Hermeneutics Review for Final

Here is some review material for the final exam of my advanced hermeneutics class at IWU:

1. "autonomy of the text"
Paul Ricoeur. He suggests that once a discourse has been fixed in writing, the author loses control over its meaning. Vanhoozer disagrees because he views texts as "communicative acts." The text thus bears the intended (illocutionary) force of the author. Schenck is not as pessimistic about recovering the intended meaning of an author as Ricoeur, but he accepts the reality of the text's detachment from intended meaning far more than Vanhoozer.

2. "surplus of meaning"
Ricoeur. Because texts don't have their author's intent to "fix" their meaning, they are susceptible to multiple interpretations. Vanhoozer agrees that there are "gaps" (see next entry) that can make the meaning of texts ambiguous, but argues that the goal in filling those gaps should be to recover the author's intended communicative act. Schenck agrees with Ricoeur that texts have a surplus of meaning and with Vanhoozer that one such meaning is the intended meaning of the author.

3. "gaps of indeterminacy"
Wolfgang Iser. All texts make assumptions, assumptions that are gaps of meaning that the reader must fill in. Iser was what Vanhoozer calls a "conservative" reader-response critic, because his goal in reading was to fill in the gaps in terms of the intended meaning. Vanhoozer accepts the necessity of this task. Schenck agrees that these gaps are the source of Ricoeur's "surplus of meaning." He thinks that filling the gaps with our best guess at the intended meaning is legitimate, although that there are other legitimate "fillings" in other contexts.

4. meaning as a function of "interpretive communities"
Stanley Fish. Fish does not believe that texts in themselves have any stable meaning. Rather, the meaning of a text is a function of the interpretive community reading that text. Vanhoozer disagrees and would consider Fish a radical reader-response critic. If a text only mirrored the beliefs and values of the community reading, then a person/community could never come away from a text changed from when they came to it. But this often happens. Vanhoozer believes that a text has a single legitimate meaning. Schenck agrees with Vanhoozer that it is possible to be changed by texts and is not as "pessimistic" as Fish. Nevertheless, the interpretive communities to which we belong often has a far greater impact on how we read texts than anything else, including the intended meaning.

5. ideological criticism
Ideological criticism is the name we give to approaches to the text that embrace the ideas of specific ideological communities such as feminist critics, liberation critics, African-American critics, etc... Vanhoozer would disagree with these approaches just as he disagrees with Fish. Schenck recognizes the possibility of such approaches in such contexts. He would merely note that such readings stand in a nebulous relationship to Christian readings of the text.

6. "fusion of horizons"
Hans Georg Gadamer. The two horizons are the horizon of the text and the horizon of the reader. On the one hand, the author of a text does not play any role in interpretation distinct from the text itself. The reader, on the other hand, does not come to the text as a neutral or objective observer or as an all-knowing "subject." A reader comes to a text with pre-understandings, with the effect of traditions in his or her thinking. Text and reader meet and their horizons fuse. The reader reads the text and, in a sense, the text reads the reader. Both are changed in the process.

Vanhoozer critiques Gadamer on both horizons. The text, V believes, is the communicative act of an author and thus bears within it the intended meaning of an author. Meanwhile, V does not believe we are simply doomed to read texts with traditional glasses but believes we can more or less determine the intended meaning of a text.

Schenck believes we can at least try to supercede traditional pre-understandings and to grasp the intended meaning of authors. It is not always necessary to do so--sometimes traditional readings are more important. He is not as pessimistic as Gadamer about intended meanings.

7. subject-object distinction
René Descartes. Traditionally Descartes is blamed for setting up the modern era with a sharp distinction between the "I" as an all-knowing and objective knower who looks out at the world as object. Vanhoozer rejects the possibility for anyone to approach the world neutrally without some pre-understanding, something that can be a plus rather than a minus if it is the right pre-understanding. Schenck has less aversion to the language of subject and object, although he agrees that none of us have a God's eye, neutral, or objective apprehension of the world or truth.

8. "properly basic"
Alvin Plantinga. As one of the key figures in Reformed epistemology, Plantinga suggests that a number of beliefs are "properly basic" and do not need to be justified. These include things like the existence of the world outside ourselves, the existence of other minds, and for Plantinga it includes the existence of God, which he does not believe needs to be defended but inherently is a reasonable thing to assume. Vanhoozer agrees and adds to the list meaning in texts as properly basic. Schenck believes that such things are reasonable to believe in by faith, although he does not consider them immune to examination.

9. Reformed epistemology
Alvin Plantinga, Nicholas Wolterstorff. Reformed epistemology is based on the idea that certain beliefs are "properly basic" and do not need to be argued for or defended. This is particularly true of Christian perspectives, which (elect) Christians should recognize to be true intuitively. Vanhoozer agrees. Schenck has a hunch that Arminian theology will emphasize the need for personal response before some intuitions will come, and that in the end God is more concerned to move our hearts than our heads.

10. critical realism
[Ben Meyer, not on the test] Critical realism holds by faith that reality exists outside ourselves, but that our apprehension of that reality is never fully objective or neutral. We see that reality from where we stand looking. Vanhoozer is okay with this, although I suspect he prefers the term regulative realism (see next). Schenck is also okay with this, although he suspects that the typical "critical realist" is more optimistic than he is about the degree of literal correspondance between our perspective and reality.

11. regulative realism
[not sure] Vanhoozer likes the idea that we guide our apprehension of reality by assuming the truth of "properly basic" ideas about reality. Schenck prefers a view of reality that is critical realist by faith, pragmatic realist (see next) by practice.

12. pragmatic realism
Richard Rorty. Rorty is a non-realist. He does not affirm the existence of any reality for us to know. However, he believes that certain assumptions about reality work, help us to function in the world. The world is thus "real" for pragmatic purposes. Vanhoozer thus classifies him as a "user" and "unbeliever." Certainly V disagrees with him. Schenck things that Rorty gives us the best "rational" perspective on us as knowers of reality, but that as believers we can make affirmations about reality by faith as well.

13. "There are no facts, only interpretations."
Friedrich Nietzsche, late 1800's. As a prophet of many things, Nietzsche recognized where Immanuel Kant's particular version of the subject-object distinction might lead. Kant believed that we could not know things-in-themselves, the world as it is outside of our apprehension of it. We could only know the world as it appeared to us. He reached this point when he concluded that the content of our knowledge comes from our senses, but that the organization of that content into meaning was a function of our minds.

In the case of Kant, he believed that the truthfulness of God guaranteed that the categories of our mind did in fact correspond to truth about the world (not dissimilar to the earlier perspectives of Descartes and Locke in their own ways). Nietzsche of course did not believe in God, so he was left with the conclusion that all we know are the interpretations of our minds, not facts about the world.

Vanhoozer sees Nietzsche as the consummate "unbeliever," whose failure to believe in God is reflected in his failure to believe in interpretive facts. Schenck once again sees faith as essential to any beliefs about the world outside ourselves.

14. "There is nothing outside the text."
Jacques Derrida. Derrida basically is packaging Nietzsche's claim on his own terms. When he says there is nothing outside the text, he is saying something very similar. All reality is something like a text we are reading. But there is nothing outside the text, no reality apart from words. And we shouldn't think that Derrida thinks this is a text with a certain meaning. Derrida is thus one step further than Fish, who at least sees meaning in interpretive communities.

Vanhoozer disagrees and considers Derrida the consummate "undoer" who is also an "unbeliever." Our belief in God includes our belief in things beyond ourselves and beyond texts. Schenck agrees with Vanhoozer by faith.

15. Deconstruction
Derrida and a/friends. Deconstruction is the idea that there are no stable meanings in texts. As soon as one tries to "contruct" meaning that meaning unravels. All texts, no matter how apparently clear in meaning, can be misunderstood and taken differently. Vanhoozer disagrees. Communication happens all the time and is a properly basic concept. Schenck agrees with Vanhoozer, although he also accepts Derrida's very important footnote that even the most obvious texts can be taken differently than intended.

16. "logocentrism"
Derrida. This is the word Derrida coined for the idea that "Platonic" truths underwrite the meaning of words. Derrida of course disagrees. Truth is not behind words--more words are. There is nothing outside the text. Vanhoozer of course disagrees and labels Derrida an unbeliever, an undoer of meaning and truth. Schenck believes that God knows absolute truth and that He underwrites truth. However, Schenck believes there is a significant divide between our language and that truth. Human words do not correspond in any direct or straightforward way to God's truths.

