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Stephen Toulmin
         The Inwardness of Mental Life
         As a model for explaining the inwardness of mental life, a computer
            in the cortex is no improvement on an immaterial mind trapped
            wherever Descartes or Newton originally located it. For both models
            distract our attention from certain crucial differences between
            inwardness and interiority - that is, from certain crucial respects
            in which these two inherited ways of thinking about the inner mind
            diverge from one another. Clearly, interiority is an inescapable
            feature of our brains and of all the physiological processes that
            go on in the central nervous system. There is no doubt at all that
            those processes are permanently located inside our bodies. So, if
            our mental lives were, properly speaking, trapped within our
            brains, they must be trapped there from birth. In this view, our
            minds must indeed operate permanently (as Jean-Paul Sartre puts it)
            à huis clos: like prisoners who are born, live, and die in
            permanent deadlock. Yet the inwardness of mental life, as we know
            it and speak of it in everyday experience, is not like that at all.
            The things that mark so many of our thoughts, wishes, and feelings
            as inner or inward are not permanent, inescapable, lifelong
            characteristics. On the contrary, inwardness is in many respects an
            acquired feature of our experience, a product, in part, of cultural
            history but in part also of individual development. So understood,
            our mental lives are not essentially inner lives. Rather, they
            become inner because we make them so. And we do develop inner
            lives, in this direct, experiential sense, because we have reasons
            for doing so.
             
            Stephen Toulmin presented an earlier version of this essay as the
            Nora and Edward Ryerson Lecture at the University of Chicago on 30
            April 1979. He is the author of, among other works, Foresight and
            Understanding, Human Understanding, Knowing and Acting,and (with
            Allan Janik) Wittgenstein's Vienna.
Michael Holroyd
         George Bernard Shaw: Women and the Body Politic
         It was difficult to avoid the amiability of [Shaw's] impersonal
            embrace. Everything he seemed to say was what it was and
            another thing. Women were the same as men: but different. But of
            the two, he calculated, women were fractionally less idiotic than
            men. "The only decent government is government by a body of men and
            women," he said in 1906; "but if only one sex must govern, then I
            should say, let it be women put the men out! Such an enormous
            amount of work is done of the nature of national housekeeping, that
            obviously women should have a hand in it." Shaw favored women over
            men in much of the same spirit as he advertised Roman Catholics
            being a trifle superior to Protestants. Both preferences were the
            product of a Protestant gentleman who delighted in perverse
            exhibitions of fairness.
             
            Certain consequences followed from the fact that only women became
            pregnant. Had Shaw had the making of the world in the first place,
            and not merely the remaking of it, things might have been ordered
            more sensibly. However, the rules had been laid down and the worst
            thing you could do was to complain of them. Every grievance was an
            asset in the womb of time. The advantage to women came in the form
            of greater natural wisdom about sex. They could hardly help
            themselves. Shaw maintained that the instinct of women acted as a
            sophisticated compass in steering our course for the future. His
            disenchantment with the human experiment expanded during and after
            the First World War. In Heartbreak House "my Lear" he called
            it he shows us what he supposed to be a "Bloomsburgian"
            culture where the feminine instinct has been trivialized in such a
            way that it no longer gives us our true bearings, and we drift
            towards the rocks. We had defaulted in our contract with the Life
            Force and would probably be superseded by another partner.
             
            Michael Holroyd is the author of Lytton Strachey and Augustus John
            and the authorized biography of George Bernard Shaw. The present
            essay appears in The Genius of Shaw, edited by Holroyd, published
            by Holt, Rinehart and Winston.
Lee R. Edwards
         The Labors of Psyche: Toward a Theory of_Female_Heroism
         I have taken such pains to indicate the scope, terms, and foci of
            Neumann's analysis because he provides one of the main pillars on
            which any further systematic study of the woman hero must rest. By
            showing Psyche's relation to the mythic or archetypal structure of
            heroism, by demonstrating the particular ways in which the hero is
            a figure distinguished primarily by involvement in particular
            patterns of action and psychological development, Neumann provides
            an invaluable service to further studies of literature, heroism,
            and women. Without belaboring the distinction between the hero and
            the heroine, Neumann validates the claim that a woman can be a hero
            and eliminates the awkward distinction between the heroine as
            heroic figure and the heroine as conventional woman that has
            perplexed so much recent literary, especially feminist,
            analysis.1He is also very good at locating the details in Psyche's
            dilemma that constitute significant associative images within a
            narrative representing heroism by means of a female character.
            Specifically, he indicates how Psyche's beauty is as much a burden
            as a boon, shows the importance of her relationship to other female
            characters, and points out the ways in which the apparent hostility
            of other women acts as a necessary goad to Psyche's own developing
            independence. Neumann's analysis is also suggestive in showing the
            appropriateness of archetypal criticism to material which is not
            myth in the narrow sense. To be sure, Apuleius' Amor and Psyche
            results from the distillation of narratives whose origins are
            clearly to be found in the folklore and functioning mythologies of
            Greek and Roman culture; just as clearly, however, Apuleius is
            telling his tale as part of a highly self-conscious, complexly
            structured narrative2 analogous, in some ways, to Chaucer's
            Canterbury Tales, Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, Milton's great
            religious epics, and even that seemingly least mythic set of
            narrative structures, the novel.
             
