Underdescribed Ends
I now think this section might be more important than I realized. In a way, it anticipates the epilog. When we speak to each other, it is the rule rather than the exception that we are not saying precisely what we literally mean. We are gesturing. Our friends know it. They fill in the blanks and as a result we are tolerably effective at conveying our thoughts to those who want to hear them. But first year graduate students learn to play a game of listening carefully to exactly what people are saying, then observing how funny it would be to take people’s words literally. After a year, the novelty of being able to hear the exact words wears off, graduate students outgrow that game, and rejoin the world of people who know that understanding each other has everything to do with putting each other’s words in context.
But it takes longer to outgrow that game in some contexts than in others. It can be truly hard to imagine what an author was trying to say, when it seems impossible that the words on the page could have been meant literally. Charitable interpretation tends to end up being creative interpretation.