The human science or qualitative approaches to research have always argued that methodology must be determined by the subject matter under study. Yet the same approaches to data collection (i.e., the qualitative interview) and data analysis have been utilized by these approaches since their inception. The most essential lesson of van den Berg's metabletics is that no phenomenon is static or absolute. If human phenomena are ever-changing then the methodologies we use to study them must also change and adapt, so (...) that we can more fully and authentically capture their meaning structures. This paper will develop this argument, and demonstrate the limitation of interviews for the study of the changing nature of human phenomena, utilizing psychotherapy research as an example. (shrink)

Despite growing interest from historians in the built environment, the use of architecture as evidence remains remarkably under-theorized. Where this issue has been discussed, the interpretation of buildings has often been likened to the process of reading, in which architecture can be understood by analogy to language: either as a code capable of use in communicating the architect’s intentions or more literally as a spoken or written language in its own right. After a historiographical survey, this essay, by contrast, proposes (...) that the appropriate metaphor is one of translation. More particularly, it draws on the work of Mikhail Bakhtin to suggest that architecture—and the interpretation of architecture—comprises a series of transpositions. As a building is planned, built, inhabited, and interpreted, so its meaning changes. The underlying logic of each medium shapes the way in which its message is created and understood. This suggests that the proper role of the historian is to trace these transpositions. Buildings, then, can be used as a historical source, but only if the historian takes account of the particular problems that they present. In short, architecture should not be studied for its meaning, but for its meanings. As historians we are always translating architecture: not reading its message, but exploring its multiple transpositions. (shrink)

Analysis of records of women at risk for abuse showed that though information about abuse was present, emergency room physicians rarely utilized it. The doctor-patient interaction tended to obscure rather than elucidate knowledge of abuse. Medicine's epistemologic model of care reconstructs abusive relationships through a medical encounter in which what is most significant is not seen. Nurses are less affected by the model but are under institutional constraints that lead to similar outcomes.

A range of stakeholders are interested in organisational values, with demands from consumers, trade unions and pressure groups. Organisations face the challenge of integrating employees from several cultures and overcoming value differences. Coupled with this emphasis on organisational values there is increasing interest in the role of discourse in constituting meaning. This research shows how texts constitute organisational values. Hermeneutics is used to analyse the texts of the Open University and UK FTSE4good companies. The research shows that organisational values are (...) constituted through three hermeneutic circles — fragmentation/integration, conceptuality/contextuality and temporality — that provide an integrated medium for interpreting values. The three hermeneutic circles are mediated by a fourth: the tropological circle, where metaphor and homonymy fuse horizons, and synecdoche and metonymy relate parts and whole. Both texts and tropes mediate the transvaluation of organisational values across time. In recontextualising its values the organisation becomes a metaphor of itself. (shrink)

This article is intended to contribute to the discussion on the meaning of volunteering by investigating voluntary work from the viewpoint of volunteers active in Swedish civil society organizations.Meaning refers both to the cognitive meaning of concepts and to the perceived meaning in life. The aim to uncover the predicates that people attribute to the concept is an attempt to anatomize volunteering as a social construct. Five predicates emerged and they make up the phenomenological structure of volunteering. By contextualizing this (...) structure in contemporary Swedish society, it is demonstrated that the conceptual meaning of volunteering has significance for its existential meaning. The volunteers say that their authenticity is confirmed through the voluntary work since they are making themselves manifest in public. Following Hannah Arendt, the reasons for this is that authenticity demands that the volunteers conduct their actions in a public realm where their actions acquire an intrinsic value as neither coerced nor instrumental. (shrink)

Accounts of normal appearances in Goffman's Stigma and Garfinkel's "Passing and the Managed Achievement of Sex Status in an Intersexed Person" are compared. It is found that in these two classic interactionist texts the formulation of stigma requires the production of normal appearances that occlude interactants' selves. In effect, selves are stigmatized. The essay reads Goffman and Garfinkel in terms of each other, and in certain emergent paradoxes rediscovers the missing (stigmatized) selves.

In this article I scrutinize the question whetherclinical medicine, in order to be considered ahermeneutical enterprise, must be thought of as areading of different texts. Three differentproposals for a definition of the concept of text inmedicine, suggested by other hermeneuticians, arediscussed. All three proposals are shown to beunsatisfying in various ways. Instead of attempting tofind a fourth definition of the concept of textsuitable to a hermeneutics of medicine, I then try toshow that the assumption that one needs to operatewith the (...) concept of text in order to develop ahermeneutics of medicine is false. Clinicalinterpretation can be shown to essentially consist ina dialogical hermeneutics, the pattern of which can befound in the philosophy of Hans-Georg Gadamer. Thiskind of hermeneutics is not a methodology of textreading, but an ontological, phenomenologicalhermeneutics in which understanding is a necessaryfeature of the being-together of human beings in theworld. This being-together in and through languagetakes on a peculiar form in the clinical encounter,since the medical meeting is typically characterizedby an asymmetrical enstrangement and has a specificgoal – health for the patient – absent in other formsof hermeneutics. Central issues of Gadamer''sphilosophy, e.g. fusion of horizons, are shown tofit the structure of clinical practice. (shrink)

