Pragmatism and Interpretation: Radical, Relativistic, but not Unruly

Interpretation has been a key theme in pragmatist aesthetics, but its centrality in neopragmatist thinking goes far beyond the field of art. Its influence extends into epistemology, ontology, and the philosophies of language, history, selfhood, and culture. Joseph Margolis devoted many articles and even an entire book to this topic, which he titled Interpretation Radical but Not Unruly. My critical examination of Margolis’s theory of interpretation shows how it is radical not only in terms of its robust relativism. It is also radical in the etymological sense of “radical” as “forming the root” of his philosophical thought in general. The logic of interpretation that Margolis developed for aesthetics is the original, generative source of his relativism, but its influence and relativist logic then extended ever more widely and deeply into his themes of anti-essentialism, historicism, and flux that pervade his metaphysics of culture and philosophical anthropology.