What's the Use of Theorizing about the Arts?

Source: Bulletin of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Vol. 25, No. 8 (May, 1972),
pp. 11-25
Published by: American Academy of Arts & Sciences
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/3822890
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many of the most important causes of that era of
conflict were to be found in the political climate
of the larger society, a fuller explanation should
also take into account the dramatic processes of
growth and structural change that took place
within the educational system.

A wide-ranging discussion followed Mr. Smel-

ser's address. Other facets of the conflicts of the
1960's were explored, and in particular, many
discussants raised questions concerning the types
of conflict that are likely to arise in the coming
decade when the growth of the higher education
system in California will be slowed considerably.

What's the Use of Theorizing

About the Arts?

In the course of its long history, the deroga-

tion or dismissal of theory in the criticism of
art has been manifested even by writers who
have themselves engaged in both criticism and
theory. Within the last two or three decades,
however, a number of philosophers have mounted
an attack against theory based on their claim
that, while the criticism of particular works of art
is a valid activity, a general critical or aesthetic
theory is a logical impossibility. At the March
Stated Meeting, Meyer H. Abrams, Frederic J.
Whiton Professor of English at Cornell Uni-
versity, countered this claim by proposing that
critical theory is not only a valid but also an
inescapable component of applied criticism-
that without at least an implicit theoretical com-
ponent, there can be no extended and coherent
discussion of a work of art.
Mr. Abrams opened his communication with
a discussion of the analytic approach to literary
criticism as set forth by such philosophers as
Charles Stevenson, John Wisdom, William Ken-
nick, Stuart Hampshire, Paul Ziff, W. B. Gallie,
and, above all, Morris Weitz, the scholar who has
most persistently sustained and most fully ex-
ploited this approach, first in a series of essays
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and later in a substantial volume, Hamlet and
the Philosophy of Literary Criticism (I964).
Analytic metacriticism-that is, the philosophi-
cal criticism of criticism-is based in large part
on the later thought of Ludwig Wittgenstein,
as set forth in his Philosophical Investigations
(953). Wittgenstein's guiding concept was that
to determine the meaning of a word or expression,
one must look, not to the things it names, but
to its use. The "uses" of a given word or ex-
pression (or of the concepts it verbalizes) are
the roles that it performs in actual utterances; in
carrying out these roles, the word or expression
is governed by a number of largely unstated
rules that are observed by all persons who know
how to use a language. Thus discourse, according
to Wittgenstein, can be described, metaphori-
cally, as a language-game, or, alternatively, as a
variety of language-games; and its rules of usage,
although implicit and flexible, may be said to be
analogous to the explicit and rigid rules that
govern the possible moves in a game of chess. The
role or function of an expression in accordance
with its implicit rules was called by Wittgenstein
the "grammar" of the expression or sometimes its
"logical grammar" or "logical syntax."
By applying such insights to critical discourse
about the arts, a number of philosophical analysts
have been able to discriminate a variety of typical
linguistic usages, each with its distinctive logical
form. For instance, Morris Weitz specifies four
distinct procedures in critical discourse which,
since they "function differently," "do different
critical jobs," and "play different roles," are
logically "irreducible."' In Weitz's analysis, three
of these linguistic activities -description, inter-
pretation, and evaluation -are regarded as le-
gitimate enterprises. Descriptions consist of tr
or false assertions about a work which are, in
principle, verifiable by reference to "facts." In-
terpretations undertake to clarify certain aspects
of a work; they cannot be proved to be true but
they can be "supported" by reasons: the criterion
of an interpretation is not its truth or falsity but
rather its adequacy or inadequacy. Evaluations or
judgments are supported by reasons, showing

