One of the essential branches of philology is the editing of texts. I don’t write about this topic much, partly because it can get somewhat technical, and partly because I’m not a textual critic myself. But every philologist, especially those who work on ancient texts, has to know something about the editing of texts. We have the texts we work on because of the work of textual critics. And now and again I find a modern text that shows how textual editing works. Here’s a modern example I found this morning. I happened to be reading an interesting book, “The Marxists”, by C. Wright Mills, first published (posthumously) in 1962, and I came across the following passage:
“[I]n marxism the elements of capitalist society form a working model of society; they are not left to interact in some loose and vague way. Rightly or wrongly, they are constructed, within the model, in close and specific interconnections with one another, and casual weights are assigned to each of them. These imputed connections and weights are of course the specific theories of Marx.” (37)
Something felt wrong here. At this point I had nothing more than a hunch, but hunches are important. Hunches derive from experience, and the more experience you have the better your hunches are likely be. My hunch here was that there was something wrong with the word “casual”. This is a perfectly normal word, correct in many contexts. Sometimes you can spot a textual problem because a word or phrase or sentence has been so garbled that it just doesn’t produce possible English. In an earlier post on textual criticism I gave an example from Philip K. Dick’s novel “The Man in the High Castle”, where the word “traffic” was printed “rtaffic”. It wasn’t hard to see that this was wrong and it wasn’t hard to correct it. The hardest cases arise when the mistake produces something that makes sense. You have to have a hunch that the sense it makes is the wrong sense.
Even though the word “casual” is perfectly normal, something feels odd about the phrase “casual weights”. I have no idea what a casual weight is. I doubt that I’ve ever come across this phrase, and I don’t know what it means. And the word “casual” doesn’t seem to fit the context of the passage. Mills has just said, earlier in the same sentence, that in Marx’s model the elements of capitalist society have close and specific interconnections; there’s nothing casual about that. Rather the reverse.
Perhaps by now you have made the same guess I made: that is, that the word “casual” here is a mistake, simply a typographical error, and the original text was “causal weights” rather than “casual weights”. A causal weight I understand. It’s the weight you give to an element in an explanation of causes. One might say, for instance, “In this situation, I would give a greater causal weight to heredity than to environment.” The transposition of the letters is easy to imagine, and it’s also easy to imagine that such a mistake might pass unnoticed by a proofreader, since all the individual words make sense. You have to be trying to make sense of the passage as a whole as to feel that there’s something wrong.
If I were editing Mills’ book for a new edition, I would probably make this change. But editors differ; a conservative editor might leave it as it is. If this were a literary text, rather than a sociology textbook, the editor might include a note either at the foot of the page or in an editor’s note appended to the text, noting the text as printed and my decision to change it. You often see such notes in good texts of literary works—Jane Austen’s novels, for instance, in the Norton Critical editions. I’ve never seen a textual note in a work of non-fiction, but perhaps I just haven’t read the right books.
How sure am I that my proposed emendation is correct? I would say that I’m pretty sure, perhaps ninety percent. But as it happens, there is further evidence. On the very next page I find the following: “A theory, in contrast, is a statement which can be proved true or false, about the causal weight and the relations of the elements of a model” (38). That, I think, clinches the argument. The phrase “casual weight” on p. 37 is a typo, and it should be changed to “causal weight”.
In this case I was lucky to find a passage which confirms my emendation right on the next page. Sometimes the confirming text will show up only at a much greater distance, and maybe not even in the same book. And sometimes you have to depend on your sense of the language and the meaning of words and phrases. That sense develops out of a lot of familiarity with many different texts, and sometimes you can’t specify exactly where you get the sense of the language. And sometimes different readers will have different senses of the language and then they may just disagree. But at least you should be able to pinpoint where and why you disagree.
I would say that I have proved that the word “casual” in this first passage is a typo and should be emended to “causal”, but the kind of proof that I’m offering is not the same kind of proof that you find in mathematics and the hard sciences. But it’s still proof of a sort. It’s not just a feeling. I may start with a hunch, but I’m not content to stay there. I want to provide evidence for my claims. There’s surely a place for feelings. I suspect that a lot of creativity in the arts is based on feelings. We don’t ask a poet or a novelist to prove anything. But when I talk about a poem or a novel, I do try to prove my claims, or at least to make statements that are more than just feelings—with the understanding that a proof in the Humanities is not the same as proof in the sciences.
The Art of Reading Slowly 