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PARTISAN REVIEW
the former, the test is, what interpretation makes the work the best
work of art? For the latter, what interpretation best places conven–
tional legal materials in a "fit" with the most enlightened political
theory?
In any case, no part of Dworkin's argument is devoted to
classical epistemology and its emphasis on the foundations of belief.
One suspects that he might agree with Hilary Putnam's recent cri–
tique in
Reason, Truth, and History
of the conventional dichotomies of
objective and subjective, fact and value, but he has not explicitly ad–
dressed these issues. His project is to help us "account to ourselves
for our own convictions as best we can," including the fact that we
profess ourselves as "standing ready to abandon those that do not
survive reflective inspection ." He is thus interested in what counts,
in our particular culture, as "reflective inspection."
The debate between Dworkin and Fish thus does not involve
whether or not judges
feel
free to impose their own interpretations
upon texts. Nor , interestingly enough, is it clear that either Dworkin
or Fish really believes that accepting their general theoretical views
would actually effect the interpretations that any given individuals
would proffer. Fish is especially explicit on this point , emphasizing
that "nothing whatsoever" follows from accepting his view for the ac–
tual content of a given interpretation. He is interested only in help–
ing us to understand the phenomenology of interpretation and has
nothing to teach law professors about
evaluating
interpretations , as he
recently emphasized in a paper delivered at the annual meeting of
the American Association of Law Schools.
Although Fish and Dworkin have directed angry articles at one
another, it is not clear that their disagreements outweigh their much
more fundamental agreements both about the task of the analyst-to
explain how it is that interpretations arise - and the saturation of
any text in varying presuppositions of any given interpreter. Both
are thoroughgoing conventionalists, denying that the interpretive
enterprise depends at all on resolution of the problems of classical
epistemology . Each, ironically,
a~cuses
the other of backsliding into
statements whose force depends on a view of "reality as it
is,"
but it
may be the very closeness of their basic positions that accounts for
the heat of their exchange. Both are light-years from those theorists
who believe that texts are autonomous and capable of being decoded
through application of a scientific methodology.
Phenomenological accounts, however, are not really relevant
