Art Interpretation

In "Art Interpretation" Robert Stecker tries to combine critical pluralism with critical monism, and I more or less agree with him. He describes critical pluralism as the view that a lot of acceptable interpretations that cannot be joined into a single one, and critical monism as the view that there is only one true interpretation. He also states that these two seemingly very different things can be combined if one can make the distinction between correctness and acceptability. I like that distinction. I think that only the author can truly correctly interpret the work in question, but that shouldn't mean the end for all outside interpretations. I agree with Stecker that interpretations are not objectively right or wrong, true or false. Different interpretations help the reader to see the work differently, and that is a good thing. Various interpretations can still, of course, be acceptable or unacceptable. Any acceptable interpretation has to be accept some facts in the work. One cannot simply make things up out of thin air and call that an acceptable interpretation. As he puts it, "it would not be acceptable, in the case of literary works, to ask readers to suppose that the words of a work were different from those actually constituting the text of a work." And, "On the other hand, it might be acceptable to attach unusual meanings to certain words in a text..." Overall, I thought Stecker did a fairly good job defending his view.