The Interpretive Turn: Philosophy, Science, Culture 9781501735028

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The Interpretive Turn

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The Interpretive Turn PHILOSOPHY, SCIENCE, CULTURE

EDITED

BY

David R. Hiley, James F. Bohman, and Richard Shusterman

Cornell University Press Ithaca and London

Copyright © by 1991 Cornell University All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher. For information, address Cornell University Press, 124 Roberts Place, Ithaca, New York 14850. First published 1991 by Cornell University Press.

International Standard Book Number 0-8014-2549-2 (cloth) International Standard Book Number 0-8014-9785-x (paper) Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 91-55061 Printed in the United States of America Librarians: Library of Congress cataloging information appears on the last page of the book.

© The paper in this book meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences— Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984.

For all the philosophy campers

Contents

Preface Introduction: The Interpretive Turn James F. Bohman, David R. Hiley, Richard Shusterman

ix 1

PART ONE

The Interpretive Turn in the Natural and Human Sciences

1. The Natural and the Human Sciences Thomas S. Kuhn 2. Heidegger's Hermeneutic Realism Hubert L. Dreyfus 3 ., Interpretation in Natural and Human Science Joseph Rouse

17 25 42

PART TWO

Interpretation and Epistemology

Inquiry as Recontextualization: An Anti-Dualist Account of Interpretation Richard Rorty Pragmatism or Hermeneutics? Epistemology after Foundationalism Charles B. Guignon Beneath Interpretation Richard Shusterman Vll

59

81 102

Vlll

Contents

7. Holism without Skepticism: Contextualism and the Limits of Interpretation James F. Bohman 8. Is Hermeneutics Ethnocentric? David Couzens Hoy

129

155

PART THREE

Interpretation

J. 10. 11.

12. 13.

Interpretation as Explanation Paul A. Roth True Figures: Metaphor, Social Relations, and the Sorites Samuel C. Wheeler III Rhetoric in Postmodern Feminism: Put-Offs, Put-Ons, and Political Plays Eloise A. Buker Constitutional Hermeneutics John T. Valauri Serious Watching Alexander Nehamas Hermeneutics and Genre: Bakhtin and the Problem of Communicative Interaction Thomas Kent The Dialogical Self Charles Taylor Contributors Index

179 197

218 245 260

282 304 315 319

Preface

In the summer of 1988, beneath the redwoods overlooking the Pa¬ cific, we gathered at the University of California at Santa Cruz to con¬ sider the theme '7Interpretation and the Human Sciences." The meeting was an institute sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities Division of Education Programs, and organized by David Hoy and Hubert Dreyfus. David and Bert were joined by a staff that included Thomas Kuhn, Charles Taylor, Richard Rorty, Stan¬ ley Cavell, Alexander Nehamas, and Clifford Geertz. Twenty-two people—from philosophy, literature, law, and political science—were invited to participate in the six-week institute. As with every other distinction that confronted the group during that summer, the distinc¬ tion between staff and participant soon collapsed, and what emerged was a community in the fullest sense. This is not to say that con¬ sensus was reached on any topic. There was none. But through the formal seminar, ad hoc working groups, lunches, beach parties, jazz clubs, funky restaurants, hikes in the redwoods, late night conversa¬ tions, Sunday brunches, wine tours, and encounters with dreamers and dowsers who shared the UCSC campus that summer, something special emerged. The intense and stimulating summer was followed by two "reunion" meetings, first in Philadelphia in February 1989, and then in Memphis in October 1989. Those who were able to attend spent each meeting working together through papers that had resulted from the institute. Some of those papers form this volume. Not everyone could be included here. Constraints of space, other commitments, and the organization of this volume meant that a selec¬ tion had to be made. It is our hope, however, that the essays included IX

