stumped for an answer; but answer or no answer, there can bernno doubt that the usual interpretation is the right one. So inrninterpreting texts far more is known, and certainly known,rnthan is commonly noticed; one can be certain, and rightly certain,rnwithout justification, without explaining where the knowledgerncame from or how it is grounded.rnThat seems to be a hard point, nowadays, to accept inrnschools and colleges. Suppose you were to move from outsidernthe college, where no posters are allowed, to the inside, wherernthey sometimes are; suppose, too, that Bill Posters is a real personrnthere, and that he teaches in a department of humanities.rnHe will probably be scandalized to hear that there arc casesrnwhere there is only one correct interpretation of a text and thatrnone can be certain what it is without being able to say why. Hernmay even glory in the dogma of critical indeterminacy. In Aprilrn1991, for example, Jacques Derrida ended a lecture at thernUniversity of Chicago, after two and three-quarter hours, withrna soaring peroration in which he urged his audience, to their evidentrnjoy, to “draw all possible deductions from all possible hypotheses.”rnOne enthusiastic member of his audience, RichardrnStern {London Review of Books, August 15, 1991), modestlyrncalled his all-but-three-hour ordeal a Daedalian act—with therndisciple Icarus, whom we may presume here to signify RichardrnStern, “soaring towards self-exaltation on wings which meltedrnbecause of his stupidity” while his master elaborately, hourrnupon hour, took the starch out of “received texts, elevated positions,rnfixed hierarchies of value.”rnSo things are happening in Chicago, which has long beenrnknown as the Windy City, much as they did in Paris 20 andrnmore years ago. Much the same things, to tell the truth, butrnthen universities exist (among other reasons) to preserve and tornmummify. Bill Posters lives. He may even think it rash to berncertain that a college notice is only about sticking things onrnwalls. There are people who like this sort of Icarus-trip, onrnwings of wax that melt in the heat of the Paris or Chicago sun,rnand who like it for two and three-quarter hours at a time. Inrnfact. Stern’s report of Derrida’s Chicago lecture speaks of raptrnattention and prolonged applause: “The Deconstructor hadrnbuilt only too well; only that eer-surprising Surprise which deconstructsrnus all would silence the applause.” That sounds likernthe birth—or is it the middle age?—of a religion, and one fullyrnequipped with a Messiah, a scripture, and a cult. It is the languagernof mystical ecstasy.rnDenying what you know is a faith with acolytes in some unexpectedrnplaces, and prophets of the indeterminate can easilyrnbe embarrassed by their allies. The Nazis are among them.rn”There is no such thing as truth, either in the moral or in thernscientific sense,” Adolf Hitler told Hermann Rauschning inrn1934, as the latter reported in Hitler Speaks (1939):rnThe idea of a free and unfettered science—unfetteredrnby hypotheses—could only occur in the age of Liberalism.rnIt is absurd. Science is a social phenomenon, andrnlike every other social phenomenon it is limited by thernbenefit, or injury, it confers on the community. Thernslogan of objective science has been coined by the professoraternsimply in order to escape from a very necessaryrnsupervision by the power of the state.rnSo Adolf Hitler, in his fashion, was an eariy multiculturalist; andrnthough defeated, his dogma lives on. Even scientists, after arngood dinner, can occasionally be heard to say they would believernnothing without proof, though they look puzzled whenrnasked how thev would prove that. But then to put that questionrnat all has at least one good effect: it helps to deconstructrnDeconstruetion. In any case, the skeptical scientist can be entirelyrncontented, in practice, with his unnoticed contradiction.rnHe simplv forgets all about it in the laboratory, where hernrightly believes in all sorts of things he could not prove. In thernlab it would not occur to him, for example, to doubt thatrnwhat looks red is red; but how in the world would he prove it?rnSkepticism in the deconstructive style, whether in Paris or inrnChicago, unlike Hitler’s or Goering’s, is a game. Like thernflight of Icarus, it belongs to fantasy. It is for dinner-table conversation,rnfor papers read at international conferences, for criticalrnjournals. It has nothing to do with what the reader doesrnwhen he reads. It is a game, above all, for those who are afraidrnthat, without it, they might have nothing interesting to say—rna substitute, sometimes two and three-quarter hours long, forrnhaving nothing to say. As a witty German philosopher recentlyrnremarked, “theory is what is done when there is nothingrnmore to be done” (Odo Marquard, Abschied von Prinzipiellen,rn1981). Nature abhors a vacuum, and silences have to be filled.rnThe .skeptic in the humanities, however, is perhaps less likelyrnthan the scientist to be robustly inconsistent about suchrnthings. Bill Posters can be a worried man. There is no argument,rnGeorge Orwell once said, by which you can defend arnpoem, and the skeptic-critic is inclined to throw up his handsrnat that, imagining it to be a damaging, even an unanswerablerncharge against everything beyond the severely factual that literaryrndepartments are supposed to be about. “Emily Bronternisn’t better than Jackie Collins,” a teacher of literature told anrneducation conference recently, “just different.” It can be hardrnto make Bill Posters forget his dud theory and simply get onrnwith it. He is a despairing being. He believes that real and lastingrndamage has been done to literary culture, that radicalrnskepticism of that sort cannot be answered, that it is time torngive up.rnThis is because he has not noticed that his skeptical view ofrncritical values is not fresh and innovative at all, as Derrida’s audiencesrnimagine, but old-fashioned in a classic 19th-centuryrnpositivistic way; a touch of modern philosophy could help.rnKnowledge is not the same as account-giving, for a start, andrnthe fact that a question cannot be answered is not in itself a reasonrnto doubt that the answer is known. It does not follow fromrnthe fact that we cannot say why Emily Bronte wrote a betterrnnovel than Jackie Collins that we do not know WutheringrnHeights to be better. Knowing how familiar foods and drinksrntaste abundantly illustrates that. Nobody, after all, can definernthe difference in taste between tea and coffee. Nobody, Irnimagine, supposes that it follows that he does not know the difference.rnKnowledge, again, does not depend on justification—”Howrndo you know?”—and silent, shared assumptions are not somethingrnto be ashamed of, as the instant lucidity of a notice prohibitingrnbill-posting illustrates, but rather natural and innocentrninstances of how language commonly works. A Cambridgernphilosopher, Elizabeth Anscombe, once raised her papers highrnover her head, in a dramatic gesture, and said to her audience:rn”If I ask ‘How many is this?’ you would have to ask a questionrnor make an assumption”—an assumption, that is, aboutrnwhether she meant lectures, or sheets, or words. To answer arnquestion, to understand anything—whether a notice, a re-rnJULY 1993/19rnrnrn