June 11, 2006: Hermeneutics 101

Having provided introductory outlines to phenomenology and Habermas' theory of communicative action, I figure I ought to do the same for hermeneutics, since I feel that this is another non-technical discipline that offers some critical "survival skills" for the Internet age. I must confess that I was led into this one by a conversation I had with a friend at PARC who made the pronouncement that it was time for us to stop wasting time on concepts that really had nothing to contribute, like hermeneutics. So if this particular introduction reads something like an apology, then that can be attributed to my personal past history!

Actually, one of the difficulties in introducing the concept of hermeneutics is that it seems to have meant many different things to different people. Therefore, I should being by stating up front that my own primary influence comes from the writings of Paul Ricœur, whose book on metaphor I discovered on a business trip to Basel and has had me hooked ever since. What has most interested me about Ricœur is that he took the traditional view of hermeneutics, as the study of methods for interpreting texts, and generalized it to the interpretation of meaningful actions. This puts him on the same field of interest as Habermas, who has had his own prolonged debate with Gadamer over hermeneutics. John Thompson's Critical Hermeneutics focuses explicitly in the intellectual relationship between Ricœur's phenomenological stance and Habermas' foundation in social theory (anchoring them both in Wittgenstein's ordinary language philosophy). This is what I mean when I say that any attempt to get a sense of the nature of hermeneutics quickly leads you into a vast Web of opposing opinions!

Ricœur's approach is basically a dialectical one. He begins with the exploration of two opposing concepts: explanation and understanding. From his point of view, "explanation" means "structural explanation," a syntactic perspective that can be generalized beyond the sentence to the broader scale of a paragraph or an entire work (if not an entire corpus). "Understanding," on the other hand, is concerned with interpretation and thus involves a semantic perspective. The opposition comes from the fact that, often, you cannot determine the syntactic structure of the text unless you know what it is trying to say; and you cannot interpret the text without knowing how it has been structured. (This was discovered "in the trenches" when Terry Winograd was doing his pioneering doctoral research on a computer system that understood natural language.) Ricœur proposed that hermenutic interpretation could only succeed through a Hegelian (Fichtean?) style synthesis of these two concepts, dealing with explanation and understanding as interrelated processes, each of which informs the other (which is one of the most important features of Winograd's SHRDLU system). This is why I clipped in the above diagram (which I discovered through an A9 image search, back when A9 was still using Google for image searches).

Why is this important? The primary reason is that computer science (or information technology) still tends to assume that intepretation is concerned strictly with the denotation of symbol structures, which is fine if you are writing a compiler or a system that interprets database queries but (as Winograd discovered) starts to break down when you more from formal languages to natural ones. So this takes us back to the debate over what we can realistically expect from the Semantic Web and whether or not we can call it "semantic" in any way that makes sense the the real world of how we all use the Internet (i.e. the world in which the Internet is used by ordinary people trying to get things done, for business or pleasure, as opposed to computer science students or professionals).

It is nice to see that Ricœur seems to have had a healthy appreciation of the pioneering work of C. S. Peirce on the interpretation of symbol structures. It is nice to reflect that, in one of his early essays ("Some Consequences of the Four Incapacities"), Peirce came up with the wonderful observation that "men and words reciprocally educate each other." I think this gets to the heart of the synthesis upon which Ricœur's approach to hermeneutics is based, and I think we can do worse than live by that insight.