Reconstructing the hermeneutic circle: Towards a dialogical methodology of interpretation, knowledge and communication

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1 A version of this was adapted as Richards, C. (1994). Reconstructing the Hermeneutic Circle, Australasian Philosophy Papers, ed. A. Duckworth, University of Queensland. Reconstructing the hermeneutic circle: Towards a dialogical methodology of interpretation, knowledge and communication This phrase ['which answers to which questions fits the facts'] is in fact the hermeneutical Urphanomen: No assertion is possible that cannot be understood as an answer to a question, and assertions can only be understood in this way. It does not impair the impressive methodology [of science ] in the least. Whoever wants to learn a science has to master its methodology. But we also know that methodology does not guarantee in any way the productivity of its application. Any experience of life can confirm the fact that there is such a thing as methodological sterility, that is, the application of a method to something not really worth knowing, to something that has not been made an object of investigation on the basis of a genuine question. (Hans-Georg Gadamer) The concept of the hermeneutic circle refers to the problem of how to interpret the transfer, mediation or communication of discursive, textual or conventional meanings, across time and space as well as across different traditions, frameworks or actual contexts of significance. Does human meaning ever remain the same, or is always indeterminate and merely contingent? Is meaning a closed circle or an open one, a vicious circle or a productive one? How can we ever understand or know anything unfamiliar? How can we interpret the actions of others - especially when they occur in a different cultural or historical context? Is it ever possible to escape our implicit preconceptions or stereotypes when we interpret an event, a text, or reality generally, when we interact with others or with the world, when we reason as a problem-solving strategy? In short, the basic methodological problem represented by the hermeneutic circle is whether an act of interpretation, communication, knowledge (or, indeed, critical reasoning) can ever take place independently of a specific context - that is, in a critical, value-free vacuum? In this paper I will consider the relevance of Gadamer and Ricoeur's related projects to reconstruct the hermeneutic circle within the framework of a dialogical methodology. My initial focus will be to distinguish such a strategy from both the objectivist framework of romanticist hermeneutics, and the relativist hermeneutics of Heidegger (the latter providing the key point of departure for both men). In order to suggest the relevance of a dialogical framework for other philosophical traditions and various intellectual disciplines, it is especially useful to locate the hermeneutic circle as a problem of critical reasoning 1. Indeed, both objectivist and relativist conceptions of this problem have been identified in the analytic tradition 2. I will identify and develop the key assumptions of a 1 To the extent that they reflect a new abstract notion of analogy (in place of mythical or explicitly metaphorical thought), Zeno's paradoxes may be considered to mark the historical closure of the hermeneutic circle in terms of the construction of arbitrary (spatial vs. temporal) distinctions for defining such concepts as irrationality and infinite regression in western thought. 2 The problem of the inherently circularity or infinite regression of reason - a significant aspect of the hermeneutic circle - has also been a focus of an analytatic tradition as well. The explicit circularity of reasoning was identified by Bertrand Russell in relation to the problem of logical paradox as the vicious circle principle within in his theory of logical types. This objectivist conception can be identified in terms of the threat of infinite regression which characterises the tautology of deductive method, the reduction of terms into meaninglessness and absurdity, and the clinging to a belief in an ideal language or framework of commensurability and verification. But did the relativist and indeterminist philosophies of a whole range of modern philosophers who challenged this framework escape from it? A number of people have identified 1 21C Knowledge-Building Cameron Richards global knowledge convergence project

