Abstract
The thematization of an interpretive element in experience and knowledge has been continuous in the general theory of knowledge since the late decades of the 18th century. Interpretation theory may be seen to have been initiated by Kant’s critical philosophy as the epistemological culmination of Enlightenment modernity, reconciling its internal controversy between rationalism and empiricism. After Kant, the problems of interpretation and the clarification of a theory of interpretation became central to Hegel and Marx and to various 19th century social philosophies and philosophies of history; to 20th century pragmatism and sociology of knowledge; and to later 20th century transcendental phenomenology, ontological hermeneutics, critical theory, and deconstruction.
Some parts of this essay were previously published as “Knowledge as Interpretation: An Historical Survey,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Vol. X, no. 4, pp. 522–540; Vol. XI, no. 1, pp. 88–103.
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References
Some parts of this essay were previously published as “Knowledge as Interpretation: An Historical Survey,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Vol. X, no. 4, pp. 522–540; Vol. XI, no. 1, pp. 88–103.
Cf. T. Z. Lavine, “Pragmatism and the Constitution in the Culture of Modernism,” Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society, Vol. XX, no. 1, Winter 1984, pp. 1–20.
Critique of Pure Reason, transl. Norman Kemp Smith. London: MacMillan Co., 1929, Introduction, p. 56.
C. S. Peirce, in Monist, Vol. XV, p. 163. Quoted by John Dewey, Philosophy and Civilization (New York, Minton, Balch, 1931), p. 14.
T. Z. Lavine, op. cit., p. 8.
Dewey, Philosophy and Civilization, p. 14.
Experience and Nature (La Salle, Ill., Open Court, 1925), p. 324, Cf., p. 317, “...What is perceived are meanings, rather than just events or existences.” Cf. also p. 318.
Op cit. p.319.
Cf. Logic: The Theory of Inquiry, pp. 105–106, p. 67.
Cf. Experience and Nature, p.42, p.259.
Essays in Experimental Logic, pp. 238–239.
Experience and Nature, p. 303.
Op. cit., p. 308.
Cf. “The Problem of Knowledge,” in The Influence of Darwin on Philosophy (New York, Henry Holt, 1910), p. 302.
Cf. “The Development of American Pragmatism,” in Philosophy and Civilization, p. 27. “The Psychological tendencies which have exerted an influence on instrumentalism are of a biological rather than a psychological nature.” etc.
Cf. Experience and Nature, p. 290, “Every thought and meaning has its substratum in some organic act of absorption or elimination of seeking or turning away from, of destroying or caring for, of signaling or responding.”
Cf. The Quest for Certainty (New York, Minton, Balch, 1929), p.231.
Cf. “The Influence of Darwinism on Philosophy,” in The Influence of Darwin on Philosophy, p. 13. “Philosophy forswears inquiry after absolute origins and absolute finalities in order to explore specific values and the specific conditions that generate them.” Cf. also p. 9: “...He emancipated, once for all, genetic and experimental ideas as an organon of asking questions and looking for explanations.”
Op. cit., p. 10.
Cf. Experience and Nature, p. 272. It may be noted that these characterizations of events are noninterpretationistic, and in conflict with Dewey’s distinction between “events” and “objects.”
Ibid.
Cf. “The inclusive Philosophic Idea” in Philosophy and Civilization, p. 86.
Cf. “The unity of the Human Being,” in Joseph Ratner, Intelligence in the Modern World: John Dewey’s Philosophy (New York, Modern Library, 1939), p. 825.
Cf. Logic: The Theory of Inquiry, Chap. III.
Cf. T. Z. Lavine, “John Dewey and the Founders: Human Nature and Politics, Works and Days, Vol. 3, no. 2, 1985, pp. 53–75.
Cf. e.g., The Quest for Certainty, p. 16; Experience and Nature, p. 214; Freedom and Culture, passim.
Cf. e.g., “The Problem of Knowledge,” loc. cit., pp. 293–294, for an analysis of the motives of the sensationalist and the rationalist. Cf. “The Development of American Pragamatism,” op. cit., pp. 32–34, p. 25, on the motives and values held by American pragmatism.