X

Preface

here convey the intellectual excitement, the variety of interests, and the quality of discussion that were characteristic of the institute, and that this book will be a credit to the entire group. Though these essays differ and disagree in fundamental ways, they are products of a col¬ laborative process and each is better for it. Those participating in the institute that summer in Santa Cruz were Frank Adler, Gordon Bearn, James Bohman, Eloise Buker, Ronald Carson, Stanley Cavell, John Connolly, Stephen Doty, Hubert Dreyfus, Marilyn Frye, Clifford Geertz, Judith Genova, Charles Guignon, David Hiley, David Hoy, Henry Kariel, Thomas Kent, Judy Koffler, Michael Krausz, Thomas Kuhn, Alexander Nehamas, Joseph Prabhu, Richard Rorty, Paul Roth, Joseph Rouse, Richard Shusterman, John Valauri, Samuel Wheeler, and Kathleen Wright. D. H. Auburn, Alabama J. B. St. Louis, Missouri R. S. Paris

The Interpretive Turn

INTRODUCTION

The Interpretive Turn James F. Bohman, David R. Hiley, and Richard Shusterman

It is now popular to mark shifts in philosophical method and preoc¬ cupation as 7'turns." In the modern period, for example, philosophy turned from its previous preoccupation with metaphysical questions to a primary concern with the possibility and nature of knowledge. This "epistemological turn" was to dominate philosophy for two centuries, only to be replaced in the early part of this century, at least for Anglo-American philosophy, by a "linguistic turn." By analyzing language, it sought to achieve many of the same goals that epistemol¬ ogy seeks in analyzing the mind. The linguistic turn has been charac¬ terized by preoccupations with the structure of language, word-world relationships, and the analysis of meaning. Recently, however, the views about the foundations of knowledge and the knowing subject that were the basis for the epistemological turn have been called into question, and it has seemed to many philosophers that language and meaning cannot bear the kind of weight the linguistic turn required. These challenges have been joined by developments in the philoso¬ phy of sciences and the hermeneutic tradition, pointing toward a new direction in philosophy characterized by an interest in interpretive activities. This "interpretive turn" has benefited from the interpre¬ tive practices of such disciplines as literary criticism, cultural anthro¬ pology, jurisprudence, historiography, and feminist theory. With philosophy's redirection of attention to the interpretive disciplines, however, the concept of interpretation itself has become the source for controversy. The more philosophy and the interpretive disciplines proclaim the importance of interpretation in all of inquiry, the less there is agreement about what it is, what interpretive practices pre¬ suppose, and how to judge interpretive successes and failures. 1

2

Bohman, Hiley, and Shusterman

The papers that make up this volume grew out of an institute, sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities, in which participants were to address the problems that emerge when philoso¬ phy and other disciplines take the interpretive turn. The institute was organized by David Hoy and Hubert Dreyfus around the following questions: (1) What is interpretation? As the old logical division of labor be¬ tween explanation and understanding is abandoned and interpre¬ tation comes to characterize the whole field of human endeavor, what, if anything, is. the "contrast class" to interpretation? (2) What makes an interpretation correct or better than another inter¬ pretation? As one answers this question, does the interpretive turn simply reintroduce older epistemological questions about truth and validity in a new guise? (3) If interpretations are fallible and circular and if there is nothing to appeal to that is not an interpretation, is the interpretive turn relativistic and ethnocentric? (4) If interpretive practices do not presuppose standards of universal reason and neutral evidence, do they become nihilistic or the result of sheer power and authority? The essays collected here have been guided by discussion of these questions during the institute. They, like that discussion, quickly move beyond the older debate about the relationship between the natural and human sciences to issues about the "epistemology" of interpretation and the implications of the interpretive turn. As the essays will show, these questions about interpretation cannot be dis¬ cussed without raising fundamental issues in epistemology, ontol¬ ogy, the philosophy of science, ethics, and political philosophy, and, consequently, without redrawing the boundaries of knowledge and the methods of various disciplines. In collecting these essays and, thereby, capturing something of the conversations of the institute, we hope to advance discussion on these important issues. (1) For most of the modern period philosophy has drawn its author¬ ity from epistemology, from its claim to provide the foundations for the rest of inquiry. Epistemology reigned as "the tribunal of pure reason," the high priest of culture that could authorize some intellec¬ tual endeavors and condemn others. In the heyday of epistemology a fundamental distinction was drawn between explanation and inter-

