David Mesing

Aesthetics
21 Apr 2009

A Fish out of Water?:

E.D. Hirsch on Interpretation

In his essay “In Defense of the Author,” E.D. Hirsch sets out to defend authorial intent as the

normative hermeneutical factor of a text. Hirsch adopts a defensive posture throughout the essay,

seemingly because of the prevailing opinions of certain literary theorists. Hirsch quotes Northrop Frye

at the beginning of the essay, but references other thinkers ranging from T.S. Eliot to Carl Jung and

Martin Heidegger to Roland Barthes. The common thread that Hirsch sees running through these

diverse thinkers is that they each would deny the author's intended meaning as what defines validity in

the interpretation of a text. Hirsch's claim is that authorial intent is precisely what determines the

validity of an interpretation and gives the text a fixed meaning; in order to accomplish this, he argues

against four different arguments that seek to “banish” an author from her text.

Hirsch briefly provides some positive arguments before defending his position against

arguments that argue for semantic autonomy. The most important of these is that “meaning is an affair

of consciousness not of words.”1 Here Hirsch states that while there are multiple legitimate meanings

of a word in a given language, the word or word sequence only acquires meaning when a person

intends to mean something by using it. He shows that conflicting interpretations of a text prove that

multiple legitimate meanings for a word or word sequence exist, and argues that this also highlights his

essential question: how do we determine which of the conflicting interpretations is valid? Hirsch

contends that if it is granted that the author's intention is not normative then we are left in the relativity

of a “chaotic democracy of 'readings.'”2

After this, Hirsch examines an argument that contends meaning in a text changes, even for the

1 Hirsch Jr., E.D. “In Defense of the Author.” in The Philosophy of Art. Neill, Alex and Aaron Ridley, eds. 392.
2 Hirsch 393.

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author. Hirsch does not address whether meaning in general can change, but does seek to disprove

what he calls the “psychologistic view,” which essentially argues that the author's intended meaning of

a fixed text3 can change over time. Hirsch argues for a distinction between meaning and significance

for the author, holding that while the significance of a certain text for an author can change, the

meaning cannot. This understanding follows directly from Hirsch's earlier comments about meaning as

an affair of consciousness; meaning is the fixed intention of an author's use of signs. By contrast, the

significance of a text is the relationship between the author and the meaning.

Next, Hirsch takes up the argument that only what an author's text says matters, not what the

author means. Here Hirsch points out that proponents of semantic autonomy often cite the example of

T.S. Eliot, who repeatedly refused to comment on the meanings of his texts. However, he points out

that Eliot did not assert that he had no intended meaning in a given text. Hirsch suggests that, because

of this, we can attempt to find out what he meant; in writing a text, Eliot's task had a “determinate

object,” which is his meaning. It follows then that Eliot accomplished this task correctly or incorrectly,

and determining this is the task that Hirsch ascribes to the critic. According to Hirsch, then, it is

fallacious to try to distinguish what a text says from the author's intended meaning. Similarly, Hirsch

holds that the notion of public consensus governing the interpretation has no empirical foundation

outside of authorial intent.

Following this, Hirsch contends that an argument which states that the author's meaning is

inaccessible to the reader is rooted in an untenable distinction between the public fact of language and

the private fact of the author's intended meaning. Hirsch simply notes that he has not encountered an

interpretation that has inferred a truly private meaning from a text. Additionally, Hirsch argues that it is

incorrect to dismiss authorial intention because we cannot get inside of an author's head to reproduce

3 I use “fixed” in the sense that the actual words used by the author in a text do not change. In other words, the author
does not revise a text in order to change his meaning, but simply says that the meaning of the same text has changed
over time.

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his original meaning. He calls this process a “meaning experience,” but argues that it is a separate

issue from the textual meaning; while “meaning experiences” are private, they are not meanings in a

strict sense.

Finally, Hirsch examines the argument that the author often doesn't know what she means. He

gives the examples of Plato's attack on the poets and Kant insisting that he knew what Plato meant

better than Plato. Such cases may prove that the author is not always conscious of an intended

meaning, but it does not follow that, using the example above, Kant understands Plato's meaning better

than Plato. What Kant understands better is Plato's given subject matter, in this case the Ideas. As

such, according to Hirsch, authorial ignorance has hardly any “theoretical significance” in relation to

the author's meaning.

Hirsch's defense of the author is clearly set forth, but his defensive posture seems to betray an

unsubstantiated burden of proof that runs throughout his essay. Hirsch seems to take it for granted that

the burden of proof lies with those who support “semantic autonomy.” While he does set forth a quick

argument about meaning as an affair of consciousness, he does not offer the reader any argument in

favor of authorial intent. Perhaps it will be argued that Hirsch clearly dismantles arguments in favor of

semantic autonomy, but it should be noted that Hirsch formulates these arguments himself and mostly

refers to those that he sets himself up against in passing. This is fine, but these negative, general

arguments are not persuasive for a proponent of semantic autonomy or someone who is undecided.

Why should it be granted that the author has autonomy but her text does not? Each of Hirsch's points

follow directly from the presupposition of authorial autonomy, and if this foundation is not established,

the reader who will agree with Hirsch in arguing for authorial intent as the normative hermeneutical

factor in interpreting a fixated meaning must simply presume such a state of affairs to be the case.

The notion of a “chaotic democracy of readings” undergirds Hirsch's defense of authorial intent,

but Stanley Fish has argued that simply because we recognize meaning and interpretation as contextual,

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it does not follow that meaning is relative. Or, more pointedly, meaning is not relative in the sense that

“anything goes,” but meaning and interpretation happen within a particular shared context, in which

communities live and communicate confidently. As such, Fish argues, the kind of relativism which

Hirsch fears is not a possible mode of being.4 Thus, instead of a fixed authorial intention as normative

for meaning, Fish insists that we must first acknowledge that communication always occurs in a certain

context, and that in this context, there already exist shared structures of assumptions. To acknowledge

this fact about our understanding is to remove the author's intention as authoritatively constitutive of

meaning, but does not erase the possibility of interpreting and communicating confidently within a

community.

I find Hirsch's arguments in defense of the author unconvincing. Surely it must be granted that

authorial intent can be a helpful factor in understanding a text, but as the sole normative and controlling

factor, it closes off the writing in such a way as to silence other plausible meanings of a text. Fish's

understanding of meaning as taking place within the context of a community better speaks to how a

question such as “Is there a text in this class?” can have multiple meanings; these meanings depend on

the context of which the one who hears the question hears it, not the ability of the speaker to infuse her

words with a particular meaning. In this sense, context is all we have, and we must not shy away from

this in our understanding of a text.

4 Fish, Stanley. “Is There a Text in This Class?” in The Philosophy of Art. Neill, Alex and Aaron Ridley, eds. 457.