“It follows that there is no specifiable difference between philosophy and its role in the history of civilization.” Cf. “Philosophy and Civilization” in Philosophy and Civilization, p.6.
Cf. “The Influence of Darwinism on Philosophy,” op. cit., p. 17. “...Philosophy must in time become a method of locating and interpreting the more serious of the conflicts that occur in life, and a method of projecting ways for dealing with them.” Cf. Experience and Nature, p. 437.
Cf. Logic: The Theory of Inquiry, p. 23. “A naturalistic theory of logic...precludes reduction of the ‘higher’ to the ‘lower’ just as it precludes complete breaks and gaps.”
C. I. Lewis, Mind and the World-Order. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1929, p. 195.
Op. cit., p. 266. Cf., p. 14: “Experience does not categorize itself. The criteria of interpretation are of the mind; they are imposed upon the given by our active attitude.” Cf. p. 271, p. 265, et passim.
Cf. op. cit., Chap. VI, “The Relativity of Knowledge and the Independence of the Real.” Lewis’s arguments supports Kant’s position on independent reality.
Op. cit., p. 257, p. 259.
E.g., op. cit., p. 239, p. 21.
Op. cit., Preface, p. viii.
Op. cit., p. 272.
Op. cit., p. 267.
Cf. op. cit., p. 311.
Cf. op. cit., pp. 215–222.
Op. cit., p. 311.
Op. cit., p. 266.
See also T. Z. Lavine, “C.I. Lewis and the Problem of Phenomenalism,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Vol. XLI, no. 3, March 1981; and “C.I. Lewis and the Problem of Foundationalism,” paper presented to American Philosophical Association, Eastern Division, 1984, publication forthcoming.
Cf. Mind and the World-Order, pp. 309–324. Cf. Richard J. Bernstein, Beyond Objectivism and Relativism, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press 1983, p.8–25,
Cf. Mind and the World-Order, pp. 309–324. Cf. Richard J. Bernstein, Beyond Objectivism and Relativism, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press 1983 71–79 et passim.
Ideology and Utopia: An Introduction to the Sociology of Knowledge, transl. Louis Wirth and Edward Shils (New York, Harcourt, Brace, 1936), pp. 76–77. Cf. p. 241: “The clue to...conflict, therefore, is not to be found in the ‘object in itself...but in the very different expectations, purposes, and impulses arising out of experience.” Cf. pp. 88–89.
Cf. op. cit., p. 50.
Cf. op. cit., pp. 84–87.
Op. cit., pp. 173–187.
Op. cit., p. 185. The definition of ideology as thought transcendent of reality leads Mannheim to postulate “adequate ideas” as thought which does not transcend reality, but is “congruent” with it. But this noninterpretationistic concept is not pursued by him. In any case it falls on two counts; it is not compatible with his notion of “synthesis” (see below); and elsewhere (p. 137) he asserts the desirability of a Utopian element in thought.
Op. cit., p. 239, Cf. p. 244. Cf., his Man and Society in an Age of Reconstruction (New York, Harcourt, Brace, 1940), p. 206. Cf. Ideology and Utopia, p. 244, p. 274, pp. 39–40, et passim.
Op. cit., p. 239, n. Cf. A. P. Simonds, Karl Mannheim’s Sociology of Knowledge. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978. Simonds argues that Mannheim’s sociology of knowledge “must be conceived in terms of a hermeneutic interest.” p. 38.
Op. cit., pp. 143–144. Cf. T. Z. Lavine, “Karl Mannheim and Contemporary Functionalism,” in Towards the Sociology of Knowledge, ed. Gunter W. Remmling, N.Y.: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1974.
E.g., op. cit., pp. 147–148.
