Abrams agreed with Wayne Booth that pluralism is not only valid, but necessary to our understanding of literary and cultural history. The brining together of different points of view is the only way to achieve a vision in depth. Abrams also said that Miller's radical statement, in his review, of the principles of what he calls deconstructive interpretation goes beyond the limits of pluralism, by making impossible anything that we would account as literary and cultural history. But Miller considered "National Supernaturalism" as an example "in the grand tradition of modern humanistic scholarship, the tradition of Curtius, Anerbackm Lovejoy, C.S. Lewis" and made it clear that what was at stake is the validity of the premises procedures of the entire body of traditional inquiries in the human sciences. Abrams thought that it was a matter important enough to warrant their discussion. The following are the essentials of the premises that he shares with traditional historians of western culture, which Miller questions.
(1) The basic materials of history are written texts and the authors who wrote these tests exploited the possibilities and norms of their inherited language to say something determinate, and assumed that competent readers world be able to understand what they said.
(2) The historian for the most part interprets not only the passages that he cites mean now, but also what their writers meant when they wrote them. His interpretation approximates what the author meant.
(3) The historian presents his interpretation to the public in the expectation that the expert reader's interpretation of passage will approximate his own and so confirm the "objectivity" of his interpretation.
