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The Hermeneutical Imperative
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- jrumbut 6y agoI feel like I'm missing why this article was written. It requires more conscious interpretation to speak via the Internet compared to in person. The Internet is a weird museum filled with stuff to interpret. Ok, seems true, but it's not really a new point. Does it make more sense if I read the other posts? Was there another section at the bottom I missed due to their mobile UI (happens all the time)?
- jawarner 6y agoIt seems buried here: > Perhaps this accounts for the widely-reported sense of unreality that plagues so many of us. The idea is that interpreting content on the Internet leads people to become more self-conscious about how they interpret reality, which causes it to be less "real."
- pacbard 6y agoPrefacing that I am not a philosopher, but I think that hermeneutics would reject the idea that "real" and "reality" can exist outside of the interpretation that people have of something that has happened. To an extent, real and reality is the same and one with its interpretation. You get into these weird spots where two people could experience the same event, interpret it in different ways, leading up to two different "realities" of the event. I don't know enough to know how this would be reconciled within hermeneutic epistemology, but that's something interesting to keep in mind.
- tines 6y agoBut isn't "determining the one true actual meaning of a thing" the entire point of hermeneutics? Or rather, hermeneutics is a technique for objectively determining what something does _not_ mean, which is incompatible with the idea that reality doesn't exist outside an interpretation.
- pacbard 6y agoI honestly don't know. I am not well read in hermeneutics to have any sort of opinion on it. It looks like Stanford's encyclopedia of philosophy [^1] might have a good introduction on the intersection of truth and hermeneutics. A quick skim of that section appears to fuse together ideas from aesthetics, ethics, and linguistics to build a conception of truth that is not based in traditional positivist epistemology. Again, I am not a philosopher so I don't really know what I am talking about. [1]: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/hermeneutics/#ContHerm_1 https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/hermeneutics/#ContHerm_1
- tines 6y agoYeah same here, just wondering.
- 1MoreThing 6y agoDetecting wrong answers doesn't tell you anything about how many right answers there might be.
- tines 6y agoThere only has to be one objectively wrong answer to show that it's not all subjective, which is the point under discussion.
- chub500 6y agoI have to say, hermeneutics is something our western culture has become catastrophically bad at. When the failure of postmodernism became apparent (truths unfortunately must be shared to take any corporate action in society), we seem to have reverted directly back into a Nietzschian nihilism, every group only exists as a means to power. This has begun to erode traditional modernist western ideals which the postmodernists seemed to allow: offensive speech isn't necessarily wrong, interpretation and truth are two sides to the same coin, etc.
- gumby 6y agoThis scratches at the surface of the very complex field of hermeneutics (basically how can humans* understand the semantics of utterances or other representations). In the west it got its start in religious enquiry (loosely: the Bible is ambiguous, or at least people disagree about interpretation; can we figure out what the real underlying message is and thus correct errors made by humans because obviously the "real" text must be absolutely correct). In the 20th century this discipline was broadened primarily by Heidigger whose work is famously incomprehensible yet filled with insight along with many others; it also lead to insight (e.g. semiotics) and extreme absurdity (e.g. 99.9% of the deconstructionists, sadly despite their having started with a useful insight). * and in more modern times, machines. I spent several years in the 1980s working on how it even makes sense to talk about a machine "understanding". It definitely changed how I view the world, but IMHO so far has had essentially no impact on the world itself.
- sriku 6y agoCan you recommend some texts that would be good reads towards understanding this subject better?
- thebooktocome 6y agoHeidegger is, contrary to popular opinion, not that unreadable. Stambaugh's revised translation of Being and Time is really good. The problem is laypeople expect to be able to understand advanced philosophy without knowing anything about the history that led to this point. Nobody complains about, e.g., Weinberg's textbook on QFT being unreadable. I think this is primarily because Weinberg is basically unknown to people who haven't had 4+ years of physics education.
- dajohnson89 6y agoOK. And is there any basic foundation for starting, that enables one to understand Heidegger well? Some kind of primer for continental philosophy?
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- jvalencia 6y agoI think a helpful point for most would be that hermeneutics is the study of how to interpret things (most generally). For example, how do we interpret the constitution of the USA? You choose a hermeneutic either implicitly or explicitly by which you then interpret the document. I think the duality in US politics today is largely one of what hermeneutic one uses to interpret the news, for example.