Hermeneutics and the Role of History

AS A NUMBER of the contributions to this issue1 of New Literary History serve to illustrate, the general retreat from empiricism and positivism in recent analytical philosophy has had a markedly beneficial effect on current discussions about the theory of interpretation. Two aspects of this trend have proved to be of particular relevance. One has been the attack on empiricist epistemology, with the consequent rejection of the belief in sense data which are capable of being directly perceived and embodied in a noninterpretative observation language. It is coming to be widely accepted that Quine, Kuhn, and Feyerabend, in their different but converging ways, have all succeeded in undermining any attempt to build up a structure of empirical knowledge on a basis purporting to be independent of our judgments.2 The next move which a number of analytical philosophers have thus been prompted to make is to appeal directly to the tradition of hermeneutics, as revived by Gadamer, Ricoeur, and especially Habermas, and to argue for a more interpretative model of the natural, as well as the human, sciences.3 The other influential development has been the abandonment, in the theory of meaning, of any positivist disposition to assert that meaningful statements must refer to facts, and thus that the meaning of a sentence must be given by its method of verification. The main challenge to this key concept of logical positivism was of course issued by Wittgenstein in the Investigations, with his famous injunction not to ask directly about the meaning of propositions but rather about how they are used in particular language games. More recently, the underlying assumption of this approach-that the analysis of meaning needs to be connected with the use of language for purposes of communication-has been refined and extended in two connected ways. First, J. L. Austin and his followers, in developing the theory of speech acts, have concentrated on the idea that, as a given utterance has a meaning, a given agent will characteristically be doing something-and may thus be said to mean something-in or by the act of issuing that particular utterance.4 Secondly, H. P. Grice, followed by a number of theoretical linguists as well as philosophers of language, has gone on to offer an analysis of the concept of meaning which is at issue when we speak of someone meaning something in or by saying something.5