Can liberal legal interpretation, free speech absolutism, and neutral “public meaning” really survive once you admit that texts, norms, and institutions only make sense inside purposive social practices?
My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy.
1. Guest
Stanley Fish is a literary theorist, legal scholar, author and public intellectual. He is currently the Floersheimer Distinguished Visiting Professor of Law at Yeshiva University's Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law in New York City, and has been a professor at other universities, including, among others, Florida International University.
2. Interview Summary
Fish opens by laying out his “intentionalist” picture of interpretation: to understand a legal text you have to recover the purpose/aim of its authors at the moment of production, not treat “the text” (or “original public meaning”) as a self-standing object that can yield determinate answers by itself. He argues that textualism is ultimately a nonstarter because it can’t specify what exactly it is interpreting once you detach words from speaker-intentions and purposive contexts, and he adds that “original public meaning” is best understood as a sociological regularity rather than a normatively authoritative entity. When the interviewer presses on group-authored texts (legislatures, institutions), Fish leans on the idea of a “standing intention” (the enterprise-level aim you commit to by joining the practice), stressing that intention-talk needn’t be psychological “mind-reading” but can track shared purposes embedded in institutions. He connects this to broader issues about meaning by treating language as a usable “code”: even a lone speaker (Robinson Crusoe) can have meaningful terms so long as they’re in principle teachable.
A large middle portion turns to religion, education, and liberalism. Fish frames the question as whether religion is “special” (not merely one discourse among others): if it is special, then its core isn’t just doctrines and rituals describable from the outside, but a kind of commitment to an external authority (God) that doesn’t sit comfortably with liberal ideals of free individual deliberation. On that view, you can “teach” religion in the academy only by taking the heart out of it—domesticating it into a historical-cultural object compatible with liberal state aims. He links this to constitutional development: the Establishment Clause, he claims, has been steadily eroded (beyond a narrow area like school prayer), while Free Exercise has become increasingly powerful, enabling religious opt-outs from generally applicable laws. And he emphasizes the deep clash between liberal pluralism (no discourse gets privileged “in advance”) and religious commitment (which does claim antecedent authority when “push comes to shove”). A telling contrast appears when he compares moral-philosophy commitments to religious faith: you can be argued into or out of utilitarianism, but the catechism-style “who made you?” structure points to a kind of allegiance that isn’t governed by ordinary evidential bargaining.
In the later segments Fish applies the same anti-abstraction impulse to free speech and contemporary politics. He rejects the philosophical stability of the speech/action distinction—arguing that speech is itself a form of action with real-world consequences—so the idea that “speech as such” deserves categorical immunity is hard to defend. He also attacks the Brandeis-style “more speech is better” optimism, saying history (and especially the internet’s explosion of unfiltered communication) suggests that more speech often makes things worse, not better, and that serious regulation becomes unavoidable. When asked about cancel culture, he treats it as a kind of left-wing “party-ism” analogous to McCarthy-era career-destruction, while still allowing that some cases of social/professional sanction are plainly warranted and others wildly disproportionate. Finally, he’s skeptical that highly abstract philosophy reliably shapes real-world decision-making: people with opposing metaethical or epistemological theories can converge on the same policy or judicial outcomes, because practice is often driven by institutional constraints, precedent, and case-specific tests rather than top-down philosophical commitments.
3. Interview Chapters
00:00 - Introduction
01:00 - Textual interpretation
07:26 - Original public meaning
14:41 - Group-produced texts
18:28 - Private language
22:23 - Teaching religion
33:05 - Political influence in education
44:00 - Defining “religion”
55:20 - Establishment and free exercise clauses
58:04 - Clauses inconsistent?
1:01:44 - Free speech and the first amendment
1:06:10 - Regulating speech
1:13:27 - Problems with unfiltered speech
1:16:02 - Pluralism
1:19:37 - Unique to religion?
1:25:50 - Cancel culture
1:30:46 - Prejoratives and use/mention
1:33:44 - Poetry
1:36:35 - Trump’s rhetoric
1:41:20 - Philip Pettit and the value of philosophy
1:55:05 - Value of philosophy experts
2:02:10 - Conclusion
