TimS comments on A Kick in the Rationals: What hurts you in your LessWrong Parts? - Less Wrong

24 Post author: sixes_and_sevens 25 April 2012 12:12PM

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Comment author: TimS 27 April 2012 06:17:14PM 1 point [-]

There are no limits at all on what meaning we can project onto a text, but if we're interested in extracting information from a text, limiting our interpretations is necessary. Of course, the information we can extract from a text is not necessarily limited only to things the author consciously put in it, but since the information isn't in the text, it's in the text-in-context, then to the extent that you're independent of the author's context, you're only getting out of it what you put in yourself.

For fictional texts, I'm not sure that extracting information from the text is really the best way of thinking about the text-reader interaction.

The "Wizard of Oz" movie is allegedly very influential in gay culture in America. Assuming this is true, I find it implausible that this was the intent of a movie made in 1939. Does that show that the movie can't "mean" something about gay culture?

Comment author: Desrtopa 27 April 2012 07:41:47PM 3 points [-]

Could you taboo "mean?"

Comment author: TheOtherDave 27 April 2012 08:33:25PM 1 point [-]

Which, I suppose, raises the question of whether there's any value to be gotten from reading fiction, and if so what it is that one is getting of value.

Which might in turn raise the question of whether it's possible to get that thing-of-value from nonfiction as well, in which case perhaps extracting information from the text is perhaps not the only way to engage with nonfiction, either.

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