[HN Gopher] The Hermeneutical Imperative
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The Hermeneutical Imperative
Author : panic
Score : 29 points
Date : 2021-01-31 05:55 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (theconvivialsociety.substack.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (theconvivialsociety.substack.com)
| jrumbut wrote:
| I feel like I'm missing why this article was written.
|
| It requires more conscious interpretation to speak via the
| Internet compared to in person. The Internet is a weird museum
| filled with stuff to interpret.
|
| Ok, seems true, but it's not really a new point. Does it make
| more sense if I read the other posts? Was there another section
| at the bottom I missed due to their mobile UI (happens all the
| time)?
| gumby wrote:
| This scratches at the surface of the very complex field of
| hermeneutics (basically how can humans* understand the
| semantics of utterances or other representations).
|
| In the west it got its start in religious enquiry (loosely: the
| Bible is ambiguous, or at least people disagree about
| interpretation; can we figure out what the real underlying
| message is and thus correct errors made by humans because
| obviously the "real" text must be absolutely correct).
|
| In the 20th century this discipline was broadened primarily by
| Heidigger whose work is famously incomprehensible yet filled
| with insight along with many others; it also lead to insight
| (e.g. semiotics) and extreme absurdity (e.g. 99.9% of the
| deconstructionists, sadly despite their having started with a
| useful insight).
|
| * and in more modern times, machines. I spent several years in
| the 1980s working on how it even makes sense to talk about a
| machine "understanding". It definitely changed how I view the
| world, but IMHO so far has had essentially no impact on the
| world itself.
| sriku wrote:
| Can you recommend some texts that would be good reads towards
| understanding this subject better?
| thebooktocome wrote:
| Heidegger is, contrary to popular opinion, not that
| unreadable. Stambaugh's revised translation of Being and
| Time is really good.
|
| The problem is laypeople expect to be able to understand
| advanced philosophy without knowing anything about the
| history that led to this point.
|
| Nobody complains about, e.g., Weinberg's textbook on QFT
| being unreadable. I think this is primarily because
| Weinberg is basically unknown to people who haven't had 4+
| years of physics education.
| gumby wrote:
| > Heidegger is, contrary to popular opinion, not that
| unreadable. Stambaugh's revised translation of Being and
| Time is really good.
|
| I disagree (I've never tried reading him in translation).
| His German coinage and turgid sentences are legendary. I
| had one particularly obscurantist sentence from _Sein und
| Zeit_ on my whiteboard for over a year and it was always
| a source of discussion, both jocular and serious, when
| someone came into my office.
| thebooktocome wrote:
| "I had an equation from _The Quantum Theory of Fields_ on
| my whiteboard for over a year... "
| gumby wrote:
| And did it lead to better understanding?
|
| This is the kind of phenomenon I miss in remote work
| dajohnson89 wrote:
| OK. And is there any basic foundation for starting, that
| enables one to understand Heidegger well? Some kind of
| primer for continental philosophy?
| thebooktocome wrote:
| The "very short introduction" series has done a lot of
| work trying to make these folks more presentable, with
| varying levels of success.
|
| You could also start with some of heidegger's shorter
| works like What is Called Thinking? or the one about
| technology (I'm not sure what the popular translation of
| the title is).
| ssivark wrote:
| There's a nice documentary movie titled "Being in the
| world" (available on YouTube and elsewhere) which
| introduces a nice flavor of Heidegger. I've also heard good
| things about Hubert Dreyfus' interpretation/translation of
| Heidegger.
| jawarner wrote:
| It seems buried here:
|
| > Perhaps this accounts for the widely-reported sense of
| unreality that plagues so many of us.
|
| The idea is that interpreting content on the Internet leads
| people to become more self-conscious about how they interpret
| reality, which causes it to be less "real."
| pacbard wrote:
| Prefacing that I am not a philosopher, but I think that
| hermeneutics would reject the idea that "real" and "reality"
| can exist outside of the interpretation that people have of
| something that has happened. To an extent, real and reality
| is the same and one with its interpretation. You get into
| these weird spots where two people could experience the same
| event, interpret it in different ways, leading up to two
| different "realities" of the event. I don't know enough to
| know how this would be reconciled within hermeneutic
| epistemology, but that's something interesting to keep in
| mind.
| tines wrote:
| But isn't "determining the one true actual meaning of a
| thing" the entire point of hermeneutics? Or rather,
| hermeneutics is a technique for objectively determining
| what something does _not_ mean, which is incompatible with
| the idea that reality doesn't exist outside an
| interpretation.
| 1MoreThing wrote:
| Detecting wrong answers doesn't tell you anything about
| how many right answers there might be.
| pacbard wrote:
| I honestly don't know. I am not well read in hermeneutics
| to have any sort of opinion on it.
|
| It looks like Stanford's encyclopedia of philosophy [^1]
| might have a good introduction on the intersection of
| truth and hermeneutics. A quick skim of that section
| appears to fuse together ideas from aesthetics, ethics,
| and linguistics to build a conception of truth that is
| not based in traditional positivist epistemology. Again,
| I am not a philosopher so I don't really know what I am
| talking about.
|
| [1]: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/hermeneutics/#Con
| tHerm_1
| chub500 wrote:
| I have to say, hermeneutics is something our western
| culture has become catastrophically bad at. When the
| failure of postmodernism became apparent (truths
| unfortunately must be shared to take any corporate action
| in society), we seem to have reverted directly back into a
| Nietzschian nihilism, every group only exists as a means to
| power. This has begun to erode traditional modernist
| western ideals which the postmodernists seemed to allow:
| offensive speech isn't necessarily wrong, interpretation
| and truth are two sides to the same coin, etc.
| jvalencia wrote:
| I think a helpful point for most would be that hermeneutics is
| the study of how to interpret things (most generally). For
| example, how do we interpret the constitution of the USA? You
| choose a hermeneutic either implicitly or explicitly by which you
| then interpret the document.
|
| I think the duality in US politics today is largely one of what
| hermeneutic one uses to interpret the news, for example.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
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