Editing Explication (section)

== Explication, ''explication de texte'', and literary criticism ==

The terms ''explication'' and ''[[explication de texte]]'' have different meanings.

As argued by Carnap (1950), in science and philosophy, 
"explication consists in transforming a given more or less inexact concept into an exact one or, rather, in replacing the first by the second. We call the given concept (or the term used for it) the explicandum, and the exact concept proposed to take the place of the first (or the term proposed for it) the explicatum. The explicandum may belong to everyday language or to a previous stage in the development of scientific language. The explicatum must be given by explicit rules for its use, for example, by a definition which incorporates it into a well-constructed system of scientific either logicomathematical or empirical concepts."

In this context, 'explication' is now regarded as "an appropriate methodology for formal philosophy". (Maher, 2007).

By contrast, in [[literary criticism]], the term 'explication' is used as a proxy for the term ''[[explication de texte]]'' (proposed by [[Gustave Lanson]]), where additional understandings and meanings are derived from the "[[close reading]]" of (say) a poem, novel or play.

In this process, explication often involves a line-by-line or episode-by-episode commentary on what is going on in a text. While initially this might seem reasonably innocuous, ''[[explication de texte]]'', and explication per se, is an interpretative process where the resulting new knowledge, new insights or new meanings, are open to subsequent debate and disaffirmation by others.