17. différance
Derrida. He coined this word by combining the French words différence with deferance. Words do not point to meanings for Derrida, they "defer" to other words. We find meaning in the space or "difference" between different words which are only signifiers, never signifieds. Vanhoozer disagrees for all the same reasons. Schenck also believes there is more to words than just signifiers.

18. signs as combinations of signifiers and signifieds
Ferdinand de Saussure. In the background of Derrida's philosophy is Saussure's idea that a "sign" such as a word consists of two parts--a signifier, which is an arbitrary sound or image, and a signified, which is that to which the signifier refers. Derrida of course believed that we can never get beyond arbitrary signifiers to stable signifieds. Vanhoozer follows Ricoeur (see next) in believing that any workable concept of language must move beyond the level of the word to the level of the sentence. Schenck agrees, although he recognizes the basic usefulness of Saussure's approach in many cases, as well as its potential to "derail" intended meaning. However, Saussure's approach is seriously inadequate without some sense of Wittgenstein's language games.

19. the sentence as a higher order of meaning
Ricoeur. Ricoeur argued against Derrida chiefly by arguing that a sentence constitutes a higher order of meaning that is not simply the addition of individual words together. Aristotle of course argued that a proposition must have both a subject and a predicate. Vanhoozer agrees, as does Schenck with the further comment in the preceding note.

20. Langue and parole
de Saussure. Saussure argued that langue or language constituted a system of interrelated signs. Parole, on the other hand, refers to the specific use a speaker/writer puts the words of that langue to. As far as I can tell, Vanhoozer does not object to this distinction, nor do I.

21. Structuralism
[Claude Levi-Strauss, not on test] Structuralism was a passing phase of text-centered approaches to meaning that focused primarily on langue, language as a system or structure of binary oppositions. It tended to look for the universal aspects of a specific story or text's meaning rather than the specific meaning of a specific text or some intended meaning. Vanhoozer of course is much more interested in parole, the specific use to which an author puts language, rather than some abstract system to which all individual speech must conform. I similarly find some of the patterns of structuralism useful but only as one tool in a much broader toolbox.

22. Narrative Criticism
Narrative criticism was a much more useful application of the "deep structure" principals of structuralism to narratives. Rather than the rather complex structuralist model, narrative critics used categories like characters, events, settings, point of view, implied author, implied reader, story time versus discourse time, etc. which are more readily understandable. Vanhoozer would disagree with the early narrative critics of the 80's who tried to bracket historical and background knowledge as much as possible, making this method a text-centered approach to meaning. Schenck finds its tools useful for more than one approach to the meaning of narratives.

23. "world of the text"
Ricoeur. Since Ricoeur does not aim at the intended meaning of an author, some meaning "behind the text," he is not interested in the text as a reference to the real world. He believes that the "reference" of a text is a world that the text creates, a world within the text. Vanhoozer of course believes that this world does indeed have something to do with the world behind the text, principly the intended force of the text by an author. Schenck can see texts as extra-referential as well, but finds Ricoeur's concept of the world of the text a useful one when one is trying to methodically aim at the intended meaning of a text.

24. "intentional fallacy"
Wimsatt and Beardsley. In a famous article of the late 40's, these individuals argued that it was impossible and undesirable to think of the meaning of a text in terms of an author's intention. We do not have access, after all, to the mind of an author. They inaugurated what came to be known in literary circles as "new criticism." Vanhoozer recognizes the validity of some of their arguments, but follows the lead of Hirsch and Thiselton to develop a sense of authorial intent that is not fallacious. Schenck also agrees that W and B overstated their case.

25. New Criticism
An era of interpretation in literary criticism in which texts are read without concern for authorial intent. See above for Vanhoozer and Schenck.

26. "thinking the author's thoughts after him"
Friedrich Schleiermacher and Wilhelm Dilthey. Around 1800, these scholars saw "getting into an author's head" as the proper goal of interpretion. A person should not only try to think the author's thoughts, but even think the author's thoughts better than he or she did, recognizing inconsistencies that the author was not able to recognize. Vanhoozer agrees with Wimsatt and Beardsley that this approach tries to do more than is possible. We simply do not have access to an author's psychology. We can only only know an author's intent on the basis of what has made it to a text. I agree, although feel free to speculate :-)

27. text as "object of consciousness"
E. D. Hirsch. Hirsch makes his way around the problems of Schleiermacher and Dilthey's approach by speaking of the "object" of an author's consciousness. This object as it were leaves the mother ship of the