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Professionalism, Relativism, and Rationality

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

James L. Battersby
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Abstract

Translation, interpretation, adjudication, and objective knowledge are possible in a world without a foundation, a world that precludes the testing and squaring of claims against a reality external to conceptual schemes. In critical studies the prevailing relativist views assume that meanings and references are unstable, that facts, things, emphases, and values depend on various culture- or community-driven conceptual schemes, and hence that defining the inherent interests of literary and other texts is impossible. On the contrary, texts are knowable as internally justified, preregistered systems of intentionality and rationality. Each text exists as such a system prior to interpretation, and it is this system of determinate values and emphases to which interpretive analysis is accountable.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 107 , Issue 1: Special Topic: Theory of Literary History , January 1992 , pp. 51 - 64
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1992

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