HERMENEUTICS AND THE COGNITIVE SCIENCES

Abstract

Abstract: Philosophical hermeneutics, understood as the theory of interpreta-tion, investigates some questions that are also asked in the cognitive sciences. The nature of human understanding, the way that we gain and organize knowl-edge, the role played by language and memory in these considerations, the rela-tions between conscious and unconscious knowledge, and how we understand other persons, are all good examples of issues that form the intersection of her-meneutics and the cognitive sciences. Although hermeneutics is most often con-trasted with the natural sciences, there are some clear ways in which hermeneutics can contribute to the cognitive sciences and vice versa. Hermeneutics is usually defined as the theory and practice of interpretation. As a discipline it involves a long and complex history, starting with concerns about the proper interpretation of literary, sacred, and legal texts. In the twentieth cen-tury, hermeneutics broadens to include the idea that humans are, in Charles Tay-lor’s phrase, ‘self-interpreting animals ’ (Taylor, 1985). In contrast to the narrowly prescriptive questions of textual interpretation, philosophical herme-neutics, as developed by thinkers like Heidegger, Gadamer, and Ricoeur, raises questions about the conditions of possibility for human understanding — not how we should interpret or understand something, but what interpretation and understanding are and how they work. For the nineteenth-century philosopher Wilhelm Dilthey, the hermeneutical disciplines were very different from the disciplines of science, including the newly emerging science of psychology. In contrast to psychology, which, in part, attempts to explain the natural behaviour of human animals in causal terms, Dilthey (1926) thinks of the hermeneutical disciplines as attempting to under-stand the behaviour of human persons in terms of their experience and inner motivation. Inner life is not composed of a series of mechanistic starts and stops, but is woven together into a continuity (Zusammenhang) that has a structure, by

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