Page 35 - Communication and the Evolution of Society

12 Communication and Evolution of Society

language; in both cases, competent speakers draw on intuitively
known meaning relations that obtain within the lexicon of one
language or between those of two languages.
If he cannot attain his end in this way, the interpreter may find
it necessary to alter his attitude. He then exchanges the attitude of
understanding content—in which he looks, as it were, through
symbolic formations to the world about which something is ut-
tered—for an attitude in which he directs himself to the gener-
ative structures of the expressions themselves. The interpreter
then attempts to explicate the meaning of a symbolic formation
in terms of the rules according to which the author must have
brought it forth. In normal paraphrase and translation, the in-
terpreter draws on semantic meaning relations (for instance, be-
tween the different words of a language) in an ad hoc manner,
in that he simply applies a knowledge shared with competent
speakers of that language. In this sense, the role of interpreter
can (under suitable conditions) be attributed to the author him-
self. The attitude changes, however, as soon as the interpreter
tries not only to apply this intuitive knowledge but to reconstruct
it. He then turns away from the surface structure of the symbolic
formation; he no longer looks through it snientione recta to the
world. He attempts instead to peer through the surface, as it were,
and into the symbolic formation to discover the rules according
to which the latter was produced (in our example, the rules ac-
cording to which the lexicon of a language is constructed). The
object of understanding is no longer the content of a symbolic
expression or what specific authors meant by it in specific situa-
tions but the intuitive rule consciousness that a competent speaker
has of his own language.
Borrowing from Ryle,?° we can distinguish between know-how
—the ability of a competent speaker who understands how to
produce or perform something—and know-that—the explicit
knowledge of how it is that he understands this. In our case, what
the author means by an utterance and what an interpreter under-
stands of its content, are a first-level know-that. To the extent that
his utterance is correctly formed and thus comprehensible, the
author produced it in accordance with certain rules or on the basis
of certain structures. He understands the system of rules of his