The modern critic works inductively, focusing on the local facts of the text and seeking to build up an interpretation which will accommodate their apparent complexities. When he does develop an interpretation which fits all the facts, he considers that the validity of the interpretation has been established. The problem is, however, that the same facts seem strangely able to confirm for different critics very different interpretations. Despite the widely accepted view that a rich multiplicity is characteristic of literary meaning, the wealth of interpretation that critical practice has developed in recent years has come to seem more and more an embarrassment: to have many meanings is too much like having no meaning. It may be, however, that much of this critical inflation is an almost mechanical consequence of a seldom recognized relationship between fact and hypothesis: that hypothesis-interpretive assumption -does not follow from the observation of fact but necessarily precedes and structures it, so that agreement between hypothesis and fact is to some degree foreordained. The implications of this relationship have been powerfully developed in the philosophy of Sir Karl Popper,' who argues that all our knowledge is inherently and permanently hypothetical, that knowledge can never begin with "the facts" but only with a conjecture about the facts, and that the test of a conjecture (read hypothesis or theory) is not the degree to which it finds confirmation in facts-the significance of which it effectively constructs-but the degree to which it risks refutation by independent facts which it does not have immediately in view. In this conception knowledge is not built up inductively from local fact to gradually justified generalization, but deduc-