When I was working on a master’s thesis in history about twelve years ago, the subject of my research was best known to literary historians, and I read a large number of recent critical articles. Trying to understand their point of view, I began to read about the literary theory of the time, including a handful of the earliest essay collections published by Stanley Fish.
Some of these essays were on topics I knew something about from my undergraduate courses in computer science and philosophy. Almost invariably, as I recall, they struck me, at the time, as interesting attempts to explore the implications of research in some area or other relating to linguistics, logic, or philosophy. Also almost invariably, they struck me as falling short, almost literally -- before the end of the essay had been reached, some mistake had been made, some misapprehension followed up on when it ought to have been corrected. Over and over again, they failed to grasp the point, failed as Mark Liberman puts it to “understand [the writer‘s] work in the context of her native interpretive community.” It seemed to me that Fish failed to understand the activity that had given rise to the discourse he was, at that moment, trying to learn about, and as a result failed to understand what the words actually meant. (I realize this sounds arrogant; what credentials do I have to criticize a figure like Stanley Fish?)
Nonetheless, I found the essays interesting for four reasons:
First, in spite of the mistakes I thought I perceived, enough of the ideas themselves showed through his own words that a beginner could learn a lot from them. I think this is because Fish depicted his own struggles with the material in his writing. By following his attempts to understand, I could also understand in part. By noticing his thought processes, I could discover where I agreed or disagreed with them. But once past the beginning stage, this source of interest dissipates somewhat.
Second, Fish seemed to think the way I think. He refused to go forward until he understood the argument being made. He did not accept theoretical statements merely as dogma. He did not seem to accept assumptions that were not obvious.
Third, the form of the essays, always incomplete and often fulfilled in some sense by later writings on somewhat different topics, seemed to confront the incompleteness of our understanding. I was reminded of Nietzsche’s aphorisms, or of Shaw’s contention that each play he wrote should address a problem left unsolved by the previous one. I guessed the "falling short" was intentional.
Fourth, Fish seemed to be learning as he went along. It seemed that by following the essays in sequence one might confront each successive conceptual difficulty in turn, and that by the end of the process, Fish and we might have approached more nearly to the achievement of a fully worked out science.
However, on the basis of these four reasons, I might reasonably have expected Fish to continue on in the same way as he’d begun, and he did not in fact continue to write explorations of philosophy and theory that pushed his and his readers’ understandings forward. His most recent books, to the contrary, have sharply criticized his own discipline for attempting to do just the kind of thing he himself did in those early collections.
If he is right, his arguments have profound implications going even beyond the possibility of interdisciplinary understanding. They raise questions, for example, concerning source analysis in historical research.
But as far as I know, Fish’s ideas are considered eccentric and are not taken seriously by experts in the relevant fields; he never did make himself enough of an expert in those fields to persuade their practitioners to listen to him. At Language Log today, Mark Liberman calls attention to the problem that Fish strongly defends disciplinary integrity at the same time he crosses disciplinary lines in order to issue a wrongheaded critique of, for example, philosopher Ruth Kempson:
[Fish] depicts Kempson as drawing back in horror from the logical implications of her argument . . . But the context of Kempson's 1973 PhD thesis, republished as her 1975 book, was not an argument about whether rational inquiry is possible . . . Rather, it was an argument among linguists and philosophers of language about whether proof theory or model theory is a better way to think about natural language semantics.
…
The one positive conclusion from Fish's work that I believe I've grasped, so far, is the crucial role of what he calls "interpretive communities" in providing enough of a shared context — even if ephemeral and unfounded — for some minimal communication to take place. So it's ironic that he so completely fails to understand Kempson's work in the context of her native interpretive community.
Fish had little reason to care about the argument between the proponents of proof theory and the proponents of model theory. Additionally, there is really no way he could have learned enough about philosophy of language to understand the problem as a philosopher would have; this would, most likely, have required more time and resources than were available to him. But he was capable of grasping the arguments for and against theoretical positions similar to those of Kempson, weighing those arguments in relation to one another, and articulating an argument of his own about their relative strengths. I'd guess this is what he did.
I believe the irony Liberman points out can be resolved fairly simply. I assume Fish believes the following: that disciplines have the right to define what their practitioners ought to do -- including when their practitioners talk about other disciplines -- but do not have the right to prevent other disciplines from talking about them. If so, the irony disappears. In favor of this interpretation is the fact that Fish is very clear about there being no “higher court” to which practitioners from rival disciplines might appeal.