            ·  1. See, e.g., Ellen Moers' long discussion of "heroinism" in
            Literary Women: The Great Writers (New York, 1976), pp. 113-242.
            Moers' use of this awkward term, the female version of the
            presumably masculine heroism, perpetuates the idea that only men
            can be true heroes, while extraordinary women remain "special
            cases" necessitating special terminology.
            ·  2. See P. G. Walsh, The Roman Novel: The 'Satyricon' of
            Petronius and the 'Metamorphoses' of Apuleius (London, 1970), pp.
            141-223.
             
            Lee R. Edwards is an editor of The Massachusetts Review and an
            associate professor of English at the University of Massachusetts
            at Amherst. She is presently completing The Labors of Psyche:
            Female Heroism and Fictional Form.
David D. Cooper
         The Poet as Elaborator: Analytical Psychology as a_Critical
            Paradigm
         Perhaps the best way to understand Harold Bloom's enigmatic theory
            of "poetic misprision" is to avoid the immanent critique
            altogether. It is best described, rather (at least as far as the
            theory's role in the evolution of our attempt to assign some
            "meaning" to the poetic response), as a synthesis. Bloom seems to
            have taken Aristotle's mimesis and linked it to Freud's concept of
            sublimation,1 with particular emphasis on the role that sublimation
            plays in "the family romance." Even if one were to hedge a bit and
            take into account the fact that neo-Freudian re-evaluations of
            orthodox psychoanalysis have succeeded in extracting the purely
            sexual component out of the psychodynamics of sublimation, one is
            still left with the notion of sublimation as anxiety producing.
            Thus it is that, according to Bloom, the modern poet, in
            particular, sublimates his imitation of a strong precursor poet.
            Since the emphasis today is on desexualizing libido, Freud's
            original sexual vocabulary seems to have survived for its
            metaphorical value alone; the "unconscious fear of castration," for
            example, is simply a metaphor for "the poet's fear of ceasing to be
            a poet," a man's fear of ceasing to be a man. No matter how much we
            "modernize" Freud, the fact will always remain that the
            psychoanalytic context is the context of psychopathology: "a
            variety of the uncanny."
             
            ·  1. See Sigmund Freud, Three Contributions to the Theory of
            Sex,in The Basic Writings of Sigmund Freud, ed. and trans. A. A.
            Brill (New York, 1938), pp. 625-26.
             
            David D. Cooper is an associate in the department of English at the
            University of California, Santa Barbara. Using the critical
            paradigm developed in the present essay, he has written a book on
            Thomas Merton's poetry.
             
            See also: "Poetry, Revisionism, Repression" by Harold Boom in Vol.
            2, No. 2; "Formalism, Savagery, and Care; or, The Function of
            Criticism Once Again" by Jerome J. McGann in Vol. 2, No. 3
Samuel Jay Keyser and Alan Prince
         Folk Etymology in Sigmund Freud, Christian Morgenstern, and_Wallace
            Stevens
         We began with the observation that language is often held to enact
            the world. We have examined several instances of this notion,
            beginning with a discussion of the folk etymology of certain words,
            moving through an example of Freud, to Morgenstern, Lettvin, and
            Stevens. The method shared by these examples assumes that words are
            literally saturated with meaning; that what appears arbitrary or
            senseless in them can be made to render up its sense and its
            motivation through a kind of inspired analysis. Our intent has been
            to show how this principle of folk etymology lies behind some
            sophisticated creative thinking. In Freud, it is hypothesized to be
            a psychological mechanism of some depth. In Morgenstern and
            Lettvin, it forms the basis for a resonant poetic joke, while in
            Stevens it appears to have the same major status as the mythic
            principle of creation-through-language illustrated in our first
            examples from Egyptian mythology and from Genesis. Stevens, of
            course, uses the principle to create poetry, not religion; for as
            he says in section 5 of "The Man with the Blue Guitar":
             
                                                                        Poetry
             
            Exceeding music must take the place
            Of empty heaven and its hymns . . .
             
