The Hermeneutic Critique of Cognitive Psychology
- The Hermeneutic Critique of Cognitive Psychology
hermeneutics, cognitive psychology, cognitive science, psychotherapy, psychoanalysis, meaning
Guy Widdershoven has written a productive and needed paper in which he addresses the respective approaches of cognitive psychology and hermeneutics to the issues of meaning and mental disorder. In the paper he adopts an even-handed attitude toward the two disciplines, describing and contrasting the two without privileging one over the other. In this commentary I would like to develop the discussion further by arguing for the merits of the hermeneutic over the cognitive psychological approach to meaning. This exercise will hopefully have the effect of extending the discussion initiated by Widdershoven.
The task of comparing cognitive psychology and hermeneutics is rendered particularly difficult by virtue of the multitude of ways in which the hermeneutic approach itself is understood. Different views of hermeneutics suggest different contrasts with cognitive psychology. The author has dealt with this complexity by settling on a unitary understanding of hermeneutics. In developing the argument below I will draw on some of the differences in how hermeneutics is understood.
1. Representational Thought and the Locus of Meaning
Probably the most fundamental difference between cognitive psychological and hermeneutic approaches to meaning has to do with the very locus of meaning. Where does meaning reside? The response of cognitive psychology is clear and forthright: meaning resides in mental representations. The latter are the world’s representatives within the mind. If the representations present the world correctly, the individual whose mind is in question is said to perceive or understand the state of affairs outside his or her mind correctly. If the representations misrepresent the world, the individual is subject to error—or mental disorder. As Widdershoven points out, from the cognitive psychology perspective, pathological behavior is based on such misrepresentations, and treatment consists in correcting them. “By examining how misrepresentations come about, and how they can be overcome, people can be helped to regain normal functioning. . . .” [End Page 259]
The hermeneutic account of meaning could not be further from the above picture. Hermeneutically understood, meaning is not a reified, thing-like entity located in the mind. Where, then, does meaning reside in the hermeneutic account? If I am engaged in the interpretation of a text or a nonliterary monument, the meaning is found in the document or monument. If I am investigating the action, or the entire life, of another person, the meaning is in the action or the life. This is the operative, embodied intentionality described by Merleau-Ponty (1962). And finally, if I am examining the life of a community, the meaning is located in the shared practices of a community. It is the latter that is emphasized by Widdershoven when he contrasts hermeneutics with cognitive psychology: “Meaning is not conceptualized as cognitive representation, but as practical understanding. Action can be explained by making explicit the practical meaning-making (or style) that it embodies.”
The epistemological gulf between the cognitive/representational and the hermeneutic approaches to meaning has been studied by Charles Taylor, who traces the representational approach to seventeenth-century rationalism, with its Cartesian and empiricist origins. According to Taylor, the disastrous accomplishment of seventeenth-century rationalism was an ontologizing of rational procedure. What should have counted as a special and occasional accomplishment of human thinking, namely, the ability to step back and adopt a rational, objective, disengaged attitude toward an object or toward the world (to adopt a “view from nowhere,” in Thomas Nagel’s 1986 phrase), was read into the very constitution of the mind. The rationalist, disengaged mind operates through mental representations, which are atomistic, manipulable, and objective (value-neutral). While seeming to offer an objective view of the world, the representational mind ends up in an epistemological quagmire, in which the subject is in contact not with the world, but with its own representations. According to Taylor it has been very difficult to free ourselves from the rationalist quagmire. He credits Heidegger and Wittgenstein in the twentieth century with breaking us loose from the rationalist hold by reminding us forcefully that knowledge is primarily not a set of mental representations but an embodied, engaged involvement in the world, and that all objective knowledge...