Paul Ricoeur's hermeneutic phenomenology has proved to be very helpful in guiding nursing researchers’ qualitative analysis of interview transcripts. Modifying Ricoeur's philosophy, a number of nursing researchers have developed their own interpretive methods and shared them, along with their experience, with research community. Major contributors who published papers directly presenting their modifications of Ricoeur's theory include Rene Geanellos (2000), Lena Wiklund, Lisbet Lindholm and Unni Å. Lindström (2002), Anders Lindseth and Astrid Norberg (2004) and Pia Sander Dreyer and Birthe D (...) Pedersen (2009). The aim of this article was to delineate differences among these methods. Descriptive presentation of each method side by side makes clear the differences among them. In addition, Ricoeur's hermeneutic theory is portrayed and compared with the modifications. It is believed that differences that are found can stimulate further thoughts on how to apply Ricoeur's theory in qualitative research in nursing. (shrink)

Summary This paper traces a mutually reinforcing set of arguments about the practice of history in the work of J. G. A. Pocock and Paul Ricoeur that responds to challenges posed to the autonomy of selves and their communities raised by both thinkers. It begins with their respective views on language, texts and actions, moves to the construction of narrative and historiography, and concludes with their account of selves and the communities to which they belong. Corresponding to these three considerations (...) are a set of conclusions drawn with different emphases: first, that both texts and acts are potentially open to indefinite and plural interpretations; second, that narrative and historiography are constitutively contested modes of critical discourse continually open to the construction of new meaning; and third, that the contested, capable, narrative self, and the community to which that mediated self belongs, exercises autonomy as an active, responsible, reflective citizen and/or critical historian. It concludes from this study that the limited openness of language, narrative and identity constitutes the promise and risk of history as a contested and affective representation. (shrink)