Introduction: The Interpretive Turn

3

pretation. In the terms of the distinction, the real business of inquiry was explanation, whereas interpretive practices were confined to the special domain of the human sciences, the traditional Geisteswissenschaften. For much of this century, positivist philosophy of science reinforced the distinction through its view of the unity of science, which demanded a reduction of all sciences, including the social and behavioral sciences, to the ontology and methods of physics. The result was a clear demarcation of the scientific enterprise and inter¬ pretive disciplines. The distinction also implied a normative distinc¬ tion that served to privilege the views about reason, knowledge, and the knowing subject inherent in the positivist view of science. The recent impetus for rejecting the demarcation of the natural and human sciences has come initially from within the philosophy of the natural sciences, in challenges to positivism by the postempiricist philosophers of science such as Thomas Kuhn, Mary Hesse, and Paul Feyerabend. For positivism, the standard list of differences between the sciences and other forms of inquiry had derived from a view of the natural sciences that turned on the supposed neutrality of observation, the "givenness" of experience, the independence of em¬ pirical data from theoretical frameworks, the ideal of a univocal lan¬ guage, and belief in the rational progress of science. With the rejection of positivism and its thesis of the unity of science, many of the historic reasons for drawing a line between the natural and hu¬ man sciences simply disappeared; distinctions between the disci¬ plines were blurred by the suggestion of a much looser and inter¬ pretive conception of natural scientific inquiry. But the interpretive turn is having repercussions within the more traditional interpretive disciplines as well. Within the human sciences themselves it was once thought that interpretation was called for primarily when one wanted to under¬ stand exotic cultures and historically distant texts. However, recent views in the philosophy of language—W. V. O. Quine's indetermi¬ nacy of translation thesis and Donald Davidson's view about radical interpretation—suggest that our understanding of speakers in our own culture and even our understanding of ourselves raise the same sorts of interpretive problems as those posed in our attempts to un¬ derstanding exotic cultures and the distant past. As with recent phi¬ losophy of science, this issue has served to expand the scope and interest in questions about the nature of interpretive practices. Fur¬ thermore, Quine's and Davidson's arguments against a key distinc¬ tion of the linguistic turn, that between the conceptual and the

4

Bohman, Hiley, and Shusterman

empirical, has served to undermine many of the presuppositions of the linguistic turn itself. The result is that recent directions in the philosophy of science and the philosophy of language are merging with the hermeneutical tradition and developments in the various interpretive disciplines to bring questions about interpretation to the center of philosophical discussion. The turn to interpretation raises questions the answers to which inform the varied perspectives that make up this volume. The essays in Part One take up the debate about the relationship between the human and the natural sciences. We begin with this debate because it is through it that many of us, in the past few years, have been led to larger questions about the nature and role of interpretation. Ironically, it is among the friends of the human sciences, not from old-guard positivists, that one now finds the most heated arguments for a difference between the human and natural sciences. From the point of view of the human sciences, the claim of the uniqueness of interpretive methods not only protected them from the imperialism of natural scientific method but also involved important ontological, moral, and political convictions having to do with human freedom, agency, and power. How or whether one draws a line between the natural and human sciences is a debate involving interrelated meth¬ odological, ontological, and pragmatic considerations. This became clear to American philosophers as a result of an important exchange among Charles Taylor, Hubert Dreyfus, and Richard Rorty that ap¬ peared in the Review of Metaphysics in 1980, and their exchange is continued and extended in this volume. Since their views form part of the background for the institute and for the essays that follow, it is useful to summarize them.1 Despite the direction of postpositivist philosophy of science, Taylor and Dreyfus have remained staunch defenders of a fundamental dis¬ tinction between the natural and human sciences. Rorty, however, has argued that it is a distinction that has outlived any usefulness it once may have had. Taylor's and Dreyfus's refusal to abandon the distinction is motivated by their desire to retain both a realist account of the natural sciences and essentialist claims about human beings. While holding that the natural sciences constitute a social practice like any other and that the history of this practice is one of Kuhnian conceptual revolutions, Taylor and Dreyfus insist that it is nonethelrThis exchange should be read as background for the essays in Part One. See Review of Metaphysics 33 (1980).

Introduction: The Interpretive Turn

5

less the social practice whose goal it is to gain access to subjectindependent reality—to decontextualize beliefs from the web of pur¬ poses and practices, to '"un-world" them, in the Heideggerian idiom. As Taylor puts it, science does not grasp things merely as they are relevant to our purposes and practices, but rather "as they are, out¬ side of the immediate perspective of our goals, desires and activi¬ ties."2 Thomas Kuhn opens this volume with an essay clarifying his own position in relation to Taylor's view of the natural sciences. Kuhn believes with Taylor that the natural and human sciences are not of the same sort, but he disagrees with Taylor about where to draw the line between them. Unlike Taylor, he believes that the concepts of natural science shape the natural world just as much as the concepts of the human sciences shape our social world. In returning to his familiar example from The Structure of Scientific Revolutions of people with different theories about the heavens inhabiting different worlds, he remarks, "I really do believe some—though by no means all—of the nonsense attributed to me." In the second essay Dreyfus takes up this aspect of the debate, offering an interpretation of Martin Heidegger's philosophy of science as a basis for what he calls "her¬ meneutic realism." Although he believes that Heidegger correctly undermines the illegitimate authority of the natural sciences and rec¬ ognizes that science is a cultural practice, he nonetheless claims that Heidegger holds that the natural sciences can tell us truths about objective reality. Joseph Rouse, in the following essay, claims that arguments such as Taylor's and Dreyfus's not only fail to appreciate the full implications of postpositivist philosophy of science, they ob¬ scure the fact that the "objectivity" of science is politically laden. This debate over interpretation in the natural and human sciences is further complicated because the human sciences are "doubly her¬ meneutic." They do not just give interpretations, they are interpreta¬ tions of interpretations. What follows from this recognition for Taylor, and for Jurgen Habermas as well, is that the human sciences involve a radical reflexivity not found in the natural sciences. For Habermas, however, the double hermeneutic of the human sciences is only a guiding moral and methodological principle. But for Taylor and Dreyfus it is also ontological. It establishes something about who we are as Dasein or self-interpreting beings. 2Charles Taylor, "Rationality," in Philosophical Papers, vol. 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), p. 136.

6

Bohman, Hiley, and Shusterman

For his part, Taylor wishes to maintain the distinction between the natural and human sciences because of this essentialist view about human agency in addition to his view about the natural sciences. He has argued that there is something about human agency, bound up with the fact that we are self-interpreting beings, that would be lost in the reduction of the human to the natural sciences. Because hu¬ mans are self-interpreting beings, the meaning of human actions are always for an agent—the beings-for-whom they are meaningful. As such, the goal of the human sciences, according to Taylor, is not to achieve objectivity as in the natural sciences, but to grasp what these meanings are for agents. Critics of Taylor such as Rorty and Paul Roth are quick to object that such a view implies "meaning realism," the belief that there is a "fact of the matter" about what agents believe; or at least it presup¬ poses the belief that there is one determinate, correct interpretation. In his essay in Part Two, Rorty suggests that we give up such dual¬ isms as "belief and that about which it is a belief," and he argues for a thoroughgoing anti-essentialism. The result is that the difference between the natural and human sciences is merely sociological, not methodological and philosophical. Charles Guignon's essay in Part Two pits Taylor's stance on human agency against Rorty's pragma¬ tism, siding, finally, with a hermeneutic account of everyday human agency against Rorty. In the final essay in this volume Taylor offers an elaboration of his view about human agency implicit in the discussion about the relationship between the natural and human sciences. In this essay he claims that what is perennial about human life is that human beings always have a sense of self that situates them in ethical space, though how that space is constituted varies through history. His concern is to reject the modern, monological, and disengaged version of the self because it fails to capture how human agency is constituted by the irreducibly social, dialogical nature of action. He ends the essay alluding to M. M. Bakhtin's insight that human beings are constituted in conversation. The implication, he thinks, is that this places dialogue at the center of human life and that a science of human beings must strive for an ideal of expanded inter subjectivity between agents who interpret themselves and others. In the essay preceding Taylor's, Thomas Kent also turns to Bakhtin's work, but for more deconstructive purposes. (2) In the background of the debate over the relationship between the natural and human sciences is a series of epistemological issues

