I’ve been thinking about the ‘construction of the object’ – i.e., the way that different communities with different interests will not only interpret an object in different ways, but may be said to have different objects – to have something different in mind when they refer to supposedly the same object. I don’t think that acknowledging this is immediately and necessarily a step into a malign postmodernist relativism; I think one can make sense of it even within a naively realist view of the world.
If I were, say, a police investigator working on a case, ‘The Bible’ might mean ‘This specific Gideon’s Bible with the torn leaf and the blood-stain’ – and there would quite possibly be no interesting relationship between that object and other books with similar words in.
If I were the forensic expert on the case, interested in how this book was used to batter the victim, ‘The Bible’ would most significantly be a member of the class of objects of this size, weight, shape, hardness and flexibility.
If I were the investigator, after a significant development in the case, trying to break the code that I now realise was used by the murderer and his accomplices, I might be interested in Bibles of exactly this edition, with exactly this pagination, on which a cypher has been developed – and no others. Nothing else would count as ‘The Bible’.
And so on.
By ‘construction of the object’, I simply mean this process by which the interests of the investigator pick out certain features of certain objects, as members of certain classes. Of course, I do perhaps go further than my little police story warrants when I claim that no ‘construction of the object’ is independent of interests – but I don’t think I necessarily step out of the sam naively realist world in doing so. There is, after all, a story to be told as to why Christians are able to say ‘Bible’ and mean a whole family of texts in different languages, with somewhat differing tables of contents – while Muslims properly mean only texts in Arabic when they say ‘Quran’. To say, ‘No, what “Bible” really means is…’ is always a statement made by some person or group that uses the word in particular contexts for particular purposes.
And, of course, you’re now meant to make a further step and think not just that identification of what is meant by ‘Bible’ might work in this way, but that identification of the meanings of the Bible will work this way – perhaps even more so.
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