Blood and tears

This text is yet another attempt at taking up the immortal question reappearing seasonally in university or college seminars in humanities: Can interpretation be scientific? Can an act of interpreting, understood as responding to the call and meeting the challenge posed by a text (or, by 'texts', in a broad semiotic meaning), aspire to be termed 'scientific', as per the customary explanation of the term? If, namely, there is always someone's subjectivity behind an interpretative gesture, whereas striving for objectivity - or, inter-subjective communicability - is part of the essence of science, then, is it not so that the notion of 'scientific interpretation' proves to be a classical example for quadrature of the circle? The author also attempts at responding the question of why science - understood for the purpose as codified rules of a methodological game - is so much afraid of interpretative subjectivity, and, at the end of the day, why it strives so insistently for taming any interpretative passion.