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The criteria of more, rather than less, critical interpretation are solely the immanent criteria provided by the interpretandum itself. Thus, in the case of interpreting a text more, rather than less, critically, the only criteria for determining the meaning of the text are what the text itself says and means. This is to say, first, that determining what the text says requires methodically following the so-called hermeneutical rules, or the historical-critical and literary-critical methods, of reading the text. And it is to say, second, that although any determination of what the text means requires also presupposing some question to be put to it in a methodical way -- whether the question to which which  it itself is addressed or some other question to which the interpreter, for her or his part, is interested in putting to it -- no determination of the text's meaning may be prejudiced, in the sense of preempting the text's own answer to the question. In short, more, rather than less, critical interpretation of a text abstracts entirely, because methodically, from employing any transcendent criteria, in the sense of criteria that go beyond what the text itself says and means, given some way of asking about its meaning without preempting its answer.

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In what I've had to say so far in trying to answer the question, I've dealt at most with the guiding question (as well as, of course, the hermeneutical rules, or historical- and literary-critical studies) and said nothing at all about the appropriate conceptuality/ terminology. This is the more unfortunate because no interpretation can be carried out except in some second language (the interpretans) into which the first language ( the interpretandum) can be appropriately rendered. And no critical interpretation can be more, rather than less, critical except by being correspondingly critical in determining the second language it is to use in its interpretation.

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