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addendum:
think of the sentence above as a kind of barrier--meaning can be worked out based on the sequence of words, grammatical functions, etc.: your interpretation is based on the sentence and moves out from it in time--it follows the sentence, refers back to it.
intent would obtain on the far side of the barrier, would be a question of psychological situation at the point of composition (which you cannot really even delimit for yourself as you write a response, if you do)--you could be thinking any number of things--this argument is wrong; roachboy is an asshole (this is a quasi-universal, so often goes without saying in discussion with me); the afternoon is wide open, i would like to barbeque; this chair is falling apart.....intent could be impacted by networks of associations,--it is a difficult state ot even formalize, much less know about, much less know about with any certainty, uch less use as a guide for interpretation.
statements about intent are statements about meaning.
statements about intent are a type of statement about meaning.
they are moves within a game of interpretation of meaning.
for this type of statement to operate as you would prefer it to, there would have to be some kind of agreement about the meaning of this register of statement.
everything that happened within that register would follow from this agreement, and would constitute somethng of a little genre of interpretation, if you took all such statements together.
the conceit of this genre would be that when you talk about meaning, you can somehow thereby talk about intent.
it seems to me that, if you can talk about intent at all, it is in a trivial way--the statement exists and so reflects some level of intent, simply because the fact of the statement indicates something about an intentional state that precedes it--but past that there is nowhere to go, except into the space opened by a community of interpretations that conflate meaning and intent.
sentences are formalized results of actions that exceed the actions.
sentences are like any other work in that the processes behind them tend to drop away, are replaced by the implications of the results, become a space of projection.
within a hypothetical genre of interpretations that conflate meaning and intent, what would be determinate is not the content of the interpretive statements but who controls the genre rules.
it seems to me that this is incoherent except as a political action, one that presumably is rooted mostly in anxiety about the changing meaning of terms in the second amendment.
if you cannot rely upon the existing communities that operate within the game of interpreting the constitution to not dissolve the 18th century notion of milita into something else, for example, then the counter proposal is to create a new interpretive community that would be geared around fixing such definitions in order to prevent this type of interpretation.
it is the same game as that which you oppose, except that folk like you would see their political interests as being advanced by it.
there is no difference in kind between the type of interpretation you propose (based on intent) and that which curently exists (based on meaning).
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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