You Made Me Do it: My Reply to Stanley Fish

Abstract

On the first page of his remarks on my Article, Stanley Fish states: "Patterson gets my position wrong in a number of related ways ... " In fact, Professor Fish asserts not only that I attribute to him a position he does not hold, but also that the view I attribute to him is "precisely the view [he has] been arguing against for more than fifteen years now."' Interestingly, Professor Fish sets about proving the truth of his assertion by appealing to a text, specifically the corpus of his work produced over the course of the last fifteen years. But when one examines that corpus, one finds the following description of the plight of two critics, each of whom seeks to resolve an interpretive disagreement about a text by appeal to the text in question: