Hermeneutics: The pursuit of meaning following specified principles of interpretation. Originally hermeneutics referred to the process of interpreting religious writings. However, much literary criticism amounts to a secular hermeneutics. Notably exceptions include most structuralist and post-structuralist criticism. These non-hermeneutic approaches focus not on discovering what a text means but rather on how meaning is deployed or subverted. www2.cumberlandcollege.edu/acad/english/litcritweb/glossary.htm

This page outlines through some notable quotes with commentary (hopefully eventually transforming into a coherent whole) what I consider to be the foundations of my hermeneutic background. Those are the resources I (hope to) bring to bear on the problems which present themselves as I journey through the world of ideas.

Models and frames:

Might as well start with Erving Goffman:

"When an individual in our Western society recognizes a particular event, he tends, whatever else he does, to imply in the response (and in effect employ) one or more frameworks or schemata of interpretation of a kind that can be called primary. I say primary because application of such framework or perspective is seen by those who apply it as not depending on or harking back to some prior or 'original' interpretation; a primary framework is one that is seen as rendering wat would otherwise be a meaningless aspect of the scene into something that is meaningful." (Frame Analysis, 1974, p. 21)

Frame analysis, or as I (following Lakoff) prefer to call it, cognitive model analysis, is probably the most important intellectual tool in my arsenal. Metaphors - a subject dear to my heart - are just one kind of these models.

I take models (frames) to be central to cognition - and as a consequence, central to how we pursue meaning. In this, a bricklayer figuring out the purpose of different materials, my 85-year-old grandmother figuring out the relationships described in a Mexican tele-novela, or Noam Chomsky figuring out the principles of grammar - are engaged in a very similar kind of activity - namely building models.

These models and their operations are subject to many principles (many of them described but few explained). But the key one of these is that they are partial. Lakoff talks about regarding metaphors, Fauconnier and Turner built this into their theory of conceptual integration, Kuhn implies it in his description of ‘paradigm shifts’, Turner acknowledges is it in his discussion of ‘root paradigms’. A nice formulation of this property of mental models is in Lamb’s 1999 Pathways of the brain:

"All imposition of structure in mental models is done at the cost of ignoring some properties of the phenomena modeled." (p. 120)

What I like about it is that it encapsulates both the ‘low’ level processual cognitive apects of modelling as described by Lakoff or Fauconnier and the ‘high’ level theory-building aspects described by Kuhn or Turner. Hopefully, more quotes to follow.

Discourse analysis as field work

I was struck by this quote from Victor Turner’s Social dramas and ritual metaphors describing the role of theories in the context of field research. I have a hunch that it applies equally to desk-based scholarship - in a way, any analytical enterprise is a kind of filed work even if, in the case of a philosopher, the field could one’s own mind (although, no plane tickets and vaccinations are necessary, and some of the attendant pressures and stresses are not - at least superficially - present.) Anyway, this describes how I work when I engage with texts (be it online or in the library) as well as anything:

"In moving from experience of social life to conceptualization and intellectual history, I follow the path of anthropologists almost everywhere. Although we take theories into the field with us, these become relevant only if and when they illuminate social reality. Moreover, we tend to find very frequenly that it is not a theorist's whole system [DL] which so illuminates, but his scattered idea, his flashes of insihgt taken out of systemic context and applied to scattered data. ... The intuitions, not the tissue of logic connecting them, are what tend to survive in the field experience." (p. 23)

The focus on the partiality of theories often formulated into elaborate hierarchies is particularly important because if is consonant with what blending theory claims about conceptual integration. Of course, individual cognitive and other personality styles (the real analogue ones no those measured by digital methods) will have an influence on how these things happen in any one case.

Me and philosophy:

I hate it and Goffman has the reason:

"There is a venerable tradition in philosophy that argues that what the reader assumes to be real is but a shadow, and that by attending to what the writer says about perception, thought, the brain, language, culture, a new methodology, or novel social forces, the veil can be lifted. That sort fo line, of course, gives as much a role to the writer and his writings as is possible to imagine and for that reason is pathetic. (What can better push a book than the claim that it will change what the reader thinks is going on?)" (p. 1)

But for some reason, despite all my distaste for and suspicion of philosophy, I keep engaging with it. Its value, a conclusion I have arrived at, is in its annoying persistence in asking questions which have long been answered or which it is not equipped to properly formulate, but nevertheless keeping us on our toes. I am profoundly wary and weary of the answers philosophy purports to give. Usually no more intellectually valuable than the fire-side chats of a wise and experienced elder. For many philosophers the supposedly selfless love of wisdom has turned into a narcisictic obsession with being a wiseass.

Of course, philosophy, as the term is used today, e.g. in the naming of university departments or bookstore sections, is really nothing more than than ‘philosophiography’ - dealing with issues it deems relevant internal to its own inquiry and on occasion (trading in its prestige chips pruchased in times when it was the only game in town) deigning to intersect with the real world in the form of an admonishment or a prediction of a conceptual doom.

Me and science

Well, I don’t believe science exists. (among others, taking into account the anglo-saxon nature of the very term - ‘wissenschaft’ or ‘věda’ being much more descriptive). It is the field at the intersection between engineering, natural philosophy and witchcraft either of which can serve as a better perspective on the activities under the umbrella of science. n this context, I found particularly illuminating Steve Fuller’s observation (in his otherwise ill-conceived book on Kuhn and Popper) that whether we talk about, for instance, Descartes or Newton as a philosopher or a scientist really depends on who won in a particular debate. Newton’s vision of the physical world and Descartes’ vision of the world of ideas have become accepted and as a result we classify them anachronistically as a philosopher and scientist respectively. In fact, they were both concerned with the same questions and saw themselves as engaging in the same scholarly enterprise. Speaking of Newton and science as witchcraft - how about that alchemy thing, eh?

My hermeneutic journey

These are some of the people to whose work (for better or worse) has accompanied my on my journey towards a hermeneutic that could be formulated in a personal manifesto.

Here are some to whom I look for positive inspiration (an very incomplete list):

• Vladimir Propp
• Vladimir Gurevic
• Claude Levi-Strauss
• Erving Goffman
• William Labov
• Victor Turner
• George Lakoff (I translated a 600 page book by him into Czech - bound to have an influence)
• Ronald Langacker
• Michel Foucault
• Roger Penrose
• David Graeber

These are some of the people I believe are profoundly wrong (and could be said to have had a negative influence). [list incomplete]

• Noam Chomsky
• Jerry Fodor
• pretty much any philosopher when it comes down to it