Hermeneutic circle
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
| Revision as of 18:29, 25 February 2009 Jahsonic (Talk | contribs) ← Previous diff |
Revision as of 14:43, 3 January 2016 Jahsonic (Talk | contribs) Next diff → |
||
| Line 9: | Line 9: | ||
| For [[postmodernists]], the Hermeneutic Circle is especially problematic. Not only do they believe one can only know the world through the words one uses to describe it, but also that "whenever people try to establish a certain reading of a text or expression, they allege other readings as the ground for their reading" (Adler 1997: 321-322). For postmodernists, in other words, "All meaning systems are open-ended systems of signs referring to signs referring to signs. No concept can therefore have an ultimate, unequivocal meaning" (Waever 1996: 171). | For [[postmodernists]], the Hermeneutic Circle is especially problematic. Not only do they believe one can only know the world through the words one uses to describe it, but also that "whenever people try to establish a certain reading of a text or expression, they allege other readings as the ground for their reading" (Adler 1997: 321-322). For postmodernists, in other words, "All meaning systems are open-ended systems of signs referring to signs referring to signs. No concept can therefore have an ultimate, unequivocal meaning" (Waever 1996: 171). | ||
| - | For other thinkers, the fact of demonstration as a method to define certain words, clearly is evidence of a degree of shared experience among all humans. For example, anyone can point to the sun, as it exists, and then name it any sound, symbol, or word that represents or literally points to that actual being, the sun. There might be some disagreement about what the sun is exactly, but there is agreement that it exists, and that to a human on Earth it looks like the drawings and pictures we see of it. Therefore, some concepts and ideas are universal.{{GFDL}} | + | For other thinkers, the fact of demonstration as a method to define certain words, clearly is evidence of a degree of shared experience among all humans. For example, anyone can point to the sun, as it exists, and then name it any sound, symbol, or word that represents or literally points to that actual being, the sun. There might be some disagreement about what the sun is exactly, but there is agreement that it exists, and that to a human on Earth it looks like the drawings and pictures we see of it. Therefore, some concepts and ideas are universal. |
| + | ==See also== | ||
| + | * [[Critical reading]] | ||
| + | * [[Georg Anton Friedrich Ast]] | ||
| + | * [[Experiential learning]] | ||
| + | {{GFDL}} | ||
Revision as of 14:43, 3 January 2016
|
Related e |
|
Featured: |
The hermeneutic circle describes the process of understanding a text hermeneutically. It refers to the idea that one's understanding of the text as a whole is established by reference to the individual parts and one's understanding of each individual part by reference to the whole. Neither the whole text nor any individual part can be understood without reference to one another, and hence, it is a circle. However, this circular character of interpretation does not make it impossible to interpret a text; rather, it stresses that the meaning of a text must be found within its cultural, historical, and literary context.
With Schleiermacher, hermeneutics begins to stress the importance of the interpreter in the process of interpretation. Schleiermacher's hermeneutics focuses on the importance of the interpreter understanding the text as a necessary stage to interpreting it. Understanding, for Schleiermacher, does not simply come from reading the text, but involves knowledge of the historical context of the text and the psychology of the author.
Heidegger (1927) developed the concept of the Hermeneutic Circle to envision a whole in terms of a reality that was situated in the detailed experience of everyday existence by an individual (the parts). So understanding was developed on the basis of "fore-structures" of understanding, that allow external phenomena to be interpreted or in a preliminary way. Gadamer (1975) developed this concept, leading to what is recognized as a break with previous hermeneutic traditions. But while Heidegger saw the hermeneutic process as cycles of self-reference that situated our understanding in a priori prejudices, Gadamer reconceptualized the hermeneutic circle as an iterative process through which a new understanding of a whole reality is developed by means of exploring the detail of existence. Gadamer viewed understanding as linguistically-mediated, through conversations with others in which reality is explored and an agreement is reached that represents a new understanding. The centrality of conversation to the hermeneutic circle is developed intriguingly by Donald Schön (1983), who characterizes design as a hermeneutic circle that is developed by means of "a conversation with the situation."
For postmodernists, the Hermeneutic Circle is especially problematic. Not only do they believe one can only know the world through the words one uses to describe it, but also that "whenever people try to establish a certain reading of a text or expression, they allege other readings as the ground for their reading" (Adler 1997: 321-322). For postmodernists, in other words, "All meaning systems are open-ended systems of signs referring to signs referring to signs. No concept can therefore have an ultimate, unequivocal meaning" (Waever 1996: 171).
For other thinkers, the fact of demonstration as a method to define certain words, clearly is evidence of a degree of shared experience among all humans. For example, anyone can point to the sun, as it exists, and then name it any sound, symbol, or word that represents or literally points to that actual being, the sun. There might be some disagreement about what the sun is exactly, but there is agreement that it exists, and that to a human on Earth it looks like the drawings and pictures we see of it. Therefore, some concepts and ideas are universal.
See also