This paper provides a brief overview and critique of the dominant objectivist understanding and use of illness narrative in Enlightenment (scientific) medicine and ethics, as well as several revisionist accounts, which reflect the evolution of this approach. In light of certain limitations and difficulties endemic in the objectivist understanding of illness narrative, an alternative phronesis approach to medical ethics influenced by Charles Taylor’s account of the interpretive nature of human agency and language is examined. To this end, the account of (...) interpretive medical responsibility previously described by Schultz and Carnevale as "clinical phronesis" (based upon Taylor’s notion of "strong" or "radical evaluation") is reviewed and expanded. The thesis of this paper is that illness narrative has the ability to benefit patients as well as the potential to cause harm or iatrogenic effects. This benefit or harm is contingent upon how the story is told and understood. Consequently, these tales are not simply "nice stories," cathartic gestures, or mere supplements to scientific procedures and decision making, as suggested by the objectivist approach. Rather, they open the agent to meanings that provide a context for explanation and evaluation of illness episodes and therapeutic activities. This understanding provides indicators (guides) for right action. Hence, medical responsibility as clinical phronesis involves, first, the patient and provider’s coformulation and cointerpretation of what is going on in the patient’s illness narrative, and second, the patient and provider’s response to interpretation of the facts of illness and what they signify–not simply a response to the brute facts of illness, alone. The appeal to medical responsibility as clinical phronesis thus underscores the importance of getting the patient’s story of illness right. It is anticipated that further elaboration concerning the idea of clinical phronesis as interpretive illness narrative will provide a new foundation for medical ethics and decision making. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Rhetoric on the Bleachers, or, The Rhetorician as MelancholiacPhilippe-Joseph SalazarThose who cannot remember rhetoric are condemned to repeat it.*French philosopher Jacques Bouveresse (2008) asks, in his most recent book, Why is it that we think we need literary works, in addition to science and philosophy, to help solve moral questions? As one reviewer notes, this comes as a surprise from a man “better known as a specialist of Wittgenstein, (...) who has always defended philosophy, often with scathing irony, against brainless realism, and, in any case, defended the prerogatives of a reason reasonably attentive to reality, a defense that led him to dismiss relativism and its mixing up of truth and verifiability with fallacy and verisimilitude” (Maggiori 2008). 1Bouveresse, who holds the chair of the philosophy of language and knowledge at Collège de France, and whose elevation to this hallowed professorship was portrayed as a revenge of sorts against Jacques Derrida, is not unimportant for those in rhetoric studies who have an interest in philosophy as well.2 He is the one who, with indeed scathing irony, unraveled the rhetorical stakes of the unrivaled Sokal truancy against Social Text (Bouveresse 1999), namely, how analogy provides a common ground for the literary and the scientific within public discourse.3Bouveresse (1999, 129) recalls, tongue in cheek, how that famed connoisseur in manipulations, [End Page 356] Alexander Zinoviev, explains, in The Yawning Heights (1979), that sciences produce their own “doubles” for the sake of public argument. The literary use of scientific analogy mimics the way in which ideology has to produce its own “doubles” in order to exist in public consciousness.For Bouveresse, literary intellectuals, and some philosophers, manufacture doubles of science because our life is lived under the shadow of science insofar as it has something to say about everything we do as moral agents or think in terms of practical reason. Analogy rules therefore by a popular demand for science. To question analogy in relation to ethics—belief and opinion, custom and habitus, temperament and character—under the gaze of the massive presence of science in public discourse (from campaign claims of “experience” to policy claims made on the basis of scientific knowledge) is at once to engage with rhetoric.4 It is to ask the question: Why do we feel that, alongside science, philosophy, and works of fiction, we need to listen to that double, “speeches,” to solve ethical problems?However, at this juncture, or crossroad where doubles point in various directions, rhetoricians have a choice among four attitudes, or four paths (to put it in Heideggerian fashion). Faced with the real, moral dangers inherent to analogy, one can (like Bouveresse) be combative and assert reason’s prerogative against the sophistry of doubles; one may defend analogy as morally grounded or even a means to resistance (hence, the moral incentive Bouveresse now attaches to fiction); one may argue for a culture replete with figurations (by and large, a matter of religious belief and faith as truth, which necessitates an analogical reading of this debased reality called “the world”); or one may, having already played on these teams, decide to stay on the bleachers, watch players of this three-cornered game, and fall into melancholy.Thomas Farrell was, I think, a melancholic rhetorician. I do not mean he was not here and there combative, or sanguine, or controversial, merely that from his writings emanates a stubborn melancholy regarding the destiny of rhetoric, or, to recall the epigram placed, ironically, at the top of this essay: “Those who cannot remember rhetoric are condemned to repeat it.” In essence, our public is a-rhetorical; it evolves in a world of instant communication, of short-lived prudence, of ever-disappearing persuasion, while, at the same time, it is made to cling to opinions raised to standards of absolute value and unnegotiable belief. The main reason why rhetoric is no longer a technē lies in this tension. It cannot be a technē because [End Page 357] its rules and artifacts are divorced from culture. It cannot be an epistēmē because its productions are singular constructions.Rhetoricians are not rhetors, and rhetors have long vanished. Indeed, there are eloquent... (shrink)

Much of the interest of critical realists in the hermeneutic character of social inquiry has been shaped by debates with critics. Critical realists insist that the meaningful character of societies does not exclude the possibility of treating them as objects that have causal powers and that these objects are more than the sum-total of their meanings. In what follows, I want to go beyond this debate. Working within critical realist ontology, the question I want to ask is what kind of (...) hermeneutics is required for the study of the causal powers of meaningful objects. If hypotheses about the causal powers of such objects can be confirmed only in dialogues, then what kind of dialogues and with whom are necessary for the understanding of causal powers? The question of the interpretation of causal objects is not merely a methodological one. Social structures are ontologically different from natural ones, and the nature of our understanding of meaningful objects is in part dependent on the way we come to apprehend them in thought. I argue that the approach to the understanding of the causal power of meaningful objects that has emerged in the debate between critical realists and their critics tends to view the study of causal powers as a dialogue between experts in the service of a more democratic society. Against this view, I suggest an understanding of the study of causal powers as a dialogue between critical social science and the public, a dialogue that takes place in the public sphere. (shrink)

My central claim is that texts introducing and explaining critical realism focus on its ontological insights, and even though issues of judgemental rationality and theory choice are central to research these often become peripheral and/or are not stated in the way Bhaskar presented them. This claim is defended by comparing Bhaskar's statements and arguments about theory choice to texts introducing critical realism and its potential research implications. The method of rational theory choice and the key criterion for it are presented: (...) immanent critique combined with retroduction to determine whether a theory has greater explanatory power than its rivals, where greater explanatory power is defined as having greater epistemic credibility because it can explain more significant phenomena and has a greater ability to integrate knowledge; and multitheoretic-linguality as a prerequisite for applying the criterion of greater explanatory power. Greater explanatory power may be assigned to competing theories, metatheories and interpretations. Lastly, a more detailed example of the disparity between Bhaskar's specifications for rational theory choice and those found in a methodology text is provided. (shrink)

This book review critically analyzes Mark Coecelbergh’s newest work: “Money Machines”. In his book, Coeckelbergh discusses the epistemic, social and moral distances that are created by modern financial technologies. It consists of a historical analysis of financial technologies from cowrie shells to digital money, a theoretical analysis of the distancing effects of financial technologies which revolves around the theories of Simmel and McLuhan and a discussion of the empirical instances of modern money machines within the framework of distancing. Two problems (...) and one missed opportunity of the book are discussed in this review: the underdeveloped nature of the theory of distancing which leaves the reader with multiple open questions, the absence of established theories of money and the sometimes uncritical comparison of different theories applied to analyse financial technologies. Nevertheless, the book convincingly manages to open up a novel branch of research in the field philosophy and ethics of technology. Its highly original discussion of financial technologies and embracement of Simmel as a philosopher of technology provide for interesting prospects for future work. (shrink)

Can research be studied in a way that is neither logical reconstruction nor empirical psychology or sociology of science? In contemporary philosophy of science this is usually denied—in spite of the recent 'paradigm shift' there. A system-philosophy approach in theory of research is outlined by means of some models : a research enterprise is viewed as a productive, innovative system, the research process as a transformation of complexes of knowledge-problems-instruments (software and hard ware). The direction this development takes is guided (...) by preconceptions about the subject matter and a programmatic conception of the discipline based on them ('internal steering factors'). The dynamics of the research process are schematized as a co-agency of 'theoretical and 'empirical' moments, which is viewed as a flow of problems, information, and conceptual frameworks. Empirically discovered pieces of knowledge may resist all attempts to explain them: the flow is disturbed, and only an extraordinary innovation on the 'theoretical' level can restore the balance. This involves a shift in perspective: a shift in the 'internal steering factors'. (In this way one type of 'scientific revolution' (Kuhn's type) is conceptualized). After a perspectival shift one will ask 'Does it constitute progress ?' Types of criteria are suggested. Although they do not apply to all research situations, they over-arch research-traditions. Eventually the above models are applied in the reflection of Research Theory on itself. Research Theory should improve our knowledge about knowledge-production. This knowledge should contribute to improving our image of science and the researcher's sensitivity—by providing better tools for concept ualizing research situations and for imagining possible alternatives. (shrink)

The present article explores problems of descriptive reporting, relativism, and the lack of systematic follow-up of qualitative research. Such issues are discussed in relation to components of phenomenologically based research reports, with emphasis on the articulation of the research approach, and steps to facilitate validation. The value of a descriptive science derived from phenomenological principles is discussed as forming a common ground for initial qualitative inquiry, while providing a critically reflective base upon which rational consensus can be developed. I suggest (...) that the values of follow-up, tentativeness, and humility in research reporting, and a rational framework of critical validation, constitute a common core of science. In addition, phenomenological tenets are discussed as providing a corrective to the uncritical search for absolutes, or the "anything counts" conception of relativistic movements. (shrink)

The metaphorical nature of biological language is examined and the use of metaphors for providing the linguistic context in which similarities and differences are made is described. Certain pervasive metaphors which are characterised by systemic properties are noted, and in order to provide some focus to the study, systemic metaphors associated with machine, text and organism are discussed. Other systemic metaphors such as society and circuit are also reported. Some details concerning interrelations between automaton and organism are presented in the (...) light of the previous discussion.An approach towards the analysis of biosystem metaphors is outlined which relates part-whole, organisational level and systemic metaphors in a single model. Examples are provided throughout the discussion and mainly come from computing. The potential for metaphorical transfers between these domains is considered. (shrink)

ABSTRACTRicoeur’s proposal to understand the encounter between religions as a practice of ‘linguistic hospitality’ has appealed to many interreligious scholars. Usually, religious texts are at the heart of interreligious hermeneutics, turning Ricoeur’s linguistic hospitality into a practice of interreligious cross-reading. Recently, due to the influence of material and ritual scholars, the textual focus of interreligious hermeneutics has been criticized. Two criticisms are prominent. First, the assumption that understanding religious otherness is best mediated via language and texts leads religious scholars to (...) minimize the ‘non-textual’ practices in religious life. Second, interreligious interpreters mistakenly assume that they can read all meaningful action and ritual performances, especially as texts. This assumption leads to a textualization of the world and does not take into account that there might be other ‘vehicles of intelligibility’ apart from texts. In this article, I explore to what extent the criticisms raised against Ricoeur’s interreligious hermeneutics are fair. I have learned from Ricoeur the importance of mediating between seemingly opposed positions, and I seek to follow his example in this article. (shrink)

