Interpretation: Ways of Thinking about the Sciences and the Arts

7. The Explanation of Consciousness and the Interpretation of Philosophical Texts

∞≠≠ π The Explanation of Consciousness and the Interpretation of Philosophical Texts Catherine Wilson University of Aberdeen Let me begin by recapitulating Nicholas Rescher’s theory of historical interpretation as he presents it in his valuable and thought-provoking summary, ‘‘The Interpretation of Philosophical Texts.’’∞ Rescher distinguishes first between three approaches to a historical text. The first is creative or imaginative, and it is in this way that many nonprofessional philosophers read philosophical texts, finding suggestive ideas and images that are experienced subjectively as fitting into a conceptual framework. This framework is relatively personal; the meaning derived is not the sort that could be or needs to be discussed and debated in a scholarly community, though there is a continuum between this ‘‘personal’’ meaning and the shared meanings of professional communities . Next is the exploitative interpretation, attempted by the reader who finds him- or herself in the midst of some controversy or who is trying to develop a position on an issue, who is looking for obstacles or aids to doing so in someone else’s thinking. Third is the exegetical interpretation, the attempt to grasp what the author meant, not only what speech acts he or she was performing—demonstrating, advising, recommending, urging, warning, and mocking—but what propositions are being asserted. This, I might add, for metaphysical discourse, is a difficult task. Metaphysics is supposed to be a descriptive theory of the world. What belongs to this world—whether it includes mathematical objects, The Explanation of Consciousness ∞≠∞ physical things, souls—is of course contested. But an ordinary proposition of natural language such as ‘‘Snow is white’’ is sometimes said to divide possible worlds into those in which it is true and those in which it is false. There is something it is like for the proposition to be true, and something else it is like for it to be false. Theories of chemistry or physics are epistemically like this; we can imagine, however confusedly , a world in which the phlogiston theory is true, or a world in which the sun circles the earth even if these things are metaphysically impossible . But how to imagine a world in which that Kantian statement that ‘‘what determines inner sense is the understanding and its original power of combining the manifold of intuition, that is, of bringing it under an apperception, upon which the possibility of understanding itself rests’’≤ is true versus one in which it is false? How to imagine a world in which an entire system, or a part of a system—say Cartesianism or Cartesian theology—is true or false? The exegetical interpreter leads the reader to understanding by enabling him or her to grasp the problem set that motivates the theory that seems to solve it, to experience a form of puzzlement, which is dispelled by its adoption. One need not agree that the problem is dispelled , but one sees why the philosopher might have thought he or she had at least come close. In doing so, the interpreter removes obstacles to understanding, ‘‘avoidable complications, inconsistencies, seeming paradoxes, and the like.’’ Where a line of text is obscure, the interpreter clarifies not by simply bearing down on that line, but by looking at context: neighboring passages in the same work, similar passages in other writings or in writings by opponents or defenders, and by considering what Rescher calls ‘‘general aspects of the state of information and opinion of the time.’’ At the same time, the analytical historian of philosophy engaged in interpretation is likely to proceed differently from the historian of ideas who is concerned with the similarity of an argument to others, with its sources, polemical function, and reception . ‘‘At the methodological level,’’ as Rescher points out, ‘‘there is a salient structural analogy—or isomorphism—between doing philosophy and interpreting philosophical texts. For in both cases alike, coherence and comprehensiveness are our guiding stars.’’≥ I would like to discuss a celebrated passage from Leibniz in terms of these and some further points made in the course of Rescher’s essay on interpretation: ∞≠≤ Catherine Wilson Moreover, we must confess that perception, and what depends upon it, is inexplicable in terms of mechanical reasons, that is, through shapes and motions . If we imagine that there is a machine whose structure makes it think, sense, and have perceptions, we could conceive it enlarged, keeping the same proportions, so that we could enter into it, as one enters a...