Class 6: Interpretive Objects

The thesis of When Things Get Personal, as we now know, is that we can understand how things get to be personal between us by understanding how things get to be persons in the first place.  But now we’re going to take a break from this book manuscript, and start to explore our other book for this semester. Interpretive Objects fills in a picture about how charity in interpretation could be the best way to get to the truth about who you are.  Philosophers have given interpretive theories of concepts or properties before, but you are not a concept or a property.  So we need to understand how an object could be interpretive.  This week we’ll look at an answer to this question and apply it to the case of works of literature.

The main assigned reading for today’s class is chapters 1 and 2 of Interpretive Objects. Chapter 1 introduces the idea of interpretive objects, and chapter 2 develops it by applying it to the case of the ontology of works of literature.

As always, I have suggested background readings and some also recommended readings for thinking more about related things. This week’s recommended reading is chapters 1-2 of Ronald Dworkin’s book Justice for Hedgehogs, where he perhaps most clearly introduces his concept of an interpretive concept, with which I am interested in contrasting my conception of an interpretive object. Unfortunately, I don’t have an electronic version of this text that I can share.

I usually also have “also recommended” readings for each week, but I think that this is already a lot of material. If you are dying for me to suggest to you what to read, then if you are not already familiar with it, I suggest that you follow up some of the references to Hawthorne and Fairchild on plenitudinous ontology in chapter one of IO, or on the Fine reference where he also discusses what I call the distinction between inherent and incidental properties. Otherwise you might find it helpful to think about whether racism is inherent in Aristotle, or merely incidental, and about whether you arrive at the same answer about Aristotle as you do about, say, Kant and Locke.