In any event, I couldn't resist the urge to elaborate on this idea of "ways of seeing" and its relation to "the facts" by using my previous post and different ways of seeing it as an example (since that kind of meta-level self-referential stuff just makes me happy).
Bernard and Burk and Darrell all “saw” my last post (about ways of seeing) differently—and, as is inevitably the case in human communication, all three ways of seeing differed from one another. Bernard "saw" the post (through the lens of Karl Popper) as way of understanding religion that made it hardly at odds with atheism at all; Burk saw it as an extension of the very thing Flew was critiquing—an attempt to avoid taking a stand on a claim of divine existence unsupported by any evidence; Darrell saw it as highlighting the fact that all of us inevitably bring a broader story to our experience, in the light of which we impart meaning and significance to “the facts” of experience.
Again as is inevitably the case, these ways of seeing my post deviated in differing degrees and places from my intentions as the author of the post. In fact, this is one important reason for putting one’s thoughts into words and inviting critique. Part of the reason, of course, is to critically assess the content of what one is saying—to identify places where one’s reasoning is faulty, etc. But part of the reason is to identify places where one needs to refine one’s mode of expression in order for one’s intentions to be more precisely characterized (which is why criticisms that are based on misunderstanding are often helpful, and not something simply to be dismissed).
At the same time, sometimes readings of a text that deviate from the author’s intentions are just fine—even something to encourage rather than bemoan. I'm reminding of some of the great conversations I've had about literature. The sharing of alternative readings is one of the great delights in such discussions--and this delight would be seriously truncated were we all to feel the need to simply focus on what the author intended to say. In cases in which I’ve been privy to conversations about short stories of mine, it has usually been a pleasure to hear how others see the story—often in ways that never occurred to me as I was writing it (but which nevertheless strike me as entirely fitting “readings” of it).
Of course, in philosophical discourse there is often an attempt to communicate a precise idea. But even in such cases others may “read” a text in valuable ways that don’t match the author’s intentions. It is not unusual for me to hear (at conferences or in print) a restatement of my argument that draws out of it insights I wasn’t explicitly thinking about at all and so couldn’t have intended to assert—but which, on reflection, seem to be working as a kind of undercurrent to my thought that has now been brought to light.
Even so, in many modes of discourse (including philosophical ones) authorial intent still operates as a kind of standard against which alternative readings need to be assessed. How closely does our way of seeing the text conform to what the author was trying to say? Sometimes, when the author is dead or otherwise unavailable, this question inspires careful study of the author’s historical and cultural context, as well as of other works by the author, etc., fuelling any number of scholarly activities and debates. Rival scholars can propose very different ways of seeing the text, but unlike those engaged in a more free-flowing conversation about literature, the alternative ways of seeing proposed by the scholars are tied to a standard outside the text. That is, these scholars are making a truth-claim about something that isn't a part of the text but plays a role in their reading of it--specifically, a truth claim about authorial intent.
When the author is alive and accessible, of course, one can always ask the author to clarify what he or she means. The problem, of course, is that the resultant clarification is yet another “text”—one which will likely be amenable to alternative readings or ways of seeing, some of which will be closer to the author’s intentions than others. But the process of clarification is not, therefore, pointless. As authors discover the different ways of seeing their text (by having it actually seen in these ways by various readers), they can fill in details or gaps that can help to rule out gross misreadings and bring it about that readers see the text in a manner ever closer to the author’s original intention.
(Of course, a reading of a text is itself a text that is likely amenable to various readings—a fact which adds an additional layer of complexity to the communicative process).
Let's take my previous post, and one of the comments about it, as an example. In that post, as you'll recall, I made use of the duck-rabbit image--which I'll reproduce here so no one will feel the need to scroll back to the previous post:
I used this image to propose a way of understanding (at least much) religious language (ooh! a way of seeing religion that invokes ways of seeing as the way of seeing! Alright, I'll stop now). I pointed out that there is a difference between offering a description of a specific feature of the image—which will either be accurate or inaccurate, and hence will say something that is true or false by reference to what is there—and seeing the image in a given way (as a duck, or as a rabbit). My claim was that religious language is often about providing an interpretive worldview whose function is to afford a way of seeing the whole of experience (as opposed to describing a feature of it).
