Abstract
This paper is concerned with two interrelated ideas: the first one is that the American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce was actively engaged with questions of hermeneutics proper and modified his theory of inquiry so as to be able to accommodate objects of investigation that are generally treated within a hermeneutical framework. Nowhere else does it become as clear as in his 1901 text “On the Logic of Drawing History from Ancient Documents, especially Testimonies” that what he calls abduction is not only a logical mode of inference but a comprehensive procedure for the invention and the selection of hypotheses in relation to conditions of subjectivity explained in terms of a pragmatic naturalism. The second idea is that the advances Peirce made in the field of philologico-historical inquiry can be made relevant with regard to the interpretation of data in every field of scientific activity. Being more than a strictly methodological proposal, Peirce’s ‘hermeneutics’ leads us to realize that at its core, all scientific inquiry hinges upon basic rhetorical and ethical fundamentals that guide cooperation within and across disciplinary boundaries.
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Notes
Short (2007), pp. 45–46) actually mixes in Eco with the others, admits that he may have retracted his earlier view, and correctly states that he merely supplanted it with an ‘interpretive community’ view (which nevertheless is intuition-free). Whether Eco’s view is actually rooted in a correct understanding of Dynamical Object and Ultimate Logical Interpretant is quite unclear.
As will become clearer, this is not a theory that is merely aimed at intuitive intersubjectivity like, for example, the idea of an “interpretive community” outlined by Stanley Fish where “[t]he only ‘proof’ of membership is fellowship, the nod of recognition from someone in the same community, someone who says to you what neither of us could ever prove to a third party: ‘we know’” (1976, p. 485).
A possible alternative explanation for this confusion is that Peirce perhaps was not entirely certain himself at that point in time whether abduction merely meant the creation of hypotheses or whether it included the selection among various hypotheses, or whether this is not in fact the same thing, as was later suggested by Fann (1970), p. 42).
“Als Bewertungskategorie von (und nicht in!) Textinterpretationen kann ‘Angemessenheit’ aber wenig mehr leisten als den Modus dieser Textauslegung zu evaluieren. Die von Rescher behauptete Sicherung objektiver Interpretation ist durch sie nicht möglich (vgl. 2008); als weiches Kriterium literaturwissenschaftlicher Theoriebildung oder interpretativer Praxis wird sie jedoch zu Recht immer dann aufgerufen, wenn die Standards, Normen und Wissenschaftskriterien unseres Fachs wieder einmal zur Diskussion und vergleichbare Kriterien wie Plausibilität auf den Prüfstand gestellt werden.” (Willand 2016, p. 195)
The same argument is developed in the neo-Peircean school of biosemiotics. For instance, Cobley states that “[t]he idea that knowledge is ‘constructed in discourse’ with humans’ apprehension of the world amounting to a mere figment induced by figures in language, arose out of the ‘linguistic turn’ and (post-)structuralism. As will be seen, the nominalism of the ‘linguistic turn’ is at odds with the Peircean realist perspective in biosemiotics. It also posits a definition of language based on ‘figures of speech’ and ‘chatter’ […] rather than the more sophisticated cognitive perspective in biosemiotics offered by language as modeling” (2016, p. 18).
The methodological proposals discussed all come from a single source, a special issue of the international DeGruyter Journal of Literary Theory on “Hermeneutics and the Philosophy of Science” (10.1, 2016. We consider these contributions representative approaches to the relation between hermeneutics and science.
Anecdotal case in point: items of research literature (i.e., interpretations by others) are generally treated as secondary material, as sources that contain other points of view against which to struggle or which to evaluate, adopt, discard or perhaps supersede. Moreover, at least in the field of literary studies, the topic of ‘other interpretations’ is generally reserved for introductions to academic writing and not included in the myriad introductions to interpretation.
There is the special case of unreliable narration, where the narrator is suspected to withhold information or betray a general indifference towards consistency in order to attain certain results. However, this type of narration is only possible because it can rely on narrative techniques like focalization and, more generally, only functions because in the interpretation of works of art, artifacts are treated as essentially underdetermined to a certain degree and in regard to its external world (an approach hinted at in the twentieth century by Roman Ingarden 1972). Moreover, the intentional withholding of information (as well as the intentional disregard for veracity) is itself a specialized version of more general rhetorical strategies that play with the persuasio of an interpreter.
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The following article is the revision and expansion of a paper presented at the 2017 DGS conference on borders in Passau/Germany on September 14, 2017.
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Feil, S., Olteanu, A. Abduction, Hermeneutics, and the Interpretation of Interpretations. Hu Arenas 1, 206–222 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s42087-018-0013-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s42087-018-0013-y