2 dialogical reconstruction of the hermeneutic circle in terms of two exemplary concepts of such a model - Ricoeur's concept of metaphorical reference and Gadamer's notion of selfunderstanding 3. Beyond objectivist or relativist conceptions of the hermeneutic circle The concept of the hermeneutic circle became significant through its use by Friedric Schleiermacher 4, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, to reformulate the project of hermeneutics within the context of the early nineteenth-century romantic German tradition of philology and related disciplines (grammar, rhetoric, history, etc.) in particular, and as part of a general strategy (later made explicit by Wilhem Dilthey) to construct a methodological foundation for the human sciences 5. It is helpful here to distinguish between the use of this term to describe an ontological dilemma of alterity, self-reference and infinite regress, and an epistemological problem of how knowledge and understanding are transferred, mediated or communicated. Romantics such as Schleiermacher, who conceived the circularity of part-whole relations, tended to confuse - or uncritically alternate between - these distinct different senses in terms of an intersubjective model of communication 6. In contrast, Heidegger isolated and focused on the ontological dilemma of the hermeneutic circle, a phenomenological model grounded in the existential constitution of Dasein 7. Dialogical reconstructions of the hermeneutic circle by both Gadamer and Ricoeur can be seen as a convergent attempt to rescue it from the objectivist and relativist views of the romantics and Heidegger respectively 8. The romanticist model generally conceived the hermeneutic circle in terms of human understanding (verstehen). This was expressed by Humbold's famous dictum that in order to understand, we must already in some sense have understood. Just as the romanticist model focused on the subjective pole of understanding, Dilthey turned to the objective pole in his efforts to develop a general methodology. He increasingly conceived the hermeneutic circle as a logical rather than historical or sociological transformation. Although he recognised that any act of interpretation - even by the most naively objectivist or critically relativist construction of knowledge - involved a productive rather than vicious circle of understanding to some degree, Dilthey came to 2 within a relativist framework the infinite regression that characterises reasoning by induction or inference (e.g. W. V. Quine, Nelson Goodman) 3 Particularly relevant to the discussion here are Paul Ricoeur's Interpretation Theory (Texan Christian University Press, Fort Worth, 1976) and The Rule of Metaphor (University of Chicago Press, 1978), and Hans-Georg Gadamer's Truth and Method (Seabury Press, New York, 1975) and Philosophical Hermeneutics (University of California Press, Berkeley, 1976). 4 Cf. section 20 of Schleiermacher's The Hermeneutics: Outline of the 1819 lecturers, (New Literary History, Winter, 1979, pp. 1-16). 5 Karl Mueller-Vollmer's The Hermeneutic Reader (Basil Blackwell, Oxford, 1985) provides a helpful overview of this as well as an anthology of writings by the key figures of romanticist and modern hermeneutics. 6 On closer inspection Dilthey's ( The Development of Hermeneutics, Selected Works, Harvester Wheatsheaf, London, 1901/1988) influential depiction of Schleiermacher's model - as basically a theory of psychological empathy - is a mere simplification that does not do it justice. In distinguishing between psychological and grammatical modes of interpretation (which he saw as interdependent), Schleiermacher's model describes how the psychological mode is transformed in terms of the figural dimensions of language-use (i.e. the grammatical mode) - thus resembling, in some ways, the dialogical reconstruction of the hermeneutic circle by Gadamer and Ricoeur. As Gadamer has pointed out, Schleiermacher's definition of hermeneutics as the art of avoiding misunderstanding (and not the achievement of literal intersubjective understanding) provides a useful basis for developing a dialogical model of the hermeneutic circle. 7 Being and Time (Harpur & Row, 1962). See, for example, Section For a useful introduction to this later development see David Hoy's The Critical Circle (University of California Press, Berkeley, 1978).