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that certain criteria of value are realized in the
properties of a given literary work; however,
since disagreements about criteria are perennial,
these reasons can only support, not prove, an
evaluation.
The fourth, logically distinct linguistic activity
defined by Weitz is theory or poetics or aes-
thetics. Like a number of analysts, he identifies
theory as the attempt to answer (and to support
the answer to) questions taking the form:
"What is X?"; for example, "What is tragedy?";
"What is poetry?"; "What is art?" However, un-
like the issues raised by practicing critics about
particular works, these, in Weitz's view, are
bogus questions, and the answers to them are
fallacies. Thus, to the metacritics, criticism (de-
scription, interpretation, and evaluation) is a
legitimate linguistic activity, but critical theoriz-
ing is not.
Analysts of critical discourse share Wittgen-
stein's distrust of what he calls "our craving for
generality," and their critique of theory rests
heavily on his remarks about "family resem-
blances." Whereas we tend to assume that the
many proceedings we call "games" must have
some feature in common, Wittgenstein contends
that what really exists is only "a complicated
network of similarities overlapping and criss-
crossing" like "the various resemblances between
members of a family."2
This analogy, which Wittgenstein used to
show that we correctly apply certain terms to
things which share no single property, has been
worked by some analytic philosophers into the
view that a valid critical and aesthetic theory is
a logical impossibility. They argue that such
theory consists solely, or at least primarily, in
the assertion and the systematic attempt to prove
or support a true definition of art based on the
assumption, as stated by William E. Kennick,
that "all works of art must possess some common
nature . . . a set of necessary and sufficient con-
ditions for their being works of art at all."3 Their
characteristic procedure is to show that the
formulation of a general definition exemplifies the
"essentialist fallacy," or the false assumption of

'3

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unum nomen, unum nominatum, and hence
"radically misconstrues the logic of the concept
of art." It is their contention that general terms
such as "art," "poetry," and "tragedy" have a
great diversity of uses in both ordinary and
critical language, in which they are applied to
works that possess, at most, a varying pattern of
family resemblances, none of which can qualify
as a set of necessary and sufficient conditions for
the correct use of the term. Therefore, the con-
clusion is that aesthetic and poetic theory, as
Kennick says, "rests on a mistake"; or as Weitz
puts it, "poetics, unlike description, explanation,
and evaluation, is an illegitimate procedure of
criticism in that it tries to define what is unde-
finable."4
Despite such disabling pronouncements, how-
ever, these philosophers acknowledge that
aesthetic theory has made valuable contributions
to our understanding of particular works of art.
As Weitz puts the matter, what theorists present
as definitions of the necessary and sufficient con-
ditions for the use of such terms as "art"
"poetry," and "tragedy"' actually function as a
disguised, and, thereby, all the more effective,
way of recommending these conditions as cri-
teria of excellence in particular works of art. In
this sense, aesthetic theory teaches us "what to
look for and how to look at it in art."5
In judging the valid contributions of the cur-
rent analytic approach, Mr. Abrams emphasized
the importance of its recognition that criticism
is composed of a variety of linguistic procedures
which exist alongside verifiable descriptions of
fact - procedures that, while not demonstrably
true, are nonetheless, in their diverse ways,
rational and valid pursuits. On the other hand,
the speaker indicated that certain aspects and
results of this approach, particularly the easy
way in which it disposes of all critical theory, are
questionable. Is it likely, for example, that the
admittedly valuable consequences of critical
theory should be no more than an unintended
by-product of an inevitably abortive enterprise?
Before we accept this paradox of private errors-
public benefits, it is reasonable to inquire whether

