Stanislav Hrubiznyi
Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv
Since the publication of Quentin Skinner’s seminal 1969 article “Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas” (Skinner 1969), a vast body of scholarship has emerged, comprising both critical responses to and defenses of his contextualist methodology. A distinctive feature of Skinner’s contextualist methodology is the sustained and intensive criticism it drew over many years. This sustained criticism is evident, among other things, in the major critical collections devoted to his work, most recently Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas and Beyond (Blau 2026). There is little reason to add yet another critique or defense, since, as Austin observed, comments on comments are subject to the law of diminishing fleas. But did Skinner’s methodology itself undergo change under the pressure of such criticism?
This paper argues that Skinner laid the foundations of his methodology in works published between 1966 and 1972 and that, although later criticism led him to refine and clarify several of its formulations, he did not abandon its central commitment to the contextual interpretation of linguistic action. In these early works, Skinner articulated several core methodological principles: the rejection of perennial problems, the view that meaning depends on the linguistic act performed, the explanatory function of redescription, the interpretive relevance of intention, and the contextual dependence of meaning on historically specific linguistic conventions.
References
Blau, Adrian, ed. 2026. Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas and Beyond. London: The British Academy.
Skinner, Quentin. 1969. “Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas.” History and Theory 8 (1): 3–53. https://doi.org/10.2307/2504188
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SOPhiA 2026 