Digital Mind 🧠

🪵 The Threshold

Winter's denial may be inconsistent with his own theory of meaning

Properties2
tagsja-picks, xref, contrarian_or_surprising, primary_study, singleton, category/contrarian-or-surprising
aliases@bobbitt_reflections_1994, loc. 366

4 min read

Winter’s denial may be inconsistent with his own theory of meaning

Evidence

Winter heatedly denies that he “believes that there must be ‘something standing between the Constitution and our understanding of it … I have argued, in contrast, that . . ‘the meaning of [the Court’s] constitutional interpretation is as much a matter of… our interpretive commitments, as it is a matter of the understanding of the Justices.’"" g And here one begins to see the problem: What exactly does Winter think this “understanding” consists in? If it is a matter of interpretive commitments, objectified sedimentations, and the like, then is Winter’s outrage really justified? — Philip Chase Bobbitt, Reflections Inspired by My Critics, 366

Categorization

  • XREF: Connects to the broader debates about textual interpretation and semantic meaning that recur throughout Bobbitt’s work and in legal theory generally. — connects to: Winter’s entire essay is structured around such small coups de theatre, which culminate in announcements of such banality that they are made ludicrous by the portentous, jargon-ridden analysis that precedes them. Does anyone think that Wittgenstein would be shattered to be informed of such revelations? Or that it is really ‘news’ that we use knowledge from one domain in assessing another? Or that meaning is dependent on experience? To maintain otherwise would turn autonomy into autism.; Winter is not writing about Wittgenstein, but about the Wittgensteinian account, which I fear must mean me.; Yet, there is scarcely a page of Wittgenstein’s work, including his work on the foundations of mathematics, that is not devoted to an attempt to rescue our understanding of meaning by linking it to the ordinary practices of human beings using language; and the many striking examples of Wittgenstein’s imaginative anthropology are testimony to his commitment to the imaginative nature of rationality. Practice fetishism and particularism may indeed culminate in the denial that human beings can conserve and transmit shared experiences and in a related refusal to recognize the imaginative elements in human rationality. But because these very ideas-how human beings learn a language, how imagination plays a crucial part in that learning-are so much at the center of Wittgenstein’s work, it casts some doubt on whether Winter’s charges of fetishism, among others, are accurate. (+4 more)

Broader Connections

✉️

Backlinks