Overinterpretation or appropriation?

Abstract

The article discusses various approaches to interpretation, which understand it as a universal method of the humanities. Particular attention we paid to the interpretations in U. Eco and E. Batti, who, although do not agree with each other, however, are opposed both to the philosophic or analytic understanding of interpretation, which we call the appropriationist approach. The way of interpreting the past inherent in appropriationism often threatens with overinterpretation, for which it is criticized by adepts of contextualism. We analyze the interpretation through the prism of three skeptical arguments we offered, “conceptual relativism”, “Gorgians’ minds”, “the part and the whole”. Skeptical arguments are often used in philosophy as an additional filter for testing the consistency of the concepts, and it is clearly seen that the contextualist concept of interpretation does not pass this filter. The thesis that appropriation is indeed a overinterpretation can be accepted under reserve that for a strictly philosophical way of reasoning and from within appropriationism, another version of interpretation is inconsistent.