Meaningful work refers to the idea that human work is an integral part of the way we think of our lives as going well. The concept is prevalent in sociology and business studies. In philosophy, its discussion tends to revolve around matters of justice and whether the State should take steps to eradicate meaningless work. However, despite the breadth of the recent, general literature, there is little to no discussion about how it is in fact the case that work is (...) meaningful. There is a basic assumption that certain facts about work make it meaningful. After noting the shortcomings in the literature, this essay argues that we can better understand the production of meaning in work by an analogy to speech acts. Using Paul Ricoeur’s theory of action as discourse, one can see how meaning is predicated in the performance of work in ways that are locutionary, illocutionary, and perlocutionary. (shrink)

One of the key debates about applying virtue ethics to business is whether or not the aims and values of a business actually prevent the exercise of virtues. Some of the more interesting disagreement in this debate has arisen amongst proponents of virtue ethics. This article analyzes the central issues of this debate in order to advance an alternative way of thinking about how a business can be a form of virtuous practice. Instead of relying on the paired concepts of (...) internal and external goods that define what counts as virtuous, I offer a version of speech act theory taken from Paul Ricoeur to show how a business can satisfy several aims without compromising the exercise of the virtues. I refer to this as a polyvalent approach where a single task within a business can have instrumental, conventional, and imaginative effects. These effects correspond to the locutionary, illocutionary, and perlocutionary dimensions of meaning. I argue that perlocution provides a way in which the moral imagination can discover the moral significance of others that might have not been noticed before, and furthermore, that for such effects to be practiced, they require appropriate virtues. I look at two cases taken from consultation work to thresh out the theoretical and practical detail. (shrink)

Wolves have a special resonance in many human cultures. To appreciate fully the wide variety of views on wolves, we must attend to the scientific, social, and ethical discourses that frame our understanding of wolves themselves, as well as their relationships with people and the natural world. These discourses are a configuration of ideas, language, actions, and institutions that enable or constrain our individual and collective agency with respect to wolves. Scientific discourse is frequently privileged when it comes to wolves, (...) on the assumption that the primary knowledge requirements are matters of ecology, cognitive ethology, and allied disciplines. Social discourse about wolves implicitly challenges this privilege and provides a rich array of social perspectives on human-wolf relations. Ethical discourse has until recently lagged behind the other two. So too, ethicists are increasingly challenging the adequacy of scientific and social discourse. They do so by calling attention to the value-laden character of all discourse, and the unavoidable ethical questions that confront us as we learn to share the landscape with large predators like wolves. (shrink)

Paul Ricoeur is a philosopher of wide ranging interests whose main concern is hermeneutics. His hermeneutics is self-reflexive, an existential appropriation that eventually gives way to self-understanding. Questions pertaining to self-identity, the problem of the other and intersubjectivity are presented by him in a tensive style, keeping the scope of interpretations wide open. While discussing the question of self-identity, he moves towards intersubjectivity which is centred on self-esteem. It provides a context for self-constancy which gives to a moral identity, an (...) attestation of Here I am. Here arises the basic issue, how the narrative identity which is hermeneutical give rise to an ethical relation. If so, Ricoeur must be ready to see that there is an asymmetric relation between the same and the other which can be termed ethical. Though he says that conscience contains an injunction to attest ourselves to say, Here I am, it is a statement of “said” and not one of “saying”. Only a statement of “saying” can interrupt ontology and enact the movement from the same to the other which is ethical. Hence, Ricoeur stands at the hemeneutical level which cannot abandon ontology. But the polysemic nature of alterity posed by him never closes the possibilities of an ethical interpretation. (shrink)

Argumentation is a form of communication, rather than an application of(formal) logic, and is used in communicative activity as a means forinquiry, although it is more typically thought of as bringing inquiry toclosure. Thus interpretation is an intrinsic and crucial aspect ofconversational (interactive) argumentation. In order to further thisunderstanding of argumentative activity, I propose a procedure forinterpretation that draws upon hermeneutic phenomenology. In response tocriticisms by argumentation theorists (and others) who understand thistradition as oriented to psychological, perceptual, or textual objects, (...) Iargue that hermeneutic phenomenology supports methods for analysis ofpublic communicative activity. The resulting conception of ’thick argumentation‘ responds to contemporary (postmodern) claims that argumentation valorizes univocity, stasis, and certainty at the expense ofthe pluralism, fluctuation, and range of epistemic results thatcharacterize discourse in the public sphere. (shrink)

This qualitative study describes and interprets the lived experiences of African Roman Catholic Church seminarians. The interpretive lens employed was world view, a conceptual tool extensively used in African-centred psychology. Sixteen African seminarians were purposely selected and interviewed in depth. Additional sources of data were reflexive notes and observation notes. Data were subjected to various iterative cycles of analysis. Participants described their difficulty in adjusting in the seminaries where teaching and living predominantly reflects a Western world view. They evidenced cognitive (...) dissonance, emotional discomfort and feelings of marginalisation. The findings point to the importance of acknowledging the world views and cultural heritage of seminarians in their training. (shrink)

Who Needs Stories if You Can Get the Data? ISPs in the Era of Big Number Crunching Content Type Journal Article Category Special Issue Pages 371-390 DOI 10.1007/s13347-011-0041-8 Authors Mireille Hildebrandt, Institute of Computer and Information Sciences (ICIS), Radboud University Nijmegen, Nijmegen, the Netherlands Journal Philosophy & Technology Online ISSN 2210-5441 Print ISSN 2210-5433 Journal Volume Volume 24 Journal Issue Volume 24, Number 4.

