VIEWSrnHow Do You Know?rnby George WatsonrnHow much is actually knowri and not just supposed orrnimagined? A lot more, surely, than it is fashionable tornthink, at least in the world that moral and literar)- theoristsrnseem to inhabit. So much more, that it is easy to forget howrnmuch by which we interpret the world and its texts is nothingrnless than certain.rnTo take a simple instance, there is a notice outside my collegernthat reads “Bill Posters Will Be Prosecuted.” Some sort of arnjoke, no doubt, could be made here: Bill Posters might bernsomebody’s name, and the authors of the notice might just bernmaking a prediction about him. But I doubt it. hi fact, that isrnto understate the matter. I am utterly certain the notice doesrnnot mean that, even though I neither know nor care whornwrote it; to raise the matter at all is to do no more than confirmrna total certainty about what it evidently means. You understand,rnat first sight and without reflection, that it forbids peoplernto stick things on the wall.rnWhat is more, it is seen to mean that regardless of race, gender,rnor class, which is a thought that should give pause to ardentrnmulticulturalists, gender-crusaders, and critics of Eurocentricity.rnIf all uses of language were conditioned by race or genderrnor class, as is sometimes asserted, then this would be, too;rnGeorge Watson, who is a Fellow of St. John’s College,rnCambridge, is the author of Politics & Literature in ModernrnBritain (1977), Writing a Thesis (J986J, The Certainty ofrnLiterature (J989), and British Literature Since 1945 (J99J).rnbut that hardly seems likely. In fact it is about as likely as a remarkrnmade in the 1930’s by a Nazi apologist called JakobrnHommes, whose name, though now forgotten, ought to be celebratedrnamong multiculturalists, because when urged to acceptrnthat arithmetic, at least, was free of race, he memorably repliedrnthat even twice-two-make-four is “somehow differently tinged”rnin the mind of a Negro. There speaks a man faithful to hisrnprinciples. Hermann Goering, a more famous Nazi, similarlyrnremarked in the spring of 1933, shortly after Hitler’s seizure ofrnpower: “I am subjective—I submit myself to my people,”rnmeaning to Germans of pure stock; he added that he thankedrnGod for having created him without a sense of objectivity.rnWhen people complain about linear logic and the like, it isrnsometimes easy to forget that we have passed this way before.rnThe Nazis were against it long before the New Left or Deconstructionistsrnwere heard of. Dogmatic irrationality is not new.rnIndeterminacy, then, or the theoretical notion that no textrnhas one correct interpretation, has a longer, and a muchrnshadier, history than is widely supposed, and brutal dictatorsrnhave believed in it and advocated it. But to return to postingrnbills. It would not occur to me or, I imagine, to anyone else onrnreading that college notice to ask how one knows what itrnmeans—still less to worr’ that making any sense of its one correctrninterpretation, which is absolute and unhesitating, dependsrnon being able to answer any such question. The familiarrnseminar challenge “How do you know?”—unanswerable asrnit often is—hardly seems to apply. One might indeed bern18/CHRONlCLESrnrnrn