            Samuel Jay Keyser, head of the department of linguistics and
            philosophy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and editor
            of Linguistic Inquiry, is the coauthor of English Stress: Its Form,
            Its Growth and Its Role in Verseand of Beginning English Grammar.
            Alan Prince, an assistant professor of linguistics at the
            University of Massachusetts at Amherst, has written on stress and
            linguistic rhythm and is currently working, with Keyser, on the
            poetry of Wallace Stevens.
Eric S. Rabkin
         Metalinguistics and Science Fiction
         The dictionary tells us that metalinguistics is simply "the study
            of the interrelationship between language and other cultural
            behavioral phenomena."1 However, because most studies are in fact
            expressed in language, the study itself becomes a candidate for
            metalinguistic inquiry. In other words, language is not only
            capable of interrelationships with kinship systems or economic
            systems or rituals but it is capable of intrarelationships. . . .
            Language often becomes a subject in science fiction because science
            fiction writers realize that they must account for the
            communication between characters from different planets or
            different epochs. Wells' Time Traveller, when he first encounters
            the effete and childlike Eloi, notices that they speak "a strange
            and very sweet and liquid tongue" (The Time Machine, 1895, chap. 4)
            which he never does come to understand. This failure of
            understanding is realistic and leads to some lovely pathos as the
            Time Traveller tries to apprehend a world solely by means of
            observation and exchanges of facial expression and gesture.
            Although language conveniently drops from consideration once it is
            established that there won't be any significant talking, that it is
            considered at all adds plausibility to this fantastic tale.
             
            ·  1. American Heritage Dictionary, New College Edition, 1976.
             
            Eric S. Rabkin, professor of English and director of the Collegiate
            Institute for Values and Science at the University of Michigan, is
            the author of Narrative Suspense, The Fantastic in Literature,
            Arthur C. Clarke and the editor of Fantastic Worlds: Myths, Tales,
            and Stories. His previous contribution to ,
            "Spatial Form and Plot," appeared in the Winter 1977 issue.
             
            See also: "The Shape of the Signifier" by Walter Benn Michaels in
            Vol. 27, No. 2
Eugene Eoyang
         Beyond Visual and Aural Criteria: The Importance of_Flavor_in
            Chinese Literary Criticism
         "The essence of literature may be compared to the various plants
            and trees," Liu Hseih writes, "alike in the fact that they are
            rooted in the soil, yet different in their flavor and their
            fragrance, their exposure to the sun."1 The character of each work
            is manifest in its unique savor and in its scent. In other works,
            the uniqueness of a work can be savored: texts may echo other
            works, but the personality of any work is instantaneously verified
            by what Liu Hseih calls wei, flavor, and hsiu, fragrance. It is
            this uniqueness that persists and survives innumerable bad
            imitations, shifts in circumstances, lost phonetics, and changing
            styles. It is what remains fresh in the classics and enables the
            contemporary reader to feel a sense of discovery and newness. Liu
            Hseih says that of these lasting works that their "roots are deep,
            their foliage luxuriant, their expression succinct yet rich; the
            things described were familiar, but their ramifications are far-
            reaching: so, although they were written in the past, they have a
            lasting savor that remains fresh."2
             
            ·  1. Liu Hseih, Wen-hsin tiao-lung chu, ed. Fan Wen-lan (Peking,
            1958), p. 519; Shih, The Literary Mind and the Carving of the
            Dragons (Taipei, 1970), p. 232.
            ·  2. Liu Hseih, p. 22; Shih, p. 24. Although the same Chinese word
            wei is used in this passage, I have translated it as "savor" to
            stress the combination of qualities inherent in a work rather than
            restrict these qualities to a single "flavor."
             