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the real fault may lie, at least in some cases, not
in the critical theories that are analyzed but in
the analysis itself.
In conducting such an inquiry, some of
wittgenstein s own insights into the uses of
language can serve as a guide. Wittgenstein
pointed out that the validity of language lies in
the way it is, in fact, used to some purpose rather
than in its accordance with logical models of how
it should be used. To discover the actual use of
language, we must avoid the mistake of stopping
at the isolated expression or sentence and, in-
stead, observe how the expression operates in
its total "surroundings," which range from the
immediate verbal context to the particular lan-
guage-game the speaker or writer is playing and,
beyond that, to what Wittgenstein calls the
"form of life" -involving human purposes, in-
terests, and values - of which each language-
game is inherently a part.6 Finally, in analyzing
critical theory, we would do well to follow
Wittgenstein's own salutary advice: "Don't say
they [the theorists] must have done one thing
or another, but look and see."7
In looking at the actual use to which such
theories have been put by representative critics,
several important points emerge. First, Mr.
Abrams noted that while many literary theorists
utter assertions that can be called definitions of
literature or art, these definitions and their sup-
port do not constitute a theory but only func-
tion within a theory. Such statements are, in
fact, often used not as essential definitions (that
is, closed concepts of "criticism" whose claim at
complete generality is made plausible only by
ignoring counter evidence) but as working defi-
nitions which serve to block out an area of
inquiry and to introduce the principal categorie
that will be used to organize that inquiry. In
this sense, they fulfill the indispensable purpose
of indicating what the theorist proposes to talk
about, and how, and to what end.
Second, the actual use of definitions and of
critical theories, in many cases, is not to set
forth necessary and sufficient conditions for the
correct use of such terms as "art" and "poetry"
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but rather to take a stand, to provide a revealing
perspective on a set of human activities and their
products. Moreover the existence of alternate
definitions and theories need not be regarded as
a sign of the invalidity of any one of them.
Indeed, it is in the very diversity of critical
theories that we find their greatest usefulness as
complementary rather than conflicting perspec-
tives on an important field of human concerns.
Third, Mr. Abrams observed that the pervasive
and varied role of theory in criticism has been
concealed, to a considerable extent, by the
failure to distinguish between Weitz's four
models of the logical grammars of critical usage
(description, interpretation, evaluation, and
theory) and the actual discourse of good critics.
Whereas the models are fixed, sharply delimited,
independent of each other, and explicit in their
rules, actual critical discourse is fluid; the con-
cepts and modes of reasoning are mixed and
complex; their uses are often interdependent;
and the "rules" of their usage are implicit, vari-
able, and tenuous.
In sununary, Mr. Abrams declared that when
we compare what analysts have said about criti-
cism to the actual practice of good critics, we
find that critical theorizing is thoroughly inter-
involved with the process of critical description,
interpretation, and evaluation. These activities
are not performed separately but in a continuous
and interdependent process, in a discourse that
is kept coherent and directional toward the end
in view by the pervasive but often implicit in-
fluence of the critics' theoretical premises and
orientation.
These observations serve to underline the
question: does all literary criticism presuppose
theory? Philosophical analysts claim that some
criticism is entirely theory-free and carries on
its analysis and assessment unimpeded by general
presuppositions. In the metacritic's idealized
model of a critical encounter, the intelligent ob-
server, undistracted by any theoretical precon-
ceptions, engages with a unique work and pro-
ceeds to register those aesthetic features he is
acute enough to discover. Of course, this model
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of pure confrontation bears no resemblance to
the actual conditions of our linguistic dealings
with a work of art.
In Mr. Abrams' view, the answer to this ques-
tion depends on one's interpretation of the word
"presuppose." Criticism does not presuppose
theory if by "presuppose" we mean that a given
theory necessarily entails a particular critique,
or that from a given critical result we can infer
its precise theoretical antecedents. The elements
of an explicit theory - definitions, categories, dis-
tinctions, criteria, and method of proceeding -
are not related to their specific application to a
particular work, or class of works, in this strictly
logical way, or in a simple casual way. In-
stead their relationship is compounded of quasi-
logical way, or in a simple causal way. In-
by terms such as "foster," "generate," "suggest,"
"bring out," or even "control" and "inform."
When "presuppose" is used in this latter sense,
we can say with assurance that criticism does
indeed presuppose theory, in at least two ways.
First, any sustained critical discourse about works
of art has certain attributes-the specific features
in the work that it discriminates or ignores,
the terms it uses or fails to use, the relations it
specifies, and the literal or analogical mode of
reasoning it exhibits - which indicate the kind
of theoretical perspective that the critic has em-
ployed, whether explicitly or implicitly, and
whether deliberately or as a matter of habit.
Second, any critical discourse is likely to use
some terms that were invented by earlier aesthetic
theorists for their own purposes and will in-
evitably use other terms, taken from ordinary
language but applied in accordance with special-
ized rules of usage which have been developed
by aesthetic theorists. Since such modes of usage
form part of the linguistic and cultural tradition
inherited by all educated men, the discourse of
any individual critic presupposes theory in the
sense that at least some elements of his particular
language-game have, in the first instance, come
to him ready-made from the history of critical
theory.
Mr. Abrams then posed the question: Are