Introduction: The Interpretive Turn

7

that make up the subject matter of Part Two and inform the interpre¬ tations of Part Three. The questions at issue turn, in one way or another, on the possibility of interpretive validity and the scope of interpretation. Once epistemological notions of objectivity and truth provide neither a fruitful contrast nor an analogue for interpretive practices, how can we decide whether or not an interpretation is adequate or truthful? Once the interpretive field is rid of putatively contrast inquiries such as the natural sciences, is interpretation the only game in town? If it is, what are the consequences of the ubiquity of interpretation? Taylor once characterized Rorty's hermeneutic universalism with the quip that he and other "old-guard Diltheyeans, their shoulders hunched from years-long resistance against the en¬ croaching pressures of positivist natural science, [will now] suddenly pitch forward on their faces as all opposition ceases to the reign of universal hermeneutics."3 Rorty, in his essay in Part Two, returns to this quip, drawing the conclusion that with the reign of universal hermeneutics, the very idea of hermeneutics might disappear. Others in Part Two, however, are not so willing to indulge in Rorty's "fan¬ tasy." For them, the ubiquity of interpretation raises serious ques¬ tions that must be addressed: On what are interpretations based? Do they refer to nothing but other interpretations? How can they be assessed or justified? What are the political implications of offering or accepting one interpretation over another? As one deals with these questions, it is important to note that "universal hermeneutics" has always been an ambiguous term. Two different elements of it need to be distinguished, each raising a dis¬ tinct set of problems for the epistemology of interpretation. The first \ element may be called "hermeneutic universalism," the claim that interpretation is a universal and ubiquitous feature of all human activ¬ ity. This strand of universal hermeneutics is captured in Dreyfus's phrase that we are "interpretation all the way down." There can be no appeal to experience, meaning, or evidence that is independent of interpretation or more basic than it. The second, related strand may be called "hermeneutic contextualism," the claim that interpre¬ tation always takes place within some context or background—such as webs of belief, a complex of social relations, tradition, or the prac¬ tices of a form of life. This claim has a positive and a negative formula3Charles Taylor, "Understanding in the Human Sciences," Review of Metaphysics 34 (1980)- 26.

8

Bohman, Hiley, and Shusterman

tion. Positively, it implies holism, that is, that anything must be un¬ derstood within some presupposed context, whole, or "hermeneutic circle/' Negatively, it denies atomism, the view that something could be understood by itself independent of such contexts and could somehow be the incorrigible and foundational building blocks for knowledge. Opposing the atomism typical of much modern episte¬ mology, contextualism holds that all justification is circular. If universalism entails that everything is interpretation, contextualism implies that truth is relative to some interpretive circle or other and that there are no external or outside grounds that would warrant stronger justification and validity for interpretations. Both these basically epistemological elements of universal herme¬ neutics have powerful social and political implications. That interpre¬ tation takes place within a context or background of beliefs and practices implies that it is social, and hence that it is infused with political relations of power and domination. If there is nothing that is not an interpretation against which to judge, choices among com¬ peting interpretations—especially interpretations of other people and cultures—raise important moral and political issues about the rela¬ tionship between interpreters and the subjects of their interpreta¬ tions. Each of the epistemological elements of universal hermeneutics involves philosophical difficulties that are addressed in Shusterman's, Bohman's, and Hoy's essays in Part Two, and that inform various essays on particular interpretive practices in Part Three. First, there are obvious skeptical issues following from the circularity of interpretation. The inevitability of the hermeneutic circle undermines the positivist conception of inquiry, but it may also undermine any knowledge claim whatsoever. This implication of contextualism is the issue that Bohman's essay examines. Shusterman's concern with universal hermeneutics is somewhat different. He argues that we can overcome foundationalist epistemology without maintaining the ubiquity of interpretation. Not only is it wrong to think that interpre¬ tation exhausts the realm of meaningful experience, but such a view fosters an overly cognitivist conception of human being-in-the-world. The hermeneutic tradition has always been dogged by charges of relativism and skepticism, but the holistic nature of the interpretive turn poses the deeper problem of ethnocentrism. Rorty wants to make a virtue of this by taking the curse off ethnocentrism and being "frank" about it. "We" can understand "them" only in light of our postmodern bourgeois liberal values. David Hoy, in his essay, insists

Introduction: The Interpretive Turn

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