How do we know what someone else means? What kinds of assumptions must we make about the words we hear or read, the students or teachers we listen to, in order to grasp their force in the world? Here Johanna Winant explains how she approaches the act of understanding by reviewing a philosophical debate that includes Donald Davidson and Alfred Tarski (among others).
The act of interpretation, the act of understanding, she says, must begin by holding steady either the truth-value of a statement, or the belief that the speaker has that makes such a statement legitimate (or desirable) to say. The principle of charity, as Winant explains it, implies a basic recognition of the self-legitimacy of any given utterance. We must be willing, in listening to others, to also imagine the system from which those others find their own language legitimate—before, that is, we can truly respond to it.
That sounds hard, but, as Winant points out, (1) it’s kind of what we already try to do a lot of the time and (2) there is no meaningful alternative to so trying.
Bio
Johanna Winant is Assistant Professor of English at West Virginia University. Her research and teaching focus on modernism, poetry and poetics, literature and philosophy, and American literature. She received her BA from Stanford University in 2004, her MPhil from Cambridge University in 2005, and her PhD from the University of Chicago in 2014. In 2019, she held a Distinguished Fellowship at the Notre Dame Institute for Advanced Study.
Her first book, Lyric Logic: Modern American Poetry and Reasoning, is forthcoming from Columbia University Press. The book conceptualizes the formal experimentation of modernist poetry as philosophical work. By showing how poetry’s forms are logical, the book redescribes the intellectual ambition of modern American poetry by demonstrating that it models the processes of reasoning. As a result, the formal experimentation that characterizes these poems can be recategorized; it’s not primarily aesthetic but rather, philosophical. There are two intertwined implications: the book offers a new account of the relationship of poetics and epistemology, and it offers a new account of poetry’s place in the intellectual history of modernity. Chapters focus on Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Gertrude Stein, Marianne Moore, and Elizabeth Bishop.
Winant also writes for the public. Her essays have been published in Slate, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Boston Review, and Post45 Contemporaries, and elsewhere.