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those philosophical analysts who deny the logi-
cal possibility of aesthetic theory themselves
theory-free? An examination of what these phi-
losophers, in analyzing critical discourse, find
relevant or irrelevant to talk about and how
they elect to talk about it reveals that a number
of them presuppose criteria for the correct use of
the term "art," and that these criteria are highly
specialized, are employed exclusively by a class of
intellectuals who share a current climate of
opinion, and are, moreover, a heritage from quite
recent developments in aesthetic theory.
For instance, a number of philosophical analysts
maintain that a "work of art" in the universal sense
is "gratuitous" - serving no purpose beyond the
work itself and existing only for its own sake.
This assertion does not correspond with the
claims of artists working prior to the last cen-
tury: we know that Milton wrote Paradise Lost
"to justify the ways of God to men" while, for
many Christian centuries, painters sought to
represent and enforce religious truths, and mu-
sicians composed for the greater glory of God.
Moreover, for fifteen hundred years and more,
it occurred to no critic to assert, as the analytic
metacritics do, that the criteria of a work of art
are "internal to itself," that since aesthetic per-
ception is "disinterested," aesthetic judgments
must be sharply distinguished from moral and
practical judgments, and that the work of art
must be assessed entirely "as a work of art," that
is, as the locus and terminus of aesthetic qualities
and values.8
The basic aesthetic concepts shared by many
analytic metacritics actually developed in Europe
only some two centuries ago, and they emerged
within a particular social and intellectual milieu
as part of what Wittgenstein terms a "form of
life." Mr. Abrams explained that, in the Europe
of the eighteenth century, at a time of increasing
wealth and a rapidly growing middle class, there
occurred a widespread diffusion of the once
solely aristocratic pursuit of connoisseurship -
the development of "taste" in a variety of ex-
periences sought primarily as ends in themselves.
The market for poetry and belles lettres ex-
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panded; public interest in painting, sculpture, and
architecture increased, and the audience for
theater, concerts, and opera grew apace. One
consequence of this social phenomenon was the
entirely natural assumption that such patently
different enterprises as literature, painting, music,
and architecture possessed certain common quali-
ties that made them eligible for the common
experience of connoisseurship. In addition, as
an escape from everyday moral and utilitarian
concerns, this mode of activity became the focus
of a growing theoretical interest, and, in time,
there arose a demand for practical guidance in
developing a "good taste" that would not only
enhance the enjoyment of connoisseurship but
would also serve as a sign of social status.
The new aesthetic theory developed in two
separate but parallel modes, both derived mainly
from metaphysical, theological, and ethical doc-
trines. In one line of thought, the root concept
was that the creation of a work of art is analogous
to God's creation of the universe and that the
artist's product may be thought of as a "second
world." In this sense, the sole responsibility of a
work of art is not to reflect God's world but to
be true to its own internal laws, and its sole end
is not to imitate reality or to do good in the
world but simply to exist for its own sake. The
second line of thought took as its starting point
the experience, not of the creator, but of the
connoisseur of the arts. The concept of a "dis-
interested love of God" based on his inherent
excellence rather than his utility for human beings
became the model for describing the connoisseur's
"disinterested" attitude toward artistic virtue or
sensuous beauty.9
All these aesthetic concerns were adumbrated by
Addison, Shaftesbury, and other amateur theorists
before they were adopted and further developed
late in the eighteenth century by professional
philosophers from Alexander Baunmgarten to
Kant. These thinkers established the field of art as
a separate philosophical discipline, for which the
German philosopher, Baumgarten, coined the
term "aesthetics," and then undertook to frame
a theory of the utmost generality in a vocabulary

