ABSTRACT
A notion of validity based on authenticity can be claimed not only to match our intuitions concerning the fulfillment of individual and collective identities, but in a derivative way can also capture our understanding of the interpretation of symbolic objects, such as texts and works of art. Needless to say, in the case of such objects – as well as of other types of symbolic entities which cannot be discussed here, such as disciplines, practices, organizations, traditions, institutions, styles and so on – we can speak of “fulfillment” only in a highly metaphorical sense. Yet we do constantly exchange judgments concerning the fact that such objects appear to be or to fail to be internally coherent and capable of forcefully projecting complex structures of meaning or, in the case of symbolic objects bound up with the temporal dimension in the way disciplines, practices and organizations are, judgments on their “flourishing” or their entering stagnation and decadence. In this chapter I will address the relevance of the four dimensions outlined above for the purpose of reconstructing our intuitions concerning what it means for texts and works of art to “succeed” or to be “well-formed” and what it means for our interpretations of them to be correct.
