When we identify the meaning or significance of something we are making claims to knowledge. In both interpretation and knowledge claims we are unavoidably relating one reality to another reality. In this we are saying something about what characterizes the relationship of one reality to another. In such affirmations we are claiming that we know something that is true about the things we are interpreting and their relationship to each other.

To interpret is to identify the meaning or significance that the thing has which we interpret. Humans interpret. We do not choose to interpret; interpretation is unavoidable. But we do choose how we interpret and thereby what our interpretation will be. Furthermore, interpreting is a perpetual activity for us. It’s not as if interpreting takes place at a given moment in time and then once having been done we can dispense with it. That could hardly be the case. With the passage of time we encounter new experiences, new realities: events, people, places, and objects. We must and will interpret them. How?

At the heart of answering the “How” question is recognizing that our interpretation of any and every thing is another way of expressing what we believe we know. When we identify the meaning or significance of something we are making claims to knowledge. In both interpretation and knowledge claims we are unavoidably relating one reality to another reality. In this we are saying something about what characterizes the relationship of one reality to another. In such affirmations we are claiming that we know something that is true about the things we are interpreting and their relationship to each other. Thus, my interpretation at this moment of my fingers is that they are a welcome instrument in my typing even if I cannot seem to always make them strike the key that I want them to strike!

Notice that in order to interpret I must be able to and do distinguish one distinct reality from another distinct reality. Life itself reveals that the reality we live in is marked by a vast number of realities that are distinct in their own right, their own way, and we simply cannot know them in any sense of that term apart from the fact that they are outside of us and do not depend for their existence on our experience with and perception of them. Yet, it is also true that our experience with and perception of all the realities we encounter is crucial to our interpretation of these realities. That’s another way of saying that we, in ourselves, are a particular reality, even as the things we encounter have their own distinct and distinguishable reality.

Whether we want to admit it or not, then, no one’s interpretation of anything can be merely arbitrary or merely subject to only their own beliefs and reasoning. How could it be? Indeed, one could not even assert such a thing with any intellectual coherency if indeed it were so. After all, to affirm that interpretations and knowledge claims rest, in the end, on merely one’s own beliefs and reasoning is to affirm that fundamentally there is no true communication going on between us and any reality outside of us. It would mean that we could not actually communicate with any one, nor have any true knowledge of any reality, or any certainty that our interpretation was true or valid in any sense. There would be no ability to intellectually comprehend what anything is, no  meaningful way to decide how to respond to anything, and no way of making any sense whatsoever regarding any feelings we had about what we encountered or made assertions about. If there is not some true knowledge of realities that is true for everyone in some sense or in some ways, then there is no justification of any kind for moral outrage regarding anyone or anything, and certainly no way of being able to communicate that moral outrage to others.

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