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that would enable them to discuss all of the
diverse arts at once.
The question suggests itself, why do some
analytic philosophers maintain that these very
presuppositions about the nature of art are so
obviously true as to require no defense and that
they are so free of theory and essential definitions
that they can serve as the basis of arguments
against the validity of all such theory and defini-
tions? One reason is the fact that the success of
these terms in dealing with certain problems of
the arts has made them, in the course of the
last century, the current coin of aesthetic inter-
change. These expressions, with their implicit
rules of specialized use, have become so much a
part of the common language of both literate
amateurs and professional philosophers-indeed so
much a part of the modern intellectual climate -
that they serve as what Aristotle in his Rhetoric
called "commonplaces": concepts from which we
argue, but for which we feel no need to argue.
Is a theory of art employing these common-
places as primary categories a valid theory?
Surely it is, for it has served as the great enabling
act of modern criticism by providing us with
the ability to talk about art as distinct from all
other human products and all moral and practical
activities - to talk about an individual work of
art as a unique entity to be described and judged
by the criteria most appropriate to it. Yet is this
theory, in itself, able to account for all the im-
portant human concerns involved with art? We
need only to look at the total "surroundings" of
an actual encounter with King Lear or the "St.
Matthew's Passion" to realize the extraordinary
inadequacies of such a theory in dealing with the
way such works engage our total consciousness
and call upon our sympathies and antipathies,
our sense of reality, and our common humanity.
If we are to do theoretical justice to the full
range of our experience of a work of art, we
must reject this useful but limited way of talking
about art qua art and adopt an alternative lan-
guage, or else adapt one of the existing languages,
such as Plato's, or Johnson's, or Arnold's, or
Lionel Trilling's, which were developed to deal
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with a work of art in some of the many ways it
is involved with other human activities, values,
and concerns.
In the end, Mr. Abrams observed that if the
preceding assertions are correct - if critical
theory is indeed diverse in its composition and
function and inescapable in extended critical dis-
course, and if not one but a diversity of theories
are valid in the variety of their usefulness for
a comprehensive appreciation of art - then it
is possible to assess the view of some of the
philosophical analysts. Their claim that all critical
and aesthetic theory consists primarily of the
assertion and the attempted proof of an essential
definition of art and, thus, is an extended logical
mistake is itself, in Mr. Abrams' view, an attempt
to assert and prove an essential definition of the
term "critical theory"; it forecloses investigation
of what able theorists have, in fact, done; and
it actually functions as a persuasive redefinition of
critical theory in that it delimits the common
uses of the term by setting up a preferred cri-
terion for its application which serves to discredit
what it purports to define.
With this analysis as background, Mr. Abrams
went on to consider the question: How does
valid reasoning in critical discussion (and in other
forms of discourse that we call "the humanities")
differ from reasoning in the natural sciences? He
emphasized that the inadequacy of their view
of the role of critical theory has not prevented
the metacritics from providing us with significant
insights into criticism itself. An especially im-
portant contribution has been their insistence that
a variety of critical arguments are rational even
though they achieve certainty only in the very
limited area in which the arguments concern
artistic facts. This view raises an issue that has
been recurrent in recent discussions of critical
theory: Can no certainty be achieved in critical
discourse and, if not, how can we claim that
critical discourse yields valid knowledge?
As Mr. Abrams indicated, the use of the word
"certainty" makes this question misleading, be-
cause the term itself gives the impression that it
is a universal criterion for knowledge when in
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fact it tends, in philosophical discourse, to be tied
to certain highly specialized models of reasoning.
In the seventeenth century, when the primary
model for achieving certainty (outside of divine
revelation) was logic, defenders of the emerging
C"new science" tried to validate its claim to
knowledge by employing concepts such as the
"principle of sufficient reason" which seemed to
bridge the gap between the necessary truths of
logic and general assertions of empirical facts and
laws. Later, when the physical sciences established
their own claim to cognitive validity, the methods
of scientific verification tended, in their turn,
to assume a status equal to that of logic as the
model for attaining knowledge in all empirical
inquiries. Such was the assumption of the philoso-
phy of positivism in the nineteenth century and
of the philosophy of logical positivism in the
twentieth century. Even in the current post-
positivist climate, there remains an uneasy feeling
about claiming validity for knowledge that can-
not be certified by some plausible likeness of the
model of formal logic or of the model of "scien-
tific method" or, more commonly, of a combina-
tion of both. Yet Mr. Abrams stressed that we
can never hope to understand the essential nature
of artistic criticism and various related inquiries
unless we accept the fact that these pursuits are
neither logic nor science but their own kind of
discourse, adapted to their own kind of problems,
having their own criteria of reasoning, and
yielding their own form of valid knowledge, to
which the term "certainty" does not apply.
In an effort to validate critical knowledge,
some recent apologists for the humanities have
maintained that artistic criticism and the sciences
share a "universal logic of inquiry."10 However,
Mr. Abrams pointed out that a comparison of the
procedures of a physical scientist and of a literary
critic in their overall surroundings reveals the
radical differences in problems, aims, and activi-
ties which characterize these two enterprises,
differences which are obscured by applying the
same terms or models to both. The physicist, for
example, tacitly shares with other physicists a
perspective which sharply limits what shall count
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as facts; he poses questions which rule out all
normative or evaluative terms, and tries to formu-
late hypotheses which are capable of being in-
dubitably falsified by specific experimental
observation; his ultimate aim is to exclude indi-
vidual differences and thereby achieve an ever-
greater generality and predictability in knowl-
edge by a procedure so controlled by precise
rules as to approximate certainty (in the sense
of universal agreement by other competent ob-
servers) at every step of the way. On the other
hand, a critic, in dealing with a work of literature,
employs one of many alternative perspectives to
conduct a fluid discourse in which the facts have
the property of being conspicuously altered by
the very hypothesis which appeals to them for
support; his questions generally involve norma-
tive and evaluative elements as central features;
there is no clear point at which his interpretative
hypothesis can be falsified; finally, his central aim,
at the extreme from maximum generality, is to
its distinctive particularity and while he may
claim that he has formulated the "true" interpre-
tation, he is not really surprised to find that other
intelligent and able critics sharply disagree.
In place of exaggerating the commonality of
method in logic, science, and criticism, Mr.
Abrams believes that it would be more effective
to say that while criticism does involve both the
use of logic and the verification of hypotheses, it
must go far beyond the capacities of these
paradigms if it is to do its proper job. Models of
logic and of scientific method achieve their ex-
traordinary efficacy and their diverse modes of
certainty and knowledge by systematically ex-
cluding just those features of experience that, in
a human sense, matter most. It is precisely in this
area of greatest individual differences that criti-
cism must initiate its chief function. When criti-
cal discourse engages with its objects, it is con-
trolled in large part by criteria that we call good
sense, sagacity, tact, sensibility. These are terms
which indicate that, although we are operating
in a region where the rules are uncodified and
elusive and where irreducible temperamental dif-
ferences are allowed scope, our decisions and
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judgments are not arbitrary but instead are sub-
ject to broad standards such as adequate-omissive,
just-distorting, disinterested-partisan, and better-
worse. Such a mode of discourse is rarely capable
of producing rigidly rational and conclusive
arguments, yet it possesses exactly the kind of
rationality it needs to achieve its particular
purposes; moreover, although its knowledge is
not, judged by an alien criterion, "certain," it
can satisfy a criterion appropriate to its own
realm of discourse for which we use a word like
"sound" or "valid."
Let us imagine a critical language-game, and
the form of life it inevitably involves, which
would actually achieve the certainty that some
thinkers consider to be the ideal in all forms of
cognitive discourse. In this critical language,
only one theoretical stance would be permitted;
all the descriptive and normative terms would
have fixed criteria of application, and reasoning
would proceed strictly in accordance with pre-
established logical calculi. Such an "ideal" form
of critical discourse could be sustained only as
part of an inhuman and repulsive form of life
very like that which Aldous Huxley direly fore-
boded in Brave New World or George Orwell in
1984.
In conclusion, Mr. Abrams declared that criti-
cism and related modes of inquiry may be de-
scribed as a family of language-games that are
not ideal forms but are instead designed to cope,
in a rational way, with those aspects of what
J. L. Austin terms "the human predicament" in
which valid knowledge and understanding are
essential but certainty is impossible." This is a
very difficult undertaking, but, as Wittgenstein
remarks, the fact is that "this language game is
played"'2 and what its great exponents have
achieved demonstrates how profitably the game
can, in fact, be played. The name of this game is
the humanities.

