The Relevance of a Reader's Knowledge within a Perspectival View of Reading

Abstract

The widely endorsed practice of activating relevant knowledge 1 prior to reading is challenged in this paper. It is argued that the endorsement is derived from a god's eye point of view that fails to acknowledge that relevance can be determined only by readers with respect to and in the course of making their own interpretations. To sustain this conclusion, the paper first outlines a perspectival (perspective-relative) view of reading that includes theoretical positions on the relation of reading to inferring meaning, on the importance of understanding first-person intentionality, on the intelligibility of the concept of text information, on the distinction between literal and inferential interpretations, on what it means for readers to integrate their knowledge with text information, and on why the concept of interpretation is more suitable than the concept of comprehension for theorizing about reading. This perspectival view of reading provides a means to make coherent sense of interpretations, at one and the same time, being justifiably relative to readers' different beliefs and purposes for reading, and also constrained by universal interpretive standards of adequacy. The paper thence proceeds to show that, as a consequence of the nature of inference, the relevance of a reader's knowledge to a text interpretation is founded on a relation that is created as part of the interpretative act, and is not something to be sought in its own right. The paper concludes by arguing that having specific knowledge is not the main desideratum in interpreting texts. Rather, the main desideratum is using effectively the knowledge one has.

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