Re: Its Hard to Decipher....
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The only sure way to know the literal meaning of something is to understand what the author intended it to be.
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I don't see how the authors intend can determine the literal meaning, which seems a group effort to me.
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Well, what if we remove the author? Imagine I program a computer to randomly string characters together, and it happens to spit out "There's a ship in the harbor." Did the computer randomly create a sentence with a certain literal meaning, or are we interpreting a random pattern as something coherent?
My instinct is to say it's the latter, but when I think about it, I could be wrong. My brain may construct a literal meaning without doing any "interpretation" work. Maybe the literal meaning is a function of the reader, not the writer.
But that implies that a text may have different literal meanings, depending on the different readers. You say it's a group effort - I have trouble understanding how the reader and the writer can collaborate in creating a literal meaning. How can any work written thousands of years ago have a single literal meaning? What if it's a work written by aliens with a different concept of space and time, millions of years ago?
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