In this contribution, I will argue that the image of a balance is often used to defend the idea of a trade-off. To understand the drawbacks of this line of thought, I will explore the relationship between online security technologies and fundamental rights, notably privacy, nondiscrimination, freedom of speech and due process. After discriminating between three types of online security technologies, I will trace the reconfiguration of the notion of privacy in the era of smart environments. This will lead to (...) an inquiry into the metaphor of the scale, building on the triple test regarding the justification of the limitation of fundamental rights such as privacy. The conclusion will be that in the case of a trade-off, infringing measures will have to be balanced by effective safeguards. No trade-off without balance. (shrink)

This paper aims to explore the relations between Schutzian theory and hermeneutics. After presenting the connections between hermeneutic thought and Schutz’s work from a historical point of view, it will argue that despite its significant differences from hermeneutic theory, Schutzian theory can be utilized as a kind of proto-hermeneutics. By now, the heterogeneous movement of the interpretive social sciences has reached an established position, but with their growing reliance on the impulses coming from philosophical hermeneutics, the latent problem comes to (...) the foreground: the former demand for an action-theoretical grounding has faded away. Currently, action theory itself is no more dominated by the work of interpretively minded authors, but by the theories of rational choice. This results in a false opposition between the explanatory models, which base their arguments on historical, cultural, and linguistic factors, and those, which focus on the plane of the decisions of individuals. Bypassing the objectivism present in both the rational choice approach and hermeneutics, Schutz’s pragmatic theory of the life-world, originating from both interpretive and pragmatic intellectual influences, may be useful to overcome this opposition, and can serve as a proto-hermeneutical point of departure: that is, as a theory which cannot alone take over the duty of hermeneutics, but which can complement hermeneutics on a fundamental level. (shrink)

This paper provides a phenomenological account of the writing of a young woman diagnosed with schizophrenia. The method of interpretation is to put ourselves in the place of the author drawing upon a combination of sympathy, reason, common-sense, experience, and an intersubjective world, common to us all (Schutz, 1945: 536). The result is the recognition of the person as also capable of putting herself in the place of others so as to understand their behavior. This role-taking success identifies the limits (...) of the current sociological understanding of insanity's significance in social interaction as an instance of role-taking failure (Rosenberg, 1992).The very appearance of a piece of writing often permits one to recognize the presence of schizophrenia. The use of space may be quite bizarre. The varying margins betray the writer's changing mood. The letter may start at the bottom or side of the paper or very close to the top .. (shrink)

Wolterstorff defends the claim not only that ‘God speaks’ through the Bible but also that the reader gains ever new insights upon subsequent readings of it. I qualify this project with the philosophical hermeneutics he rejects—namely that of Gadamer and Ricoeur. Wolterstorff thinks what he calls ‘authorial discourse interpretation’ provides warrant for religious communities believing that ‘God speaks’ to them through a text. In developing this hermeneutic, he dismisses the viability of Gadamer and Ricoeur's approach because, Wolterstorff asserts, their form (...) of interpretation is merely an operation performed on an artifact. While a cursory study of Gadamer and Ricoeur might support such dismissal, particularly Ricoeur's emphasis on writing's obliteration of dialogue, a closer study guided by the hermeneutic priority of questioning complicates Wolterstorff's caricature. If writing obliterates dialogue, what happens to questions and responses? My thesis is that dialogue with another is preserved through the hermeneutical arc. I demonstrate this through specifying distinct logics of question and answer that occur in the reading process, and I delimit these logics by way of appeal to contemporary literacy pedagogy and its taxonomies of questions. A voice does speak with and listen to a reader in the event of reading, in this case a God who is not behind but before the text. Isolating this other who speaks and listens provides reinforcement for constructive theological work aligned with Gadamer and Ricoeur's hermeneutics, and answers for the experience of hearing ‘God speak’ differently through sacred texts. (shrink)

Paul Ricoeur's account of the human capacity for taking action stands in opposition in important respects to two other prominent views. One of these alternatives is exemplified in the position that John Rawls holds. A second alternative appears in some interpretations of the results of neuroscientific research. My aim in this paper is first to highlight a number of the salient feature of Ricoeur's account. Then I will briefly point to some of the challenges it presents to these two alternatives.