24

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References

i. Morris Weitz, Hamlet and the Philosophy of

Literary Criticism (Chicago and London, i964),
pp. ix-x, 213, 217, 285.
2. Ludwig Wittgenstein, The Blue and Brown
Books (New York, I965), P. I7; Wittgenstein,
Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M.
Andcombe (Oxford, 1953), sections 65-67.
3. William E. Kennick, "Does Traditional Aes-
thetics Rest on a Mistake?" Mind, 67 (1958), 3i8-
319.

4. Weitz, Hamlet, P. 31 .
5. Ibid., pp. 309, 314-3I5.
6. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, sec-
tions I9-27 and pp. 223e-226e.
7. Ibid., section 66.
8. Stuart Hampshire, "Logic and Appreciation,"
Aesthetics and Language, ed. William Elton
(New York, 1954), pp. I6I-I67; Kennick, "Does
Traditional Aesthetics Rest on a Mistake?" p.
331.

9. Shaftesbury, Characteristics, ed. J. M. Robertson

2 vols. (London, 1900), II, 54-56.
io. E. D. Hirsch, Jr., "Value and Knowledge in the
Humanities," Daedalus (Spring 1970), p. 354.
II. J. L. Austin, Philosophical Papers (Oxford,
196I), p. 100.

I2. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, sec-

tion 654.

The full text of Mr. Abrams' paper will appear

in a volume entitled In Search of Literary
Theory, edited by Morton W. Bloomfield and
scheduled to be published by the Cornell Uni-
versity Press in the late summer of 1972.

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