What I hoped to do was respond to Flew by showing that there are different ways in which statements can be meaningful. Flew claims that "sophisticated" theists so qualify their claim about the existence of God that it becomes consistent with anything we might observe about how the empirical world is arranged. In so doing, Flew thinks they have rendered their theistic hypothesis meaningless.** My point (following R.M. Hare and John Hick) is that offering a statement that makes a difference in the observable facts is only one way that a statement can be meaningful. Another is to offer a way of seeing the observable facts—and such a way of seeing will be meaningful insofar as it lends a different significance to the facts than they would have under an alternative way of seeing the same facts. But a way of seeing a set of facts doesn't typically add any new facts to the set it is interpreting.
But a way of seeing might very well presuppose a broader context than the set of facts which are being interpreted. It may make assertions about what is true concerning this broader context, even if it is not making assertions about what is included within the set of facts being interpreted. And with respect to these assertions about the broader context we may ask, “Why should I believe that?”
The most critical response to my previous post, offered by Burk, relies on this point. Burk's chief objection (unless I am misreading him) is that theism is a way of seeing the totality of empirical facts that does make such an assertion about a broader context within which the material world studied by science is situated. The most significant such assertion, of course, is “God exists.” But insofar as this assertion is endlessly qualified so as to be rendered consistent with any empirical facts whatever (as Flew claims is the case with "sophisticated" theism), it becomes an assertion for which no evidence is in principle available (at least if we take “evidence” in roughly the scientific sense). In effect, Burk is saying, "Okay, so sophisticated theism offers a way of seeing the whole of experience. But so what? That doesn't negate that it is also making an assertion about reality without any possibility of evidence being adduced in its favor."
This response to my post is rooted in a “way of seeing” what I wrote—or, in more usual terms, a reading of it. Among other things, this reading seems to take my post as an effort to defend theism against not merely Flew’s challenge of meaninglessness but against what has come to be called “the evidentialist challenge”—a challenge to theistic belief (and other religious beliefs) that in its usual form runs very roughly as follows: There is no good reason to believe that theism is true, no signs or indicators that speak in its favor; and in the absence of any such evidence one should presumptively disbelieve. (Since the evidential challenge is the next unit to be covered in my philosophy of religion class, you can expect a more detailed treatment of it soon).
Now I do have things to say about the evidentialist challenge. And I do think that the distinctive character of religious beliefs—that they provide “ways of seeing” the totality of observable facts by appeal to a posited "transcendent" realm—has some bearing on this challenge. But I do not think the mere fact that theistic belief serves as a “way of seeing” the world is sufficient to defuse the evidentialist challenge. It isn’t, for some of the reasons Burk gestures to in his comment. I do, however, think it is sufficient to show a way in which such a belief can be meaningful other than the ways Flew recognizes—and hence as providing the basis for a response to Flew’s challenge of meaninglessness.
Here, then, is one way in which someone can read a text in a manner at odds with the intentions of the author: the scope of an argument can be taken as more ambitious than the author intended.
But here’s the thing. In seeing my previous post as he did, Burk was doing more than merely casting the text in a certain light. After all, what cast that light were his beliefs about something beyond the text—more precisely, beliefs about what I was intending to do or show with my argument. In this case, the beliefs in question happen to be false—but in the very act of misreading my post, Burk exemplifies a point he makes in his remark that is exactly right: a way of seeing a set of accepted truths or facts, while it does not add new truths to the set, might presuppose the truth of something outside the set.
In the case of students in a literature class offering various interpretations of a literary work, such presuppositions are not usually being made. Their alternative readings don't hinge in any way on claims about authorial intent. They’re just offering “free floating” ways of seeing the text. But in the case of various scholarly interpretations of, say, Kant’s Transcendental Deduction, the alternative readings of the text may depend heavily on views concerning authorial intent. And such “transcendent” truth claims could be false.
