ABSTRACT
The dichotomy between the uses of language to express common sense and language that is to have autonomous meaning, objectivity, and logical coherence leaves the place of the humanities unsettled. Humanitas was also supposed to contain truth of a kind. The interpretive schemata for receiving that language is not the same as it is for the reception of scientific statements. Even if text never becomes completely autonomous, there are still immensely different procedures to apply to the analysis of a sentence than the ordinary conversational ones. It is very possible that students initially come into school trying to do what they always try to do, namely, to use processes geared to old functions. These would certainly be of the commonsense kind. What they run up against is the uses which the schools require. These are geared mainly to the kinds of texts which reward this sort of sterile, logical, literate approach.
