The Mechanics of Interpretation

When I was trying to understand the concept of “interpretation” I was coming at it with a more Tarski-esque view where interpretation was simply just the empirical or experiential basis of a sentence. Whether that was math statements or english statements or formal logic statements. For the most part that is true.

The problem was I had to reinterpret the interpretation of “interpretation” depending on how I was going about thinking about it. Which in a more succinct manner, just means that the “interpretation” takes on a new meaning depending on the context.

When I think about interpretation, I am mainly concerned with the notion of “semantics”, the Merriam-Webster Dictionary definition of words, even if they use more words.

But, this isn’t what interpretation means in poems or visual mediums. In both the usage of interpreation is not definition rather understanding the symbolism and being able to uncover the “true word” and thus capturing the true meaning of a given work.

definitions aren’t semantic

The first step to thinking through this is realizing the notion that definitions don’t capture “meaning”.

The definition of a word in the dictionary is just more words, but they are still just more words. Hopefully those words make more sense than the shorthand work like “sky”. But, they ultimately don’t give you a sense of what the word means if you don’t understand the words in the definition.

An illustrating example is to consider formal logic statements.

(p v q) ^ (p ^ q) means the same thing as (p ^ (q v q)).

Sky means the same thing as the appearance of the upper atmosphere, especially with reference to weather.

denotation is the same as conotation

If you believe the above then denotative and conotative meaning are really the same thing and don’t really do give much of a distinction.

Denotative meaning is everything that isn’t figurative language. When someone says “kick the bucket”, a denotative interpretation would say it literally means someone kicked a bucket.

Conotative meaning is figurative language, to use words to say something other than literal. “Kick the bucket” means “to die” here.

But even though I gave definitions, I still think they are the same with respect to “interpretation”, but are different with respect to “understanding”. Conotation in this aspect is just a less evoked meaning of the word or phrase.

The sky could denotatively mean the atmosphere, but also conotatively mean freedom, divinity, or any other thing really. The point I want to highlight here is that for the point of “interpretation”, i.e. selecting the “true meaning” being evoked by the use of the word is the “same”, in the sense that, you are selecting another word to describe the meaning of the word.

This is why the first notion of “definitions aren’t semantic” is important here. Words have sense, and denotation/conotation simply opens up the range of potential interpretations. Polysemy. The cognitive procedure is similar in how when presented with a word or phrase we have to decide what sense of it we want to use.¹

visual interpretation

For example in the image of “Madonna of Chancellor Rolin”, I can give an “interpretation” of the work by describing what I see in it. I see a baby, a women, a floating person with bird-like wings, inside a church, and a priest. This would be a true description of the work, but I don’t think people would take it as a true interpretation.

Taking a look at wikipedia it, I would have failed at “interpreting” this image. The baby I naively called “a baby” is actually Jesus and the women, Virgin Mary. The crown that the angel (floating person) is putting on her contains gems that symbolizes Virgin Mary’s virtues. So interpretation here isn’t defining the meaning or truth of something as I mainly approach interpretation as, but rather, trying on new meanings for what you see.

text interpretation

I put text interpretation second, becuase here you do see both the definitions of “interpretation” in full effect. That is, you are tasked with 1. understanding what the word even meant and then 2. seeing if there is any underlying symbolism by varying the word.

Say the phrase: “death caught up to him”. This is figurative speech, a literal interpretation would render the sentence meaningless as death doesn’t have a physical form to catch someone with. But, if you interpret death as in old age, then the setence would mean that he died of old age.

Abstract words tend to lend themselves to non-literal interpretation because they themselves need to resolve to a specific example for the use of their word. Importantly, this isn’t symbolic interpretation, rather just trying to ascertain what a person meant by “death”.

An example of symbolic interpretations are simply what we would call “substituve metaphors”. Metaphors that aren’t written explicitly with a connecting predicate, but meant to be discovered and read through the context of the text.

Interpretation for formal logic talks directly to semantics because you are showing the truth table. In the same vein, experience or pictures or sense, is the only way to show semantics for a word. Otherwise you are just using more words to talk about the sense. ↩