The Mythologies of Contextualism: Method and Judgment in Skinner's Visions of Politics
| Author | Michelle T. Clarke |
| Date | 01 December 2013 |
| Published date | 01 December 2013 |
| DOI | 10.1111/j.1467-9248.2012.01000.x |
| Subject Matter | Article |
The Mythologies of Contextualism: Method and
Judgment in Skinner’s Visions of Politics
Michelle T. Clarke
Dartmouth College
This article argues that Skinnerian contextualism is an unsuccessful attempt to develop a truly methodical approach
to textual interpretation.According to Skinner, the various ‘mythologies’ that he associates with textualism are due to
its misplaced confidence in the faculty of judgment.Whereas textualists believe that an interpreter’s own judgment is
his or her most useful tool in attempting to understand a text, contextualism proceeds from the assumption that we
cannot help but make faulty judgments when confronted with historical materials given the nature of human
cognition. Having dissociated itself from textualism on these grounds, contextualism attempts to repair the defects of
textualism by minimizing the role of judgment in interpretive practice.As this article will show,these efforts have been
fruitless. Moreover, Skinner’s attempt to reinforce contextualism by importing claims about the strategic motives
behind philosophical argumentation is either incoherent or unconvincing.
Keywords: interpretation; contextualism; ideology; Skinner; motivation
Quentin Skinner is undoubtedly the foremost scholar of interpretation in the history of
political thought alive today and his work fully deserves the vast amount of critical attention
it has received in the 30 years since the publication of his seminal essay on interpretive
methodology,‘Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas’ (Skinner,1969; 2002e).1
Here and elsewhere, Skinner clarifies and defends the theoretical underpinnings of con-
textualism with reference to linguistic philosophy and contrasts it sharply with what he calls
‘textualism’, or the view that interpretive understanding can be gleaned from a close
examination of the text alone.2This article examines the cogency of Skinner’s argument
with a view to its central premise, that interpretive judgment is an unreliable tool for
understanding the meaning of a text.
According to Skinner, contextualism is superior to textualism because it minimizes the
role of judgment in textual interpretation. Whereas textualism relies primarily on the
interpreter’s own judgment for its understanding of what an author meant to say and for
this reason cannot help but produce a distorted view of the past, contextualism proceeds
according to a method designed to expunge interpretive bias through the firm discipline
of our cognitive processes – hence the subtitle of his recent collection of essays
on interpretive practice, Regarding Method.3In this article, I argue that Skinner fails
to distinguish and elevate contextualism on these grounds. Notwithstanding his vehe-
ment assertions to the contrary, interpretive judgment plays an indispensable role
in Skinner’s version of contextualism and for that reason it cannot escape the very
‘mythologies’ that he associates with textualism. Moreover, I argue that Skinner’s attempt
to reinforce contextualism’s interpretive power by importing assumptions about the stra-
tegic motives behind philosophical argumentation proves to be either incoherent or
unconvincing.
bs_bs_banner
doi: 10.1111/j.1467-9248.2012.01000.x
POLITICAL STUDIES: 2013 VOL 61, 767–783
© 2012The Author.Political Studies © 2012 Political Studies Association
The Problem of Interpretive Judgment
Skinner uses ‘textualism’to denote the belief that we can understand what an author meant
to say by focusing our attention entirely on the text he wrote. By simply reading a book
‘over and over’ again, it is possible to recover both what it says and why it was written
(Skinner, 2002e, p. 80, p. 82; 2002j, p. 143). In Skinner’s view, textualism rests on a faulty
assumption that necessarily corrupts everything it produces – the assumption that texts can
speak for themselves. Expressing a version of positivism’s misguided faith in the possibility
of having direct and unmediated access to the world in which we live,textualism neglects
the role played by cognition itself in shaping how we perceive the raw data of experience.
For a textualist, says Skinner,the meaning of a book is simply there to be found by anyone
who can think and read properly, a position akin to Sir Geoffrey Elton’s, which Skinner
assails as ‘the cult of fact’ (Skinner, 2002h, p. 12).
Skinner, by contrast, urges scholars to account for the social dimension of thought and
language when trying to understand what an author meant to say. Since we always
organize our experiences according to socially meaningful categories and express them
using socially meaningful terms, he argues, it is impossible to disentangle philosophical
ideas from the wider historical context in which they came to be. For this reason, the
meaning of a text is simply not available to a reader unless and until he or she becomes
familiar with its original conceptual environment. Skinner emphasizes that not even the
most apparently obvious ‘f acts’ about the world escape conceptual filtration, making it
critical that scholars fully recognize and acknowledge the interpretive significance of
those ‘models and preconceptions in terms of which we unavoidably organize and adjust
our perceptions and thoughts’ and hence ‘act as determinants of what we think and
perceive’ (Skinner, 2002e, p. 58). Perception alone is insufficient for making sound judg-
ments about anything, he insists, because ‘[e]ven in the most primitive perceptual cases’
our beliefs and judgments ‘will always be mediated by the concepts available to us for
describing what we have observed’, and hence all that we ‘experience and report will
accordingly be brought to our attention by the range of concepts we possess and the
nature of the discriminations they enable us to make’ (Skinner, 2002b, p. 44). Conse-
quently, the relevant question for intellectual historians is not whether historical context
should matter, but rather which historical context is most apt for illuminating the
intended meaning of a text.
Skinner holds that by committing themselves only to reading a book ‘over and over’
again, textualists cannot help but indulge their own assumptions and preconceptions about
what they will find there. For this reason,textualist inter pretations are inevitably rife with
‘confusions and exegetical absurdities’ (Skinner, 2002e, p. 58). Skinner’s discussion of the
errors made by textualists is unforgiving; at times he goes so far as to insinuate that
textualism is a symptom of intellectual and moral depravity.According to Skinner, there is
something ‘insidious’ and ‘sinister’ about textualist interpretations (p. 61, p. 66); textualists
play‘tr icks’on the authors they purpor t to study (p. 65);textualists use history as a ‘pretense’
for covertly advancing their own values (p.63); textualists are too lazy and unimaginative to
‘do [their] own thinking for [themselves]’(p. 88); textualists are guilty of using history as ‘a
means to fix [their] own prejudices onto the most charismatic names under the guise of
768 MICHELLE T. CLARKE
© 2012The Author.Political Studies © 2012 Political Studies Association
POLITICAL STUDIES: 2013, 61(4)
To continue reading
Request your trial