In other words, since such scholarly readings of a text are rooted in claims about what is true about something beyond the text, it is coherent to talk about misreadings in a way that doesn't seem appropriate when the participants in a book group share their different ways of seeing the novel-of-the-month. The scholar's interpretation requires evidence, because it is not merely a free-floating reading of the text. It is a reading of the text that is paired with the following claim: "This is the reading of the text intended by the author." In fact, scholars often arrive at the reading they do by first considering evidence concerning authorial intentions--and then using that evidence to arrive at a way of seeing the text that they take to be true to those intentions.
I also think the distinction between the way that lay Christians in Bible studies approach sections of Scripture, and the way that biblical scholars do so, is very relevant here. The former involves what I'm calling "free floating" readings. Participants share their readings of a New Testament epistle and others say, "Oh, I hadn't thought of it that way. Here's how I see it." People go home with things to think about, perhaps a bit wiser about the human condition. Biblical scholars, by contrast, marshal evidence of various kinds to arrive at a theory about what the author of the epistle meant in this or that passage. While this theory is a reading of the text, it isn't a free floating one. Rather, it is a reading that makes a truth claim about something beyond the text, in the light of which this reading of the text is taken to be appropriate.
Consider two ways that, on viewing the duck-rabbit image, I might see it as a duck. First, I might approach it as an ambiguous image that can be seen either way, and I just happen to decide to see it as a duck for the moment. But now suppose that the image appears through an opening in one surface of a sealed metal cube. Suppose the surface is considerably broader than the window through which the image is visible, so that it is possible that what I am seeing is part of a broader image, most of which is hidden under the metal surface. Suppose I come to believe that this is in fact the case: the drawing continues beyond the limits of what I can see, with only the "head" visible in the opening. But now suppose I go even further than that. Suppose I become come convinced that what is hidden from view is an oval-shaped body stretching out below and to the right of the visible picture, complete with webbed feet. Now, of course, I see the image in the opening as the head of a duck--but not in a free floating way. I see it in this way because I have situated the visible image in the context of a certain conception of what the "whole picture" looks like.
In this latter case, it is true enough that my seeing the image in the window as a duck does not require me to deny of the image (or attribute to it) any facts not denied of (or attributed to) the image by those who see it as a rabbit. As such, my seeing it as a duck does not involve my making any new factual claims about the image. But I am making a factual claim about what is hidden behind the metal surface of the block. I am claiming that there is more to the image than we can see—and I have the audacity, if you will, to harbor a specific belief about what that “something more” is like.
I suspect that many atheists look at theistic belief in much the way that most of us would be inclined to look at the person who not only sees the image in the metal block as a duck, but does so as an extension of the broader conviction that the visible image is part of a larger one we cannot see (but which the person is happy to attribute details to even so). At least initially, harboring such beliefs seems strange. How could someone be willing, in the total absence of any glimpse of what is underneath the metal, to embrace the view that there is an image of a duck body there? And why would anyone think that such belief is legitimate?
It is in such cases that the evidentialist challenge to religious belief becomes significant. And since that is the topic being covered this week in my philosophy of religion class, it will also be the topic of my next post.
**I actually think Flew overstates his case when he says that the "Believer" in his parable about the invisible gardener has qualified his claim about the gardener so much that the claim has become consistent with any facts whatever. After all, what prompts the "gardener hypothesis" in the first place is a set of fact--a beautiful clearing in the woods, with flowers arranged in a distinctively appealing manner, etc. Were it not for this set of facts, the gardener hypothesis would never have been made in the first place. After all, that hypothesis amounts to a "way of seeing" the clearing. If there is no clearing, then there is nothing to see in that way. And a similar point can be made about theism: Were the elements of human experience radically different than they are--no aesthetic or moral experience, no moments of mystical encounters with the numinous, nothing but chaos in the physical world, etc.--the theistic way of seeing might not make any sense at all. It would be like seeing the duck-rabbit image as the football player attacking a penguin.
