Introducing Stanley Fish in the context of his position in the American academia, the author of the article focuses on the concept and mechanisms of interpretation in Fish’s understanding, who ascribes to it the function of a ubiquitous epistemological tool for man as homo interpretans. With this purpose in mind, the article juxtaposes Fish’s ideas with hermeneutics and structuralism and reveals their constructivist nature. This does not lead, nevertheless, to relativism as culture is grounded on a solid rock of fossilized meaning, which has been constituted as a result of previous consensual interpretations within a social group. This rock of fossilized meaning is a starting point for the negotiation of further meanings, which leads to the transparency of the acts of interpretation in everyday life for the people who preform them. Such existence in the world understood has its ethical and philosophical consequences, which the article briefly examines in its conclusions.
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No. 2 (2001)
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