            Eugene Eoyang is an associate professor of comparative literature
            and of East Asian languages and literatures at Indiana State
            University. He has contributed over fifty translations to Sunflower
            Splendor: Three Thousand Years of Chinese Poetry and is the author
            of an anthology of Chinese fiction, Links in the Chain.
Stephen Orgel
         Shakespeare  and the Kinds of Drama
         If we think about comedy in terms of stock characters, Shakespeare
            provides some startling examples. Here, for instance, are two
            hypothetical casts: (1) A jealous husband, a chaste wife, an
            irascible father, a clever malicious servant, a gullible friend, a
            bawdy witty maid; (2) A pair of lovers, their irascible fathers, a
            bawdy serving woman, a witty friend, a malicious friend, a kindly
            foolish priest. Both of these groups represent recognizable comic
            configurations, though in fact they are also the casts of Othello
            and Romeo and Juliet. Being able to see them in this light, I
            think, reveals something important about how both these tragedies
            work. Much of their dramatic force derives from the way they
            continually tempt us with comic possibilities. We are told in a
            prologue that Romeo and Juliet are star-crossed, but if
            inevitability is a requisite of tragedy, neither play will qualify
            for the genre: they are the most iffy dramas in the Shakespearean
            canon. At innumerable points in both plays, had anything happened
            differently, the tragic catastrophe would have been averted.
            Othello particularly teases the audience in this way as the
            famous story about the man who leapt from his seat, furious at the
            impending murder of Desdemona, and shouted "You fool, can't you see
            she's innocent?" reveals. The story is no doubt apocryphal (I have
            even heard it told about Verdi's opera), but the point is that it
            is unique to this play: there are no similar tales of spectators
            leaping up to rescue Cordelia, to save Gloucester from blinding, to
            dash the asp from Cleopatra's hand.
             
            Stephen Orgel, professor of English at Johns Hopkins University, is
            the author of The Jonsonian Masque, The Illusion of Power, and the
            coauthor of Inigo Jones. The editor of Jonson's Complete Masques
            and of Jonson's Selected Masques (in the Yale Ben Jonson series),
            he is currently writing a book on the idea of theatrical genres in
            the Renaissance.
Nelson Goodman
         Metaphor as Moonlighting
         The acknowledged difficulty and even impossibility of finding a
            literal paraphrase for most metaphors is offered by [Donald]
            Davidson1 as evidence that there is nothing to be paraphrased -
            that a sentence says nothing metaphorically that it does not say
            literally, but rather functions differently, inviting comparisons
            and stimulating thought. But paraphrase of many literal sentences
            also is exceedingly difficult, and indeed we may seriously question
            whether any sentence can be translated exactly into other words in
            the same or any other language. Let's agree, though, that literal
            paraphrase of metaphor is on the whole especially hard. That is
            easily understood since the metaphorical application of terms has
            the effect, and usually the purpose, of drawing significant
            boundaries that cut across ruts worn by habit, of picking out new
            relevant kinds for which we have no simple and familiar literal
            descriptions. We must note in passing, though, that the
            metaphorical application may nevertheless be quite clear. For just
            as inability to define "desk" is compatible with knowing which
            articles are desks, so inability to paraphrase a metaphorical term
            is compatible with knowing what it applies to, And as I have
            remarked elsewhere,2 whether a man is metaphorically a Don Quixote
            or a Don Juan is perhaps easier to decide than whether he is
            literally a schizoid or a paranoiac.
             
            ·  1. In "What Metaphors Mean,"  5 (Autumn 1978):
            31-47.
            ·  2. In "Stories upon Stories; or, Reality on Tiers," delivered at
            the conference Levels of Reality, in Florence, Italy, September
            1978.
             
            Nelson Goodman, emeritus professor of philosophy at Harvard, has
            written The Structure of Appearance; Fact, Fiction, and Forecast;
            Languages of Art: An Approach to a Theory of Symbols; Problems and
            Projects;and, most recently, Ways of Worldmaking. His contributions
            to include "The Status of Style" (Summer 1975),
            "Twisted Tales; or, Story, Study, and Symphony" (Autumn 1980), and
            "The Telling and the Told" (Summer 1981).
Max Black
         How Metaphors Work: A Reply to Donald Davidson
         To be able to produce and understand metaphorical statements is
            nothing much to boast about: these familiar skills, which children
            seem to acquire as they learn to talk, are perhaps no more
            remarkable than our ability to tell and to understand jokes. How
            odd then that it remains difficult to explain what we do (and
            should do) in grasping metaphorical statements. In a provocative
            paper, "What Metaphors Mean,"
            1
            Donald Davidson has recently charged many students of metaphor,
            ancient and modern, with having committed a "central mistake."
            According to him, there is "error and confusion" in claiming "that
            a metaphor has, in addition to its literal sense or meaning,
            another sense or meaning." The guilty include "literary critics
            like Richards, Empson, and Winters; philosophers from Aristotle to
            Max Black; psychologists from Freud and earlier to Skinner and
            later; and linguists from Plato to Uriel Weinreich and George
            Lakoff." Good company, if somewhat mixed. The error to be
            extirpated is the "idea that a metaphor has a special meaning" (p.
            32).
             
