On Wed, 15 Mar 2000, Bob wrote:
> Much more eloquently stated than my own humble effort, Ben, but I'm
> wondering if you could be so kind as to provide some bibliography.
> I'm familiar with Gadamer, but is there any particular bibliography
> you'd care to cite? I'm unfamiliar with Dilthey.
Well, I think most of my comments could be found in the first half
of _Truth and Method_, in which Gadamer gives one of the more
impressive recountings of the history of hermeneutical theory.
Leading up to the end of the 19th century, the positivist strain
of philosophy thought that the "human sciences" could and should
be brought under the model of the more precise natural sciences
(like physics, biology, geology, etc.). Typically, this is how
the two were treated - as lying along the same continuum, i.e.
employing the same general approach to their subject matter, but
just that the human sciences had not yet attained the advanced
state that the natural sciences had, in which a small number of
axioms that had been scientifically "discovered" could be used
as the basis for further research.
The challenge that I believe begins with Dilthey - of whom I am
also not terribly familiar (mostly I know him through Gadamer and
other secondary sources on hermeneutics) - is to the notion that
both the human and natural sciences are actually doing the same thing.
It soon became fairly clear that the social sciences were devoted to
human expressions - whether in historical accounts or in questionnaires
filled out for some sociological research - and hence involved
interpretation of language. The natural sciences, on the other hand,
were grounded in testable physical events or states. So, the two could
no longer be placed on the same continuum, with the human sciences
simply being less exact or not as far advanced as a science. The
same methods that could be carefully observed to derive scientific
"truths" could not be applied to the human sciences (everybody learns
something about the "scientific method" in grade school).
What followed was a desperate attempt to figure out how we /could/
derive truths from the human sciences. There was a resurgance of
Kantianism (the neo-Kantians), since Hegel was really the figure-head
of the notion that one could have a science of History. There were
also attempts to use psychology as a the paradigm for the human
sciences ("psychologism"). There was phenomenology that sprang from
a refutation of the psychologistic attempts. Karl Mannheim's
sociology of knowledge was also an attempt to provide a model
for the human sciences. A lot of the philosophy from the early 20th
century - especially during the interwar period, in the 20s, and
in the 30s - can be understood against this background, I think.
Eck, but I'm rambling,
----Ben