This article reviews the contribution of media institutions to modernity and its wider institutional arrangements. It will consider how this relationship has normally been conceived, even mythified, and then, in its second half, review how the institutions that we now call ‘media’ are, potentially, disrupting, even deranging, modernity’s arrangements in profound ways. The article will suggest that, under conditions of increased complexity and radically transformed market competition, the changing set of institutions we call ‘media’ demand a major reinterpretation of how (...) modernity ‘works’ through institutional concentration. The first main section reviews in schematic terms the role which media institutions (the press, radio, television, film, but also infrastructural media such as the telegraph) played in the institutional development of modernity from the late 18th century, stabilising the circulation of information and contributing to the freedom associated with modernity, but in the course of this installing a ‘myth of the mediated centre’. The second section will review how this traditional settlement between media and modernity is now being deranged. This goes beyond the globalization of modernity and the complexification of culture landscapes through media and time-space compression. It is a matter, more fundamentally, of a change in the conditions under which media institutions exist and are able to ‘centralize’ communications flows. Today, communications are becoming centralised less through the production and circulation of elaborate media contents at/from global/national centres throughout the social domain (funded through audience-based advertising or state subsidy) and more through the stimulation to/from everywhere of symbolic interactions within a global information space (the internet, and its related apparatus) funded by the collection and sale of data ‘exhaust’ generated by those interactions. The result, paradoxically, is likely to be an increasing destabilisation of many traditional institutions of modernity, and the normalisation of unfreedom through continuous surveillance, undermining the legitimacy of institutional arrangements on which modernity has conventionally relied. (shrink)

Despite the proliferation of specialised agencies designed to reduce the prevalence of refugees worldwide, the number of individuals fleeing persecution is increasing year on year as endemic violence in countries such as Iraq, Somalia and the Syrian Arab Republic continues. As a result, media broadcasts and political dialogues are saturated with discussions about these “persons of concern”. Fundamental questions nonetheless remain unanswered about what meaning these actors attribute to the label ‘refugee’ and what intent, other than paucity of knowledge, might (...) be driving the term’s use or manipulation. Though this is evidently important in the public arena, where incorrect conflations fuel mistrust and misunderstandings, the ramifications of these divergent understandings at the level of multi-lateral politics have yet to be critically explored. This article applies Barthes’ theory of the multiple orders of the sign to address this. Using the case study of the negotiations preceding the invocation of the Cessation Clause for Rwandan refugees, it illustrates how the word refugee is susceptible to numerous, simultaneous understandings, and discusses the implications of these manifold interpretations for how durable solutions are envisaged and negotiated in the refugee regime. In the case of Rwandan refugees in Uganda, this has meant that over a decade of stalemated discussions between the Governments of Uganda and Rwanda and the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees over their future have been broken by a series of bilateral concessions that, whilst diminishing the political significance attached to this protracted caseload, have failed to address the continuing precarity of their situation. By conceptualising the word refugee as a sign according to the Saussurean model of semiotics, this paper therefore argues that despite the term’s established legal-normative definition, its inherent malleability makes it susceptible to processes of political instrumentalisation. This elevates the refugee as a rhetorical figure above the refugee as a physical-legal body entitled to certain forms of assistance. (shrink)

Contemporary philosophy of technology, in particular mediation theory, has largely neglected language and has paid little attention to the social-linguistic environment in which technologies are used. In order to reintroduce and strengthen these two missing aspects we turn towards Ricoeur’s narrative theory. We argue that technologies have a narrative capacity: not only do humans make sense of technologies by means of narratives but technologies themselves co-constitute narratives and our understanding of these narratives by configuring characters and events in a meaningful (...) temporal whole. We propose a hermeneutic framework that enables us to categorise and interpret technologies according to two hermeneutic distinctions. Firstly, we consider the extent to which technologies close in on the paradigm of the written text by assessing their capacity to actively configure characters and events into a meaningful whole; thereby introducing a linguistic aspect in the theory of technological mediation. Secondly, we consider the extent to which technologieshave the capacity to abstract from the public narrative time of actual characters and events by constructing quasi-characters and quasi-events, thereby introducing the social in our conception of technological mediation. This leads us to the outlines of a theory of narrative technologies that revolves around four hermeneutic categories. In order to show the merits of this theory, we discuss the categories by analysing paradigmatic examples of narrative technologies: the bridge, the hydroelectric power plant, video games, and electronic money. (shrink)

What is the relation between interpreting a person's speech and actions, on the one hand, and interpreting a written text, on the other? That question is considered in connection with the theories of interpretation offered by Donald Davidson and Paul Ricoeur. There are some important similarities between those theories. However, it is argued that Davidson and Ricoeur are divided on fundamental questions about the relation between meaning and intention, about the reference of texts, about the relation between the meanings of (...) texts and the meanings of spoken words, and about the notion of correctness that applies to interpretation. On each of these points, it is contended, Davidson has the better of the dispute. (shrink)

