was blue. However, since my statement did not correspond to the way things actually are, it was false.

Truth is also outside the scope of this paper-except that I hope that my statements regarding meaning and authorial intention are true.

Meaning (attempt 3) with (finally) authorial intent

Now that meaning has been severed from truth, are there any limits on interpretation? If Jack the Ripper claimed that he did his work because of his interpretation of St. Luke's Gospel, can we deny it? We saw how ambiguity can give rise to alternate meanings. If Jack interpreted the text as a conglomeration of code words regarding murder, then how can we say that his soul's affections are something other than they are? Umberto Eco responds thus:

One could object that the only alternative to a radical reader-oriented theory of interpretation is the one extolled by those who say that the only valid interpretation aims at finding the original intention of the author. In some of my recent writings I have suggested that between the intention of the author (very difficult to find out and frequently irrelevant for the interpretation of a text) and the intention of the interpreter who (to quote Richard Rorty) simply 'beats the text into a shape which will serve for his purpose', there is a third possibility. There is an intention of the text.^[18]

Eco means to establish a difference between the intent of the text and the author's intent. He does this because the author's intent is often difficult to obtain and seems to expect us to do further research with outside sources on any text we may wish to interpret. Furthermore, an author's opinion might change years after the text has been written; but the text does not. Personally, I do not find a large dissimilarity between the intent of the text and the intent of the author. The intent of the text seems to be just the intent of the author at the time the text was written... which is like saying that the intent of a lecture is the intent of the lecturer at the time he is speaking. And nothing better tells us the intent of the lecturer at the time he is speaking than the words of the lecture. Anyway, it doesn't seem necessary to dwell any longer on this minutia.

Our dilemma is that we have hitherto defined meaning in terms of the reader/receiver of the text. But now that this door is wide open, we have no way of screening misinterpretations. All communication is of the broadcast form-it originates from one person and disseminates to many. Every thing we say and write (except maybe prayers) has the potential of being heard by more than one person. Even secrets we tell our best friend are only one-to-one as long as our friend respects the privacy of the secret. However, no matter how many people hear or read our statements (either directly from us or indirectly from someone else), there is only one author. Each member of the audience may take a different meaning from the lecture, but the lecturer himself intendes only one meaning. Only one string is plucked even if strings of many different tones vibrate sympathetically with it.

Eco's only resolution to the mess we have created between a reader's meaning and a text's intention is to adopt a stance similar to Karl Popper's view on science. Popper argues that what separates science from pseudo-science is not that science is provable, but instead that it is falsifiable. Horoscopes can be proven because they are so general in nature that nearly every occurrence confirms them. But because horoscopes are so general, Popper classifies them as pseudo-science since they cannot be falsified.^[19] Eco uses a similar criterion for distinguishing interpretations from misinterpretations. We may not be able to distinguish from 2 or 3 good interpretations which is the true intent of the text, but we can rule out misinterpretations because they clearly defy the meaning. In order for a misinterpretation to apply to the text, the criterion used to relate it would be one so general that it would allow any interpretation. Whatever scheme Jack the Ripper used to relate Luke's Gospel to his twisted interpretation would be so general, so unfalsifiable that the same logic could be applied to The Repulic, War and Peace, or the phone book with the same message coming across.

In physics, we know that when a string is plucked, it has the capability of creating sympathetic vibrations in not only strings of the same pitch (frequency) but also that string's overtones. A plucked 'A' (220 hertz) causes vibrations in other strings at 220 hertz as well as 440 hertz ('A' an octave higher), 660 hertz ('E'), 880 ('A'), 1100 ('C#'), 1320 ('E'), 1540 (between 'F#' and 'G'), etc. A text, as a plucking of a string, can stimulate a variety of other vibrating strings. The most significant ones are the strings of the same pitch. But each to a lesser effect, the overtones also resonate with the fundamental frequency. If the first overtone is strong enough it could be mistaken for the fundamental, or the second overtone for the first. Similarly, an interpretation that has many similarities with the intent of the text could, in some situations, be mistaken for the intent of the text. But with Popper's criterion, we can rule out those that are nowhere near the intent of the text. The relative strength of overtones may difficult to discern, but that should not stop us from ruling out the dissonant notes.

Notes

1. ^  "De Interpretatione," 16a:3-8
2. ^  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bee_learning_and_communication#Dance_language
3. ^  http://www.abc.net.au/science/k2/moments/s133634.htm
4. ^  Actually, this is overly simplified, too, because each step can be broken down into many, many smaller steps. Each piece of information that is processed has to be loaded into its proper register in the processor (of which there are only about 10 on the best home-user computers), and then low-level commands such as "add" combine the data in two registers and output it to a third. Calculating a natural logarithm could easily take more than 10,000 of these low-level commands altogether, but since a 1 gigahertz processor moves a billion pieces of information a second, 10,000 commands go by in the blink of an eye.
5. ^  "Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality Among Men," pg. 121
6. ^  "Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality Among Men," pg. 121-122
7. ^  Confessions: Book I. 8. Quoted in Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations, pg. 2.
8. ^  Madison, SD
9. ^  Philosophical Investigations, pg. 2
10. ^  Philosophical Investigations, pg. 3
11. ^  How To Read a Book, pg. 17-18
12. ^  Interpretation and Overinterpretation, pg. 68
13. ^  Or a more humorous example would be '(You) time flies when you are having fun.'
14. ^  http://aboutthebeatles.com/song-i_am_the_walrus.html
15. ^  Obtained from http://www.math.luc.edu/~vande/jabtext.html
16. ^  'Sentence' could be replaced with phrase, paragraph, chapter, or book. The length of the medium is not important.
17. ^  "De Interpretatione," 16a:10-18; 17a:1-6
18. ^  Interpretation and Overinterpretation, pg. 25
19. ^  Science as Falsification, retrieved online at: http://www.stephenjaygould.org/ctrl/popper_falsification.html

Bibliography

• Adler, Mortimer J. How to Read a Book (The Art of Getting a Liberal Education). New York City: Simon and Schuster, 1940.
• Aristotle. "De Interpretatione." The Complete Works of Aristotle. Trans. J. L. Ackrill. Vol. 1. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984. 2 vols.
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