Hermeneutics And The Human Sciences.pdf
Sandrine Willert
Originally in 1978, this important work, by one of the leading European social theorists, is arguably the best introduction to the hermeneutic tradition as a whole. It is designed to help students of sociology and philosophy place the problems of "understanding social science" in their historical and philosophical context. It does so by presenting the major current in sociological thought as responses to the challenge of hermeneutics. The idea that true knowledge of social life can be attained only if human conduct is seen as meaningful action whose meaning is accordingly grasped has been presented as a discovery of recent sociology.
In fact its history is long and its connections plentiful, reaching beyond the boundaries of sociology itself. Yet it is in sociology that the hermeneutic tradition has attracted most interest but most misinterpretation. The debate is in full swing and there is no attempt to offer "correct" solutions - the emphasis instead is upon revealing the strengths and weaknesses of each of the main approaches. However it is Bauman's view that the theory of understanding may achieve valid results only if it treats the problem of understanding as an aspect of the ongoing process of social life.
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It has been 25 years since a report of original research was last submitted to our editors for publication, making this an appropriate time to revisit the question that was so widely debated then: what is the role of human scientists in an age when the frontiers of scientific inquiry have moved beyond the comprehensibility of humans?
No doubt many of our subscribers remember reading papers whose authors were the first individuals ever to obtain the results they described. But as metahumans began to dominate experimental research, they increasingly made their findings available only via DNT (digital neural transfer), leaving journals to publish second-hand accounts translated into human language.
Without DNT, humans could not fully grasp earlier developments nor effectively utilize the new tools needed to conduct research, while metahumans continued to improve DNT and rely on it even more. Journals for human audiences were reduced to vehicles of popularization, and poor ones at that, as even the most brilliant humans found themselves puzzled by translations of the latest findings.
No one denies the many benefits of metahuman science, but one of its costs to human researchers was the realization that they would probably never make an original contribution to science again. Some left the field altogether, but those who stayed shifted their attentions away from original research and toward hermeneutics: interpreting the scientific work of metahumans.
Textual hermeneutics became popular first, since there were already terabytes of metahuman publications whose translations, although cryptic, were presumably not entirely inaccurate. Deciphering these texts bears little resemblance to the task performed by traditional palaeographers, but progress continues: recent experiments have validated the Humphries decipherment of decade-old publications on histocompatibility genetics.
The newest and by far the most speculative mode of inquiry is remote sensing of metahuman research facilities. A recent target of investigation is the ExaCollider recently installed beneath the Gobi Desert, whose puzzling neutrino signature has been the subject of much controversy. (The portable neutrino detector is, of course, another metahuman artefact whose operating principles remain elusive.)
There is still no way to augment a human brain into a metahuman one; the Sugimoto gene therapy must be performed before the embryo begins neurogenesis in order for a brain to be compatible with DNT. This lack of an assimilation mechanism means that human parents of a metahuman child face a difficult choice: to allow their child DNT interaction with metahuman culture, and watch him or her grow incomprehensible to them; or else restrict access to DNT during the child's formative years, which to a metahuman is deprivation like that suffered by Kaspar Hauser. It is not surprising that the percentage of human parents choosing the Sugimoto gene therapy for their children has dropped almost to zero in recent years.
As a result, human culture is likely to survive well into the future, and the scientific tradition is a vital part of that culture. Hermeneutics is a legitimate method of scientific inquiry and increases the body of human knowledge just as original research did. Moreover, human researchers may discern applications overlooked by metahumans, whose advantages tend to make them unaware of our concerns.
We need not be intimidated by the accomplishments of metahuman science. We should always remember that the technologies that made metahumans possible were originally invented by humans, and they were no smarter than we.
Copyright 1988 by Vern S. Poythress. Published by Zondervan Publishing House, 1988. All Scripture quotations, unless otherwise noted, are taken from the HOLY BIBLE: NEW INTERNATIONAL VERSION (North American Edition). Copyright 1973, 1978, 1984, by the International Bible Society. Used by permission of Zondervan Bible Publishers.
These questions are obviously important, but we cannot explore them all. Questions about whether theology should be scientific will be covered in more detail in another volume in this series on hermeneutics. In this volume, we will explore whether the growth of knowledge in science can tell us something about how knowledge grows in biblical interpretation and in theology.
To answer these questions, we will have to look in some detail at theories concerned with the nature and history of scientific knowledge (chapters 2 and 3). But first, let us start with an actual example of biblical interpretation, namely, the interpretation of Romans 7. Because this passage has proved to be a difficult and controversial passage, it effectively illustrates some of the problems.
How do we decide a conflict in interpretation like this one? At first glance, it might seem that we decide simply by looking at the passage and seeing which interpretation actually fits. Which interpretation is consistent with all the facts of the passage? All three interpretations above, however, claim to be consistent with the passage. All three claim to account for all the words and sentences in the passage.
In addition, we should not oversimplify the process of judging when an interpretation generates a contradiction or an insuperable difficulty. Each of the three interpretations has a difficulty at one point or another. If we were harsh, we would say that each generates a contradiction. But they are not necessarily false. In fact, some people continue to advocate each of these lines of interpretation, even though they are well aware of the difficulties. But they think that the difficulties are great with competing interpretations than with their own. Hence they still endeavor to give a coherent interpretation of the difficult texts within their own viewpoint.
Hence we can see that a text like Romans 7:14-15 or 7:22-23 does not just display its meaning on its sleeve, so to speak. It is not just a brute datum, about which no one can dispute. A particular verse or passage might conceivably mean something slightly different from what we think it means at first. Making sure of its meaning involves assessing context as well. What might initially appear to be a contradiction, and thus rule out one line of interpretation, might on further investigation have an explanation.
Calvinists, for example, have a low view of the spiritual abilities of fallen, sinful, unregenerate people. Calvinists emphasize that such people are spiritually unable to turn to God and to love God unless the Holy Spirit performs a special work of regeneration to change their hearts. Calvinists are therefore reluctant to accept the positive statements of Romans 7:14-25 as descriptions of an unregenerate person.
On the other hand, other people have experienced very gradual growth in their spiritual life. They have come to understand and appropriate Romans 6 and 8 gradually. But they have continued to be aware that subtle tendencies to sin still lurk in them. To them second-blessing theology seems not to match their experience. All this background of experience will influence whether a particular person finds it plausible to claim that Romans 7:14-25 describes the first-blessing stage or immature stage in a second-blessing theology.
Is there any way out of this impasse? Can the triumphs of science and the way in which science proceeds be of any value? The analogy with science might suggest to many people that the way out is through objectivity. Science, it is said, consists in a dispassionate, objective analysis of the data. The problem with the interpretation of Romans 7 is that it gets mixed up with the doctrinal commitments and personal experiences of the people doing the interpretation. The process of interpretation needs to be freed from such doctrinal commitments and personal experiences.
As Ernst Troeltsch incisively argued, historical research in the context of Enlightenment thought presupposed three fundamental principles.3 According to the principle of criticism, no documents of the past can be accepted as authoritative; all claims about the past must be weighed by the modern critic. At most, we can arrive at a greater or lesser probability concerning the past, never a certainty. According to the principle of analogy, the present is the key to the past. Events of the past must all be analogous to what is possible today. According to the principle of causality, history is a closed continuum of events, in which every event has an antecedent immanent cause and there is no divine intervention (miracle) in history. Troeltsch saw that, since the assumptions of the method already denied traditional Christianity, the results would necessarily confirm this denial.
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