“philosophy as Rigorous Science,” Logos, 1911; Phenomenology and the Crisis of Philosophy, English translation and introduction by Quentin Lauer, New York: Harper and Row, 1965. Quentin Lauer suggests Husserl’s relation to Fichte, discussed below. I am indebted to Quentin Laueres discussion of Husserl’s transcendental subjectivity as a transformation of Kant’s formal a priori “into a formal and material a priori...” (p. 52)
The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology: An Introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy, [1934–37; a part published in 1936]; translation and introduction by David Carr. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1970.
Cf. Husserl, Ideas [Vols. I–III, 1912–28], Vol. I, transl, by W. R. Boyce Gibson. New York: Macmillan, 1931, pp. 110–111. Cf. Husserl, Cartesian Meditations [1931]; transl. by Dorion Cairns. The Hague: Nighoff, 1960, pp. 19–21.
The reference is to Husserl’s conception of the “infinite” tasks of Western Philosophy (“Philosophy and the Crisis of European Man”); also to the major contribution to Husserl scholarship by Maurice Natanson, Edmund Husserl: Philosopher of Infinite Tasks. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1973, p. 175 ff; also chapter 9, “The Crisis of Reason,” pp. 168–189.
Cf. the argument for transcendental intersubjectivity in Cartesian Meditations, pp. 88–150.
Cf. e.g., George Psathas, ed., Phenomenological Sociology: Issues and Applications. New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1973;
Maurice Natanson, ed., Phenomenology and the Social Sciences, Vols. I and II. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1973.
Cf. Paul Ricoeur: “It is thus finally against the early Husserl, against the alternately Platonizing and idealizing tendencies of his theory of meaning and intentionality, that the theory of understanding has been erected.” Paul Ricoeur, The Conflict of Interpretations [1969], English translation. Willis Domingo, et al., 1974, ed. Don Ihde. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press. Instructive here is the relationship between Husserl and Dilthey, which included a significant personal meeting in 1905 and correspondence in 1911 shortly before Dilthey’s death. Dilthey appears to have been drawn to Husserl’s foundational structures as providing needed support for the methodology of the Geisteswissenschaften; and Husserl was drawn to Dilthey’s exploration of Erlebnis as the lived experience of inner, outer, and social reality. Husserl placed great value on Dilthey’s Erlebnis concept as an attack on naturalistic psychology and also as a potential approach to a phenomenological reduction (as well as an anticipation of his own Lebenswelt concept). But Husserl was in search of a phenomenological transcendentalism which Dilthey’s psychologism and historicism could not provide; and Dilthey increasingly shied away from what he perceived as the rigid abstractions of a phenomenology which would be foundational for both the natural and the human sciences, and moved instead toward a hermeneutic of Verstehen for the Geisteswissenschaften.
See R. Makkreel Dilthey: Philosophy of the Human Studies (Princeton U.P. 1975), pp.273–294;
also: Makkreel “Husserl, Dilthey and the Relation of the Life-World to History,” Research in Phenomenology v. 12, 1985, pp.39–58.
Richard Rorty, “A Reply to Dreyfuss and Taylor,” Review of Metaphysics, XXXIV, 1980: pp. 39–46;
Richard Rorty, “A Reply to Dreyfuss and Taylor,” Review of Metaphysics, XXXIV, 1980: pp. 47–55.
Martin Heidegger, Being and Time [1927], transl. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. New York: Harper and Row, 1962.
Paul Ricoeur, The Conflict of Interpretations, p. 7.
Paul Ricoeur, “The Task of Hermeneutics,” Philosophy Today, 17, Summer 1973. Reprinted in Heidegger and Modern Philosophy, ed. by Michael Murray. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978, p. 156. See Habermas, “Martin Heidegger: The Great Influence,” Philosophical-Political Profiles, transl. Frederick G. Lawrence, Cambridge: MIT Press, 1983: “Heidegger’s thought...understands itself just as little in relation to social practice as it does in relation to the interpretation of the results of the sciences.”
Being and Time, p. 227.
Cf., William J. Richardson, S. J. Heidegger; Through Phenomenology to Thought, second edition, The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1967, p. 238.
Heidegger, Holzwege, p. 336. Cited by Richardson, op. cit., p. 13.
It is significant that Heidegger’s “philosophical poetics” omits reference to the celebrated Jewish poet Paul Celan, who expressed concern for the very possibility of poetry “in an age--which had passed through the Holocaust.” Cf. Veronique M. Foti, “Paul Celan’s Challenge to Heidegger’s Poetics,” presented to the conference of the Heidegger Circle, May 1987.
Cf. Hans-Georg Gadamer, Philosophical Apprenticeships, transl. Robert R. Sullivan. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1985.
Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method [1960], transl. and edited by Garret Bardem and John Cummings. New York: Seabury Press, 1975.
Truth and Method, p. 289.
Truth and Method, p. 267.
“The University of the Hermeneutical Problem,” Philosophical Hermeneutics, University of California Press, 1976.
Op. cit., p. 10–11.
“The Heritage of Hegel,” Reason in the Age of Science, transl. by Frederick G. Lawrence. Cambridge: MIT Press 1984, p. 41.
Op. cit., p. 43, p. 41.
Cf. Martin Jay, “The Frankfurt School’s Critique of Karl Mannheim and the Sociology of Knowledge,” Telos 20, Summer 1974, also Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination: A History of the Frankfurt School and the Institute of Social Research, 1923–1950. Boston: Little Brown and Co., 1973.
Jurgen Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests [1968] transl. Jeremy J. Shapiro, Boston: Beacon Press, 1971.
Jurgen Habermas, Theory and Practice [1967] transl. by John Viertel, Boston: Beacon Press, 1973. (Abridgement of fourth German edition, 1971) Introduction, p. 8.
Thomas McCarthy, The Critical Theory of Jurgen Habermas. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1978, p. 91. My discussion of Habermas is indebted to McCarthy’s comprehensive and insightful analysis of Habermas’s theoretical development. On the above issue,
cf. also Henning Ottman, “Cognitive Interests and Self-Reflection,” Habermas: Critical Debates, ed. John B. Thompson and David Held. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1982.
See Habermas’s summation of these: “Introduction: Some Difficulties in the Attempt to Link Theory and Praxis,” Theory and Practice, pp. 14–16.
See “Erkenntnis und Interesse,” reprinted in D. Emmet and A. Maclntyre, eds. Sociological Theory and Philosophical Analysis. London, 1970, pp. 36–55; Knowledge and Human Interests, pp. 109–115.
The principal events of the debate, sequentially: Habermas, “A Review of Gadamer’s Truth and Method,” Philosophische Rundschau 14, Beiheft 5, Tubingen, 1966–7. Reprinted in Habermas, Zurlogik der Sozialwissenschaften, Frankfurt am Main, 1971, pp. 251–290. Reprinted in F. Dallmayr and Thomas McCarthy, eds., Understanding and Social Inquiry, Notre Dame, Indiana: Notre Dame Press, 1977, pp. 335–363. Reply by Gadamer, “Rhetorik, Hermeneutik und Ideologiekritik,” Gadamer, Kleine Schriften I: Philosophie-Hermeneutik. Tubingen: J.C.B. Mohn, 1967. Habermas’s reply, “The Hermeneutic Claim to Universality” and Gadamer’s “Replik,” as well as contributions from other authors, appeared in the anthology devoted to the Hermeneutikstreit, Hermeneutik und Ideologiekritik, ed. K.O. Appel et al, Frankfurt: Suhnkamp, 1971. The debate continued in 1975 with Gadamer’s criticism of Habermas’s universal pragmatics, “Postscript,” Wahrheit und Methode, 3rd edition.
“A Review of Gadamer’s Truth and Method” [1967] Fred Dallmayr and Thomas McCarthy, eds. Understanding and Social Inquiry. Indiana: Notre Dame Press, 1977, p. 359.
Op. cit., p. 360. For a different view of Habermas on language, see V. Tejera, “Community, Communication and Meaning: Theories of Buchler and Habermas,” Symbolic Interaction, Vol. 9, no. 1, pp. 83–104, 1986.
“A Review of Gadamer’s Truth and Method” p. 358.
Ibid., p. 360.
See Hans-Georg Gadamer, “On the Scope and Function of Hermeneutical Reflection,” Philosophical Hermeneutics, Berkeley: University of California Press, pp. 18–43. Reconciliation of the multi-factoral issues raised in this debate have been attempted, notably by the differing perspectives of Paul Ricoeur, “Ethics and Culture: Habermas and Gadamer in Dialogue,” Philosophy Today, 17, 1973, pp. 153–65; and Richard J. Bernstein, Beyond Objectivism and Relativism, pp. 182–97 et passim.
See Thomas McCarthy, “Rationality and Relativism: Habermas’s ‘Overcoming’ of Hermeneutics,”. Habermas: Critical Debates, pp. 57–59.
See T. Z. Lavine, “C. I. Lewis and the Problem of Foundationalism,” presented to American Philosophical Association, Eastern Division, 1984, forthcoming.
See “What is Universal Pragmatics?”, Communication and the Evolution of Society. Boston: Beacon Press, 1979, pp. 1–68.
Knowledge and Human Interests made a similar effort to root cognitive interests in naturalistic conditions. Cf. also the empirically conditioned a priori concepts of C. I. Lewis’s Mind and the Word-Order. For a different view of Habermas in this connection, see V. Tejera, “Habermas and Buchler.”
Knowledge and Human Interests, p. 94.
Habermas: Critical Debates, p. 238.
See John B. Thompson, “Universal Pragmatics,” Habermas: Critical Debates, pp. 116–133, to which my discussion of communicate competence is indebted.
Jacques Derrida, Positions, transl. by Alan Bass. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981, p. 54.
“Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences,” Writing and Difference, transl. by Alan Bass. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978, pp. 279–80.
See Richard Rorty, Consequences of Pragmatism, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982: “Philosophy as a Kind of Writing: An Essay on Derrida,” p. 103.
“Differance,” Margins of Philosophy, [1962] transl. by Alan Bass. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982, p. 17.
Positions, p. 44.
The reference is to Derrida’s essay “Signature Event Context,” Glyph I, 1977, pp. 172–97 which provoked an exchange on “performative utterances” with John Searle. See Christopher Norris, Deconstruction: Theory and Practice, London: Methuen, 1982, pp 108 ff. to which my discussion is indebted.
Of Grammatology [1967], transl. and preface by Gayati Chaknavorty Spivak. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1976...“That Dangerous Supplement...,” p. 145.
See Positions, pp. 45–6; also also Gayati Chakavorty Spivak, preface, On Grammatology, IXV.
See Positions, p. 42.
Nietzsche, “On Truth and Falsity in Their Ultramoral Sense,” in Complete Works of Nietzsche, ed. Oscar Levy, New York, 1974, Vol. 2, p. 174, cited by Derrida, “The White Mythology,” Margins of Philosophy, p. 217.
“white Mythology: Metaphor in the Text of Philosophy,” p. 213.
“Structure, Sign and Play,” p. 280.
Ibid.
Of Grammatology, Preface by Spivak, IXXV.
Positions, pp. 41–42.
Of Grammatology, Preface by Spivak, IXIX.
See Of Grammatology, p. 93.
Of Grammatology, p. 15.
Positions, p. 50.
Of Grammatology, Preface by Spivak, IXXVII.
Margins of Philosophy, “The Ellipsis of the Sun,” p. 243.
Margins of Philosophy, “The Flowers of Rhetoric,” p. 253.
“Structure, Sign and Play,” p. 292.
Ibid.
Of Grammatology, p. 158.
Norris, pp. 92–98.
“Does Philosophy Still Have a Purpose?” [1971], Philosophical-Political Profiles, transl. F.G. Lawrence. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1983, pp. 9, 14. Cited by McCarthy, op. cit., p. 105.
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Lavine, T.Z. (1989). The Interpretive Turn from Kant to Derrida: A Critique. In: Lavine, T.Z., Tejera, V. (eds) History and Anti-History in Philosophy. Nijhoff International Philosophy Series, vol 34. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-2466-6_3
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