3 ms·
This is not a bad survey article but strangely misses the deep tradition (~700 years at least) of hermaneutic linguistics that generalizes the central thesis of
by gumby 3y ago
This is not a bad survey article but strangely misses the deep tradition (~700 years at least) of hermaneutic linguistics that generalizes the central thesis of the essay. It's not just languages themselves that present "unbridgeable gulfs in thinking and perception" but the experiences/history of individuals themselves even when speaking the same language.
Anyone who speaks more than one language in the home has jumped back and forth between languages in a sentence when trying to convey something "properly". When you live with a spouse/partner, over time you learn to consider your choice of words even in a single language in order to make it happen -- individual words can have idiosyncratic implications. Over time (decades) you have to do this less and less as you form a "household language" with your partner.
BTW the origin of the hermaneutic effort comes from aneffort to reconcile inconsistencies in the christian texts: if they are truly the word of a god then any inconsistency must be due to human confusion or imperfection of human language; this was an attempt to find the underlying meaning (or as the article says, platonic meaning). This led to quite a bit of development in linguistic philosophy in the 20th century (some of it quite insightful and some of it plainly absurd). Because text cannot make the same adaptations one can mid-conversation, it's both harder and (to me) more interesting to look into the text itself.
- smitty1e 3y ago> When you live with a spouse/partner, over time you learn to consider your choice of words even in a single language in order to make it happen -- individual words can have idiosyncratic implications. A long-term relationship grows its own shared vocabulary and idioms that sound idiotic outside of that context.
- lo_zamoyski 3y ago> you form a "household language" with your partner This has more to do with alignment of signifiers and emphasis (determined by the concerns particular to that relationship). Language is, of course, not just the collection of signifiers, but the signs in toto, which means signifier, concept/proposition, and signified. > the origin of the hermaneutic effort comes from aneffort to reconcile inconsistencies in the christian texts I would just emphasize that what constitutes a cohesive corpus of text (like the Bible) is determined by prior Tradition. That is, it wasn't the case that the Bible came first in absolute terms (it didn't fall from the sky), but that the Bible was assembled (by the Catholic Church) through the lens of Tradition from texts written over the course of thousands of years. This Tradition provides not only the hermeneutic means that allowed said text to be compiled in the first place, but also the means to interpret the text in the future with greater depth as more is learned and the Tradition is refined and developed. That's how we know that Genesis, having been written in a different language, time period, style, and cultural climate than the the Gospel of John, must be read differently from the Gospel of John. (Incidentally, this is the reason behind the absurdity of sola scriptura. By doing away with the unbroken Tradition that links us to the past and gives us the means by which to interpret Scripture, we are left to whatever parochial devices we happen to have. This explains, in part, the great variability and divergence of interpretation among Protestants, made evident by the presence of over 40 thousand Protestant sects in the US alone.)
- 0xEF 3y agoYour last paragraph about the origin of the hermaneutic effort is surprisingly interesting to me and I know nothing about it. I will be seeking some resources on this to learn more, so if you have suggestions, I would love to hear them.