            If Davidson is right, much that has been written about metaphor
            might well be consigned to the flames. Even if he proves to be
            wrong, his animadversions should provoke further consideration of
            the still problematic modus operandi of metaphor.
             
            ·  1. In "What Metaphors Mean,"  5 (Autumn 1978):
            31-47. All further references in text.
             
            Max Black is Susan Linn Sage professor of philosophy and humane
            letters emeritus at Cornell University and senior member of the
            Cornell program on science, technology, and society. His many
            influential works include Models and Metaphors, A Companion to
            Wittgenstein's Tractatus, and, most recently, Caveats and
            Critiques. During the fall of 1978 he was Tarner Lecturer at
            Cambridge University and is currently preparing a book on
            rationality based on those lectures.
Lawrence Kramer
         The Shape of Post-Classical Music
         Very few nineteenth-century works are unintelligible in terms of a
            dual structure. Consider a Chopin Ballade or Etude as an example.
            Such pieces, with their continuous chromatic mutation and rhapsodic
            form, make little sense in classical terms. Yet once one grasps
            that the process of chromatic alteration is their norm, not a mode
            of deviation, they become perfectly and immediately intelligible.
            Their autonomy is in no way compromised, nor do the pieces require
            extrinsic support from language; any competent listener will
            recognize that their structural tensions derive from the contrast
            between a continual attack on the stability of their tonal centers
            and the continual resilience of those centers as sources of
            structure. Chopin, like Schumann after him, may go so far as to
            treat the major and minor modes of one key as interchangeable; but
            even that only emphasizes the simultaneity of tonal stability and
            tonal instability which informs their works and clarifies their
            structures. Similarly, one can find in Brahms a deliberate return
            to the "premise structure" of classical music, as filtered through
            Beethoven; and Brahms' music clearly attempts to mediate between
            this structure and the normative instability of nineteenth-century
            harmony. Subotnik, however, is pressed by her thesis to deny the
            autonomy and dual structure of Brahms' music. So she says of him
            that "Those of his instrumental works which achieved popularity
            allowed the majority of listeners to perceive nothing in them
            beyond the individuality of Brahms' themes, gestures, and
            instrumental colors; within his works the classical identity of
            subjectively designed gesture and objectively rigorous structure
            was no longer generally audible."1 Subotnik offers no evidence in
            support of this claim nor does she mention a single work of Brahms
            in connection with it. In view of such transparently "classical"
            structures as the Variations and Fugue on a Theme of Handel, the
            Passacaglia of the Fourth Symphony, the Rondo of the Violin
            Concerto, and dozens of others, the claim seems improbable at best.
             
            ·  1. Rose Rosengard Subotnik, "The Cultural Message of Musical
            Semiology: Some Thoughts on Music, Language, and Criticism since
            the Enlightenment,"  4 (Summer 1978): 761.
             
            Lawrence Kramer has written various articles on nineteenth- and
            twentieth-century poetry and on the relation between poetry and
            music. An assistant professor of English at Fordham University, he
            has written a book on Wordsworth and Keats.
Rose Rosengard Subotnik
         Tonality, Autonomy, and Competence in Post-Classical Music
         I try to indicate this special quality of classical intelligibility
            by linking it with the notion of "dual structure," a notion which
            should not be flattened to mean any sort of intelligibility to
            those listeners deemed "competent," especially if the term
            "competence" is used without qualification. Dual structure in
            music, as I construe it, is an intrastructural system of reference
            between pairs of discrete semiotic constructs both members of which
            are in some sense wholly embodied in a given musical structure.
            These constructs include a general ground of meaning and more
            particularized semiotic configurations derived from that ground;
            and because both are present in the musical structure, the
            relationship between them the meaning of the music can
            be retrieved directly, wholly, and on a general scale. No
            extrastructural mediating explanation or specialized information or
            training is needed; the interpreter need merely use the musical
            equivalent of reason. The archetype of such a system in music seems
            to be the relation of implication or self-generation that obtains
            between premise and conclusion within a pure system of logic,
            which, as described by Kant in his account of theoretical reason,
            would be universally intelligible.
             
