Inferring and Explaining

88 InferrIng and exPlaInIng up along the side of his head. Did he just give you an obscene hand gesture? Or was he sim- ply scratching his ear? I text you “Meet you at 11” and get “?” as a response. Are you confused about 11 a.m. or 11 p.m.? Did you mean to text “k,” or did I mistakenly text my mother-in-law, and she has no idea what in the world I’m say- ing? Just as wemust explain identical exams, the car outside Joe’s bar, and morphological simi- larities in mammalian forelimbs, we ofen fnd ourselves in communicative contexts where we must explain gibberish Morse code, potential hand gestures, and “?” in a reply text. It should surprise none of you that I believe inference to the best explanation will be helpful to you in these latter situations. Inference to the Best Explanation and Textual Interpretation Historians are concerned with texts, so are legal scholars, and indeed all of us rely on the spo- ken and printed word as evidence for all sorts of hypotheses. We might well turn to other inter- pretive disciplines such as biblical hermeneu- tics and literary criticism for methodological insights. Rather than begin with a tricky legal statute or a puzzling short story, however, it will be clearer, and more amusing, to illustrate the explanatory nature of textual interpretation with an example that does not require the back- ground of an academic specialization. Stanley Fish provides a good one: I have inminda sign that is afxed in this unpunctuated form to the door of the Johns Hopkins University Club: PRIVATE MEMBERS ONLY I have had occasion to ask several classes what that sign means, and I have received a variety of answers, the least interesting of which is, “Only those who are secretly and not publicly members of this club may enter it.” Other answers fall within a pre- dictable narrow range: “Only the genitalia of mem- bers may enter” (this seems redundant), or “You may bring in your own genitalia,” or (and this is the most popular reading perhaps because of its Disney-like anthropomorphism) “Only genitalia may enter.” In every class, however, some Dr. Johnson-like positivist rises to say, “But you’re just playing games; every- body knows that the sign really means, ‘Only those persons who belong to this club may enter it.’” He is of course right. 2 Interpreting the sign involves making an inference about what it means. We have a col- lection of data that is in need of explanation: e 1 . The “text” is on a sign. e 2 . The sign is on a door. e 3. The door is to the Johns Hopkins Uni- versity Club. e 4 . The “text” reads, “PRIVATE MEMBERS ONLY.” Such a characterization of the data implies that we have already done a certain amount of interpretation. We have explained the shapes “PRIVATEMEMBERSONLY” as an attempt at lin- guistic communication; they did not accidentally appear when the building was being painted nor are they modern art. Our explanatory question focuses on what these words are intended to communicate. We have a number of explanatory hypotheses: