Here’s a quotation from Richard Rorty about context, and the last two sentences are instructive for legal interpretation. It is impossible to read a text without a context. Instead of even trying to, the interpreter should consider how each object/text is situated within a broader contextual “web,” from which insight can be draw for resolving the “tensions in the region currently under strain”:
We pragmatists must object to, or reinterpret, two traditional methodological questions: ‘What context is appropriate to this object?’ and ‘What is it that we are putting in context?’ For us, all objects are always already contextualized. They all come with contexts attached, just as Riemannian space comes with axioms attached. So there is no question of taking an object out of its old context and examining it, all by itself, to see what new context might suit it. There is only a question about which other regions of the web we might look to to find ways of eliminating the residual tensions in the region currently under strain.
Richard Rorty, “Inquiry as Recontextualization: An Anti-Dualist Account of Interpretation,” in The Interpretive Turn: Philosophy, Science, Culture (David R. Hiley, James F. Bohman, and Richard Shusterman eds. 1991), 64-65.
The post Interpretation, Context, and “the Region Currently Under Strain” appeared first on Reason.com.