            Rose Rosengard Subotnik, assistant professor of music at the
            University of Chicago, is the author of articles on nineteenth-
            century music. Her essay which prompted this exchange, "The
            Cultural Message of Musical Semiology: Some Thoughts on Music,
            Language, and Criticism since the Enlightenment," appeared in the
            Summer 1978 issue of .
John Reichert
         But That Was in Another Ball Park: A_Reply_to_Stanley_Fish
         Fish comes dangerously close to identifying the meaning of a
            statement with its illocutionary force. At one point he says that
            "the meaning of a sentence is a function of its illocutionary
            force"(p. 638). At another he says that a move from a situation in
            which "I have to study for an exam" is heard as a statement to one
            in which it is heard as a rejection of a proposal is a move "from
            one meaning that emerges in a set of circumstances to another
            meaning that emerges in another set of circumstances"(p. 641).
            Since "meaning" is so tricky a term, it may be well to remind
            ourselves that in a situation in which the sentences "I have to tie
            my shoes," "I have to eat popcorn," and "I hate movies" would all
            be understood as rejections of an invitation to the movies, no one
            would mistake the meaning of one for that of either of the other
            two. The three sentences make different statements, convey
            different information, and offer different reasons for not going to
            the movies. There is a sense in which Y's saying "I hate movies"
            means that (i.e., implies that) he rejects the proposal. But even
            in that situation, the meaning of "I hate movies" isn't reducible
            to "I reject your proposal."
             
            John Reichert, chairman of the English department at Williams
            College, is the author of Making Sense of Literature. He has
            contributed "Making Sense of Interpretation" to .
Stanley E. Fish
         A Reply to John Reichert; or, How to_Stop_Worrying_and_Learn_to
            Love Interpretation
         I could go on in this way, replying to Reichert's reply, point by
            point, but the pattern of my replies is already set: he charges
            that my position entails certain undesirable consequences and flies
            in the face of some of our most basic intuitions; I labor to show
            that none of those consequences (the lack of a basis for deciding
            that something is wrong, etc.) follow and that our basic intuitions
            are confirmed (albeit in a new light) rather than denied by what I
            have to say. This of course is exactly what I was doing in the
            article to which he takes exception and will soon do at length in a
            book to be published within the year. I am not, however, optimistic
            that a reading of that book will make Reichert a convert because
            the fears that impel his argument are so basic to his beliefs. I
            take the key sentence in his article to be this one: "Since I would
            like to think that I read the same King Lear that Dr. Johnson read,
            and am therefore free to disagree with his interpretation of it, I
            would like to find a way out of Fish's formulation of the reader's
            situation" (pp. 164-65). Reichert's commitment to what he would
            like to be able to do and his conviction that if what I say is true
            he will be unable to do it make it impossible for him to regard my
            position as anything but perverse and dangerous. Even if I could
            demonstrate in his own terms (as I think I have) that his fears are
            unfounded that he is still free to disagree with Dr. Johnson
            or anyone else any argument I might make would be received
            within the belief that it had to be wrong, and within that belief
            he could only hear it as wrong. (Of course I am equally open to
            this characterization; when Reichert or anyone else identifies
            something an object, a text, an intention as being
            available independently of interpretation, I know in advance that
            it could not be so and I look immediately for ways to demystify or
            deconstruct it. I always succeed.) To this Reichert would probably
            reply that arguments are either good or bad, irrespective of
            beliefs, and that mine are bad; but it is my contention that
            arguments are forceful only within a set of beliefs and that unless
            someone is willing to entertain the possibility that his beliefs
            are wrong he will be unable even to hear an argument that
            constitutes a challenge to them. That is why the fact that Reichert
            is likely to remain unconvinced by my argument is its strongest
            confirmation.
             
            Stanley Fish is the author of, among other works, Is There a Text
            in This Class? Interpretative Authority in the Classroom and in
            Literary Criticism. His contributions to  include
            "Facts and Fictions: A Reply to Ralph Rader" (June 1975),
            "Interpreting the Variorum" (Spring 1976), "Interpreting
            'Interpreting the Variorum'" (Autumn 1976), "Normal Circumstances,
            Literal Language, Direct Speech Acts, the Ordinary, the Everyday,
            the Obvious, What Goes without Saying, and Other Special Cases"
            (Summer 1978), and "One More Time" (Autumn 1980).
