MICHAEL S. MOORE

There is a simple life-cycle for metaphors. They are born of fresh insight
about an unnoticed similarity, wither with over-use, and die by becoming
so familiar that they are treated as established senses of words. Intellectual
fashions are like metaphors in this respect. Although they may begin life
fresh and full of promise, they eventually become the tired counters in a
patter that prevents insight rather than conveys it.

This has happened to the current intellectual fashion built around inter-
pretation. Like the 'form of life' patter of the 1950s, and the 'paradigm'
patter of the 1960s, some mention of 'interpretation' has become de rigueur
in articles on just about any subject. Like the 'form of life' and 'paradigm'
patters that Wittgenstein and Kuhn visited upon earlier decades, our 'inter-
pretive' patter does very little work in either discovering or justifying any
conclusion; such patter is most often merely the ornamental dressing put on
to generally sceptical conclusions about law, literary criticism, psychology,
physics, or just about anything. 'It is only your interpretation' has descended
to the level of cocktail party conversation as our preferred way of express-
ing metaphysical or epistemological scepticism about anything, but it rarely
does any work in justifying such scepticism.

All this is distressing to those of us who were interested in interpretation
before it became so fashionable. This is not just the unhappiness one feels
when having the symbols of one's personality appropriated by the masses--
as when hippies made blue jeans a uniform, or when yuppies made BMWs
a high-status automobile. Rather, it is the dislike of seeing a useful concept
turned into a piece of empty rhetoric. It is rather like the distress a surgeon

This paper originated from my Lectures on Interpretive Theory, given in 1986 to the Eighth
Annual Session of the International Institute for Semiotic and Structural Studies, held at the
English Department of Northwestern University, Evanston. It also benefited from the term-
length research fellowship on interpretive theory held at the Humanities Research Institute,
University of California, Irvine, Spring Quarter, 1989. The paper was written specifically for the
Conference on Interpretation and Legal Theory, Tel Aviv University, 1993. My thanks go to
participants (and particularly to my commentator at the latter, Gilead Bar-Elli) for their helpful
comments.

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