3 the conclusion that this could not, ultimately, be theorised. The reason for this, it may be suggested, is that he, like the romantics, represented the hermeneutic circle as a subjectobject relation - thus implicitly reinforcing the framework of an objectivist-relativist dichotomy. Within a dialogical framework, the hermeneutic circle may be reconstructed as fundamentally a representation-interpretation relation of communication or exchange. As Gadamer (1976:15) put it, understanding does not take place in a vacuum but is language-bound (i.e. is mediated) 9. Thus, as Ricoeur (1976:86) further suggested, the whole problematic of interpretation... [is] less an intersubjective relation of mutual understanding than a relation of apprehension applied to the world conveyed by the work 10. In this way the dialogical model of the hermeneutic circle is able to provide a theoretical basis for arguing that acts of interpretation or communication do not take place in a vacuum, are not just functions of the content and/or forms of representation. In other words, the mediation of knowledge is not just a process of translation or a mere 'mirroring' of subject-object relations, but one of implicit transformation. In Truth and Method (1975), Gadamer argued that any act of representation or interpretation (and thus critical reasoning) does not just reproduce or reflect meaning - it also produces it. He thus refers to the excess of meaning in language-use which has semantic and rhetorical autonomy from either a subjective or objective reference for it. Like Ricoeur, Gadamer also refers to how the meaning of any statement or a text lies in front of it, not inside it. His dialogical methodology, which therefore recognises that the rhetorical and hermeneutical aspects of human linguisticality completely interpenetrate each other (1976:25), proceeds on the productively circular basis of not only identifying and answering the question which any assertion of facts or text seeks to answer, but of further dialogical questioning which confronts the otherness, difference, or newness of a discourse, text, or cultural context. The dialogical model of the hermeneutic circle describes how any act of interpretation transforms that which is represented, authorised or produced (e.g. as either objective or subjective meaning) in relation to specific contexts. Thus, for instance, like a number of philosophers of science who have also turned to this model (e.g. Rom Harre, Mary Hesse, Thomas Kuhn), many western ethnographers (e.g. Clifford Geertz, James Clifford, Renato Rosaldo) have increasingly realised that what unavoidably gets interpreted or communicated in the study of traditional social contexts and actual texts is as much their own implicit western/modern/rationalist preconceptions and prejudices as any explicit representations Gadamer's concept of language goes beyond the narrow concepts of idiomatic content or a formal system to describe the historicality (or cultural and rhetorical context) of human communication in terms of the infinite dialogue which ever opens up and transforms the finitude of human life. As he puts it in his essay Scope and function of reflection (1976:32): Language, then, is not the finally found anonymous subject of all social-historical processes and action, which presents the whole of its activities as objectivisations to our observing gaze; rather, it is by itself the game of interpretation that we all are engaged in every day. 10 This may be considered in terms of viewing the hermeneutic circle as the dialogic relation of parts and wholes. The objectivism-relativism opposition may be identified in terms of the alternate errors of confusing the map [part] with the territory [whole] and throwing out the baby [part] with the bathwater [whole]. Whereas both these perspectives focus upon the explicit representation relation between parts and wholes, a dialogical framework focuses on interpreting parts also in relation to the implicit aspects of the wholes which they represent (i.e. actual or historical contexts of interpretation as well as the representation of mere contents or forms). 11 Relevant here is the sociologist Anthony Giddens' use of the term double hermeneutic (after Gadamer) to refer to the dialogical conception that people in social worlds are able to, in terms of the ordinary language of lay actors, to talk back to social scientists or, rather, the technical terminologies they invent and use (i.e. a positivist framework, whether it involves an objectivist or relativist methodology).

4 4 The basis for a dialogical reconstruction of the hermeneutic circle The basis for a dialogical reconstruction of the hermeneutic circle is a recognition that interpretation, knowledge and communication are acts or process of transformational and not just translational mediation. Three key points might be identified. First, a dialogical framework represents a dialectical methodology that is implicitly grounded in human dialogue. Second, such a framework reconstructs the act or process of critical reasoning as a provisional phase and mode of interpretation open to contextual transformation. Third, as the exemplary dialogical medium of human interpretation, knowledge and communication, language-use provides the key locus for a dialogical reconstruction of the hermeneutic circle. It will suffice to mention here that a dialogical methodology may be considered to involve a dialectical epistemology which is grounded in the rhetoric of ordinary human language-use and cultural contexts. In contrast to other conceptions of dialectic 12, the dialogical model recognises that an implicitly symmetrical notion of dialogue inevitably appropriates explicitly asymmetrical forms of human interaction or discourse in terms of being open to rhetorical reversals of Self-Other or subject-object relations. In other words, however monological or asymmetrical a discourse or situation may seem to be (e.g. as described by Hegel's conception of the master-slave relation in human history) it is implicitly dialogical to some degree, and thus potentially open to transformation. For what is dialectical is the process of mediation itself (i.e. the open-ended hermeneutic circle of representation and interpretation) and not Self-Other or subject-object relations in themselves. A crucial implication of the focus on how knowledge is transformed in its mediation is that any methodology is a provisonal hereustic strategy. In other words, any method of critical reasoning is a tool, and if taken too literally or permanently then becomes false. So instead of being a question of truth or falsity per se (e.g. of a model or a statement), it becomes rather a question of interpreting and distinguishing usage and abusage. As debates in the philosophy of science have inevitably recognised, theory and models are heuristic devices which transform the theory-dependence of observation in an open-ended circular relation. In contrast to relativist interpretations of reality (e.g. Popper's falsificationism), a dialogical methodology not only emphasises the provisional efficacy of any method, model or theory, but suggests that critical reasoning is a strategic and provisional phase of the larger process of interpretation. Thus, a dialogical framework distinguishes between naive, critical and dialogical modes of interpretation. These modes correspond to the distinction between objectivist, relativist and dialogical frameworks. It is this the qualifying clause of provisionality which opens up the hermeneutic circle in a dialogical sense. The clause of provisionality also provides a basis for two important distinctions Ricoeur makes in building upon Gadamer's challenge to Heidegger to construct a more developed dialogical model of how an interpreter's own historicality is the precondition of an open-ended, productive hermeneutic circle 13. Gadamer distingushed between a 12 Modern re-conceptions of a dialogical methodology can thus be contrasted with Aristotle's conception of dialectic as syllogistic reasoning and post-enlightenment conceptions of a dialectical methodology (e.g. Hegel's idealist and Marx's materialist conceptions of dialectic as a function of self-reflective reason in human history). In other words, a dialogical methodology involves a discipline of dialectics framed by that of rhetoric (in the dialogical sense) - rather than vice-versa, as has generally been the orthodoxy since Socrates. This model thus also appropriates the classical definition of rhetoric, (i.e. as the privileged art and/or methodical discipline of using language for persuasive purposes) - grounding it in conventional contexts and practices of interactive communication 13 In The Universality of the Hermeneutical Problem Gadamer (1976) argues that a hermeneutical dimension even encompasses the entire procedure of science... the methodological self-consciousness of modern science. In On the Scope and Function of Hemeneutical Representation he distinguishes this

5 critical mode of distanciation grounded in historicality on one hand, and an arbitrary, permanent methodological alienation of reason in a vacuum on the other. Similarly, Ricoeur describes the interpretative dialectic of critical distanciation and dialogical appropriation to interpret meaning as a context-dependent transformation, and not as something uniquely self-contained and unchanging. The different phases of interpretation might be considered in term of how the function of mediation is transformed in conventional language-use. For it is in languageuse one might best consider the terms of how a dialogical framework appropriates the self-reinforcing opposition of objectivism and relativism. In responding to the problem of explicit circularity or infinite regression in knowledge, communication and interpretation, the dialogical strategy might be distinguished from the kinds of relativist manoeuvres represented by exponents, say, of ordinary language philosophy (Wittgenstein, Austin, Strawson) or pragmatics (Grice, Lyons, Halliday) - people who have challenged the objectivist illusion that an artificial or transcendental language of pure abstraction might be constructed to literally mirror reality. In the context of how modern hermeneutics has been divided over the issue of language as a medium of communication (for Gadamer, a dialogical medium of historicity and, for Habermas, a reflective medium of universal pragmatics ), it is pertinent to consider how linguistic relativists have responded to the idea that the Enlightenment conception of reflective reason is an infinite regression, a vicious circle. The relativists argued that by discarding the referential criterion of formalist ontology (and semantics) and replacing it with notions of historicist or pragmatic relevance they were able to avoid the formalist threat of infinite regression. However, from a dialogical perspective relativist frameworks of knowledge reinforce a similar privileged perspective of language-use in opposition to populist modes as that promoted by the objectivism, say, of formalist semantics; also, a similar positivist assumption that metaphorical and/or poetic aspects of language-use are special cases rather than constitutive functions of language-use 14. In contrast to objectivist or relativist frameworks of interpretation, the dialogical model recognises that figural forms of representation are fundamental aspects of language-use which facilitate interactive communication - and thus interpretation and knowledge. In short, it recognises how language-use presupposes the use of rhetorical strategies and, thus, how metaphorical functions of representation are related to those of interpretation. Ricoeur's concept of metaphorical reference Metaphorical reference is one of the crucial concepts involved in Ricoeur's reconstruction of the hermeneutic circle in terms of the transformative function of mediation. It is defined and developed in The Rule of Metaphor (1978). According to Ricoeur, the suspension of reference in the sense defined by the norms of descriptive discourse is the negative condition of the appearance of a more fundamental mode of reference, (whose) explication is the task of interpretation (p.229). This more fundamental mode (i.e. metaphorical reference) is a concept which suggests that no kind of subjective or objective reference ever operates in a vacuum (as a binary opposition). Human reflection on either subjective experience or objective reality is ever framed, implicitly if not explicitly, by an interactive imagination. Such a term thus serves to recognise that all human interaction, representation, and communication is implicitly an open-ended, dialectical and transformative process grounded in context-dependent mediations of language-use. In short, the concept of metaphorical reference describes the 5 critical mode of distanciation (in practice, embraced and transformed by the hermeneutical dimension) from an arbitrary or permanent methodological alienation which ignores a knower's historicality. 14 It may be argued that the relativists have not overcome the problem of circular reasoning but implicitly reinforced it in such terms as historical or contextual determinism.

6 im-mediate relation of self and world mediated in language-use in such terms as the semantic autonomy or reception of a discourse or text. There are two ways this might be discussed, since Ricoeur developed his theory in dialogue with both ordinary language philosophy and post-structuralist applications of the semiotic model 15. First, it re-inverts Strawson's linguistic application of Frege's distinction between sense and reference. Whereas for Strawson reference defines the sense of (the immanent meaning or content) of any statement, for Ricoeur the sense that is applied in language-use defines the reference - the split reference of self and world. Second, Ricoeur re-inverts (in the sense of appropriating) Derrida's strategic inversion of the relation between writing and reading. He recognises that a written text (rather than discourse per se) is an exemplary form of communication since it is mediated dialogue which recapitulates the im-mediate conditions of dialogue. In other words, discursive language-use implicitly presupposes actual contexts on one hand, and rhetorical strategies on the other, which together serve to mediate symbolic action, social convention and cultural contexts (and/or imaginary worlds). Challenging the basic assumptions of both these traditions of language theory, Ricoeur thus has provided powerful support for an argument that metaphors are a constitutive basis, and not merely paranthetic aspect, of all language-use - therefore, also of interpretation, knowledge and communication.. In describing the metaphoric functions of referentiality, communicability and selfunderstanding (as progressively interdependent, fundamental dimensions of mediation), Ricoeur suggests that their interdependent relation provide a basis for recognising that the hermeneutical problem begins, then, where linguistics leaves off. Referentiality describes the relation of Self and the world. Ricoeur's (1978) own theory of metaphorical reference conceives this as an intrinsically interactive, transformational relation and mediation, rather than a subject-object one in which language merely mirrors and describes the objective world (and/or defines human subjectivity) in processes of identification, communication and knowledge. Within this dialogical perspective, the communicability dimension of mediation between different selves is not just utilitarian, but based on the reversibility (in an interactive and rhetorical sense) of the Self/Other relation. In relation to this (as well as the dimension of referentiality), the dimension of self-understanding pertains to the self-awareness of personal or public prejudices, preconceptions and, above all, motives - embracing both desires and values - in either the representation or interpretation of meaning. Hence, the dimension of self-understanding may be regarded as the key to the dialogical reconstruction of the hermeneutic circle. Gadamer's concept of self-understanding Gadamer's concept of self-understanding might be considered in the context of two other key concepts he developed. One is the concept of prejudice, in the sense of implicit preconceptions which mediate processes of knowledge communication and intepretation - or hidden premises or agendas which might inform the process of critical reasoning. In his essay The Universality of the Hermeneutical Problem, Gadamer (1976:9) suggests that it is not so much our judgments as it is our prejudices that constitute our being. A second related concept is that of historicality. Put as simply as possible, Gadamer's concept of historicality refers to how any act or process of interpretation is informed by the inter-relation between an open-ended horizon of the present in constant 6 15 Yet, from contradictory positions, both objectivists and relativists retained a common assumption of the arbitrary distinction between literal and metaphorical meanings, between descriptive ( in the sense of giving information about facts ) and emotional uses of language. It is this latent positivism which, as Ricoeur has recognised, provides the epistemological connection between formal and contextual theories of linguistic (and literary) meaning both in semiotic and analytical traditions.

7 formation on one hand, and that of specific, localised cultural contexts (or languages ) of human life on the other. In other words, the hermeneutic circles of both human subjectivity and language-use are ever framed by that of the historicality of any act of interpretation: human meaning is constantly concretised as an interplay of the past and present. Thus, for Gadamer, the concept of historicality provides a basis for distinguishing between arbitrary and legitimate prejudices or interpretative preconceptions Gadamer does not deny the prejudices of one's own present horizons (and thus reinforcing implicit bias), but recognises this is able to be overcome in practice by being aware of it in terms of one's historical condition or finitude on one hand (i.e. that selfidentity is not neither merely an objective or subjective condition), and the dialogical process of mediated and not just immediate communication on the other. Objectivist and relativist frameworks would isolate the act of interpretation from the process of history (from individual/collective actions and events, social contexts and the rhetorical function of myth-making ), would isolate an abstract concept of the present in relation to the past (and future). Therefore, in his essay On the Problem of Self-Understanding (1976), Gadamer asserts that understanding is not a mere (reflective) reproduction of knowledge but by virtue of how understanding is aware of the fact that it is indeed an act of repeating transforms that knowledge and, in doing so, thus produces meaning. As he writes in the same essay: The genuine reality of the hermeneutical process seems to me to encompass the selfunderstanding of the interpreter as well as what is interpreted... The real event of understanding goes beyond what we can bring to the understanding of the other person's words through methodical effort and critical self-control. Indeed, it goes beyond what we ourselves can become aware of... It is not really ourselves who understand: it is always a past that allows us to say, I have understood (Gadamer, 1976:58). Within in a dialogical framework, the self-understanding dimension of mediation may be regarded as grounded in the physical, social and rhetorical/cultural realities of human action (i.e. also in terms of the corresponding rhetorical predicates of desire, power and knowledge) - and not a transcendental or privileged perspective of either objectivity or subjectivity. This may also be discussed in terms of how naive, critical, and dialogical modes of interpretation correspond, in the context of mediation as a transformational process, to the representational modes of content, form, and substance (this last term understood here as the semantic/rhetorical autonomy of discourses, texts and traditions). In other words, it is possible to distinguish between self-understanding and manipulative persuasion (or bad faith ) in terms of how a dialectic of naive identification and critical negativity ever informs rhetorical strategies of communication and knowledge, as well as practices of either representation and interpretation. The habits or patterns of perception, thought and action which some people view or experience as fixed or inevitable vicious circles are able to be recognised by others as potentially productive and open to change. The human capacity for shared selfunderstanding is thus an intrinsic transformative function of the hermeneutic circle - one which makes this concept a useful meta-methodology of interpretation, knowledge and communication. Conclusion The relevance of Gadamer and Ricoeur's efforts to reconstruct the hermeneutic circle, I would suggest, lies in providing a dialogical or interactive framework of knowledge, of communication, of interpretation, of critical reasoning that overcomes the objectivist and relativist methodological opposition, a subject-object conception of knowledge. Such a framework challenges the enduring, usually implicit assumption in western philosophical traditions that critical reasoning takes place in a vacuum, that reason can be separated from its other. I have briefly described how the concept of 7

8 dialogical might be approached as a dialectical methodology grounded in rhetoric rather than logic or metaphysics - that is, rhetoric as a strategy and context of communication, and not just of persuasion. The similar dialogical frameworks of both Gadamer and Ricoeur can be considered to have recovered the spirit as well as method of Socrates' conception of the philosopher as a mid-wife facilitating self-knowledge. So, in conclusion, I would like to suggest that the philosophical frameworks of Ricoeur and Gadamer have interdisciplinary relevance for addressing the various philosophical problems and methodological issues which continue to be assumed in on-going debates in different intellectual traditions