According to the ‘cryptographic’ model, the meaning (say, of an utterance or another piece of discourse) is objectively there, as it were beneath thesurface of the sign, and what the hunter or interpreter is trying to do is to uncover that underlying meaning. According to the ‘hermeneutic’ model, themeaning is not “there” but “here”; it is the interpreter that grants meaning to the sign by relating to it qua interpreter. While for the former model the interpreter’s activity is one of discovery,for the latter it is one of creation. For the former, meaning is a datum to be inferred from other data (e.g., the signs); for the latter, it is a construct,to be engendered in the interpretative process, which is no doubt sparked by the presence of the sign, but necessarily goeswell beyond whatever may be in the sign or beneath it. For the cryptographic model, no matter how difficult and protracted the search for the meaning, there is at bottom a fact of the matter which permits toassess the result: You either have discovered the meaning or not. A sign usually belongs to a system of signs, a ‘code’. If you know the code, your task isto apply its rules in order to decode the given sign. If you don’t, you have Wrstto “break” the code, i.e., to discover its key, and then to apply it to the givensign. In both cases, success is objective; it is a matter of using the right codeand key in the right way.For the hermeneutic model, there is no ultimate fact of the matter byreference to which the results of the interpretative process are to be judged. Different interpreters, each with his/her own ‘prejudices’, or the same interpreter in different circumstances, will construe differently the meaning of the same sign. Some of these constructs may be judged, on the lights of yet another interpreter, as better than others for this or that purpose. But there is
no interpreter-free and purpose-free criterion whereby one of the constructsc an be chosen as constituting the objective meaning of that sign. For this model, talk of codes and keys is misleading; even assuming that there are suchthings, the very decision as to what code or key to apply to a given sign in agiven circumstance is interpreter- and purpose-dependent
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