The Fear of the Text and how to overcome them

In the first two parts of the following paper I recapitulate what I developed elsewhere at greater length, namely, that 'interpretation' can be understood as a specific form of (performative) knowing how as opposed to (propositional) knowing that (part 1) and that the relationship between background knowledge and singular hypotheses might best be understood as 'topical' in the sense of the Aristotelian Topics (part 2). Part 3 tries to give a rudimentary idea of Brandom's inferentialism, and how this semantic theory grounded upon the principle of 'making it explicit' might serve as a basis for a theory of interpreting literary texts. The arguments put forward in parts 1 to 3 suggest that there can be no finite set of interpretational rules. There is, however, the possibility to formulate a restricted number of 'maxims' as guidelines for interpretation. Two of these 'interpretational maxims' will be discussed in conclusion (part 4).