The paper presents the prevailing understanding of pre-reflective and reflective experience as a “data-description model”. According to this model, pre-reflective experience is the original datum, the meaning of which is fully determined in the very beginning, whereas reflection is a secondary layer that purports to recover faithfully the meaning of the pre-reflective. The paper spells out the difficulty of this model by looking into the scepticism on reflection. Despite its contribution to explicating the basic level of human consciousness, the data-description (...) model merely attends to the epistemological function of reflection and its orientation towards the past. The aim of the paper is thus to propose an alternative model inspired by the phenomenological-hermeneutical tradition, especially the paradigm of “text” Gadamer and Ricoeur emphasize. By understanding pre-reflective experience as a text, we are able to make explicit the essential role reflection plays for human life and its inherent existential dimension. (shrink)

The paper examines some of the processes of the closely knit relationship between Google’s ideologies of neutrality and objectivity and global market dominance. Neutrality construction comprises an important element sustaining the company’s economic position and is reflected in constant updates, estimates and changes to utility and relevance of search results. Providing a purely technical solution to these issues proves to be increasingly difficult without a human hand in steering algorithmic solutions. Search relevance fluctuates and shifts through continuous tinkering and tweaking (...) of the search algorithm. The company also uses third parties to hire human raters for performing quality assessments of algorithmic updates and adaptations in linguistically and culturally diverse global markets. The adaptation process contradicts the technical foundations of the company and calculations based on the initial Page Rank algorithm. Annual market reports, Google’s Search Quality Rating Guidelines, and reports from media specialising in search engine optimisation business are analysed. The Search Quality Rating Guidelines document provides a rare glimpse into the internal architecture of search algorithms and the notions of utility and relevance which are presented and structured as neutral and objective. Intertwined layers of ideology, hidden labour of human raters, advertising revenues, market dominance and control are discussed throughout the paper. (shrink)

_ Source: _Volume 45, Issue 3, pp 412 - 429 In the 1980s Ricoeur conceptualized metaphoricity and narrativity as twin ends of a discursive field governed by the productive imagination. A decade earlier Ricoeur was working at a significantly different proposition. He wanted to establish a parallel, in fact a strong homology, between metaphor and _text_. In both cases Ricoeur articulated a complex criteriology to establish the parallelism between the terms. Should we regard the earlier parallel as a first and (...) less precise version of the later? a distinct thesis? a reconcilable claim? a category error? Was the rejection and return an evolution, a clarification, or simply a different topic? The thesis of this close reading of Ricoeur’s middle period writings on metaphor is that the shift of analogical relations is actually a migration from the first to the second homology, and that the second homology is the correct one. (shrink)

Uno de los antropólogos más importantes del siglo XX es Clifford Geertz. Aunque muchos académicos han dicho que su obra se ha quedado anticuada, la verdad es que sus afirmaciones no se han estudiado aún en profundidad. Las propuestas antropológicas de Geertz no se pueden entender sin sus presupuestos filosóficos, especialmente los de Wittgenstein y Ricoeur. En ese caso, la explicación de su relación podría ofrecer nuevos caminos para las humanidades y la mutua comprensión entre filosofía y antropología. “Descripción gruesa” (...) y “cultura como texto” son conceptos en los que estas relaciones resultan claras y aprovechables. Este artículo tratará de mostrar los fundamentos de estos conceptos de una nueva manera. La hermenéutica implica un punto de vista metafísico específico y resulta imposible que la antropología cultural opere sin hipótesis filosóficas. La religión es el principal concepto que se necesita para clarificar esto. El dolor y el sufrimiento son, a causa de esto, dos ideas sin sentido que aparecen en la vida humana, y los estudios antropológicos de Geertz resuelven esta relación. (shrink)

This essay provides an intellectual history for the cultural turn that transformed the human sciences in the mid-20th century and led to the creation of cultural sociology in the late 20th century. It does so by conceptualizing and contextualizing the limitations of the binary primitive/modernity. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, leading thinkers – among them Marx, Weber, Durkheim, and Freud – confined thinking and feeling styles like ritual, symbolism, totem, and devotional practice to a primitivism that would be (...) transformed by the rationality and universalism of modernity. While the barbarisms of the 20th century cast doubt on such predictions, only an intellectual revolution could provide the foundations for an alternative social theory. The cultural turn in philosophy, aesthetics, and anthropology erased the division between primitive and modern; in sociology, the classical writings of Durkheim were recentered around his later, religious sociology. These intellectual currents fed into a cultural sociology that challenged the sociology of culture, creating radically new research programs in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. (shrink)