Dieter Freundlieb

The Empirical Study of Literature. How Empirical can it be

This article addresses some of the problems of an empirical study of literature resulting from the fact that it cannot, qua empirical science, engage in the evaluation of literary texts and the moral issues those texts exemplify as well as the further fact (if it is a fact) that statements about textual meanings in the context of literary interpretations are not empirically true or false. Traditional interpretive literary criticism has always played a significant part in the reproduction and modification of culture. From this point of view, an empirical science of literature must appear severely limited. However, it can be argued that such an empirical study of literature can show that interpretation is necessarily a constructive process and therefore always, to a large extent, determined by (often ideological) background assumptions. An empirical study of literature would make interpretation one of its objects of study and explanation. Such investigations would further our understanding of processes of text comprehension in general, but it would also allow us to reconstruct the background assumptions guiding traditional interpretations.

The Difference between Science and Hermeneutics: Habermas’s Theory of the Necessarily Normative Nature of Linguistic Interpretation

In the history of hermeneutic philosophy and the empirical hermeneutical disciplines, various attempts have been made to demonstrate the distinctive nature of linguistic understanding and to mark it off against the ways in which knowledge is acquired, and the type of knowledge produced, in the natural sciences. The reasons that have been given for distinguishing between the hermeneutical disciplines, including the social sciences in so far as they deal with linguistic data, and the natural sciences have varied. In recent times Hans-Georg Gadamer and his followers have argued, based on Heidegger’s ontological analysis of Verstehen as an Existenzial, that the experience of truth in the Geisteswissenschaften is independent of scientific method. More recently still, Karl-Otto Apel, a close though increasingly critical collaborator of Jurgen Habermas, has argued that while hermeneutic processes of understanding form a necessary part of all the sciences, including the natural sciences, such processes are complementary to the objectifying procedures of science.1 In this paper I wish to focus on a somewhat different but related attempt by Habermas to show that the hermeneutical disciplines, in particular those he regards as non-objectifying critical social sciences, are necessarily distinct from the natural sciences and from any form of social science modeled on the natural sciences.

Epistemological realism and the indeterminacy of meaning. Is systematic interpretation possible

SummaryThis paper tries to show how the irreducible indeterminacy of textual meanings can be reconciled with epistemological realism which normally presupposes independently existing but determinate objects of knowledge. E.D. Hirschs project of objective interpretation, including his most recent attempts to show that meanings, in spite of their openness to future modifications, are historically determined objects of knowledge, is being criticized. The paper argues that his use of the semantics and the reference theories of Kripke, Putnam, and others forces him to give up, against his own intention, his methodologically important distinction between meaning and significance. Within such theories a strict separation of linguistic knowledge of meaning and world knowledge can no longer be upheld. Since the application of individually and historically variable world knowledge is unavoidable in the process of understanding texts, the textual meanings reconstructed by readers will always remain indeterminate.However, this state of affairs does not force us to abandon epistemological realism as it can be shown that the meanings of words and texts are not objects of knowledge in the usual sense. Meanings are cognitive capacities which make our knowledge of external objects possible. They are thus not themselves objects of knowledge. Systematic interpretation of texts in the sense of obtaining objective knowledge is therefore impossible. Nonetheless, suitably developed psycholinguistic theories of text comprehension allow us, at least in principle, to explain systematically how interpretations come about.

Hermeneutics, deconstruction, and linguistic theory

SummaryThis paper is an exposition as well as a critical examination of M. Franks response to the Derrida/Searle debate. It argues that Franks critique of Derrida and Searle is partly justified but suffers from a number of shortcomings. The author agrees with Franks argument that Derrida fails to explain how linguistic meaning is possible on the basis of purely differential relations between signs (différance) and supports his view that the human subject, in spite of its lack of complete self-transparency, is endowed with more autonomy and semantic creativity than Derrida is willing to grant it. The paper tries to show, however, that much of Franks critique of linguistic theory as represented by the work of Searle is unjustified because it is informed by a questionable notion of linguistic determinism rooted in Schleiermacher and Saussurean structuralism, a notion of ineffable or non-conceptual individual meaning that remains insufficiently explicated, and a generally anti-naturalist attitude towards language which leads to a misunderstanding of the role linguistics and related cognitive sciences can (and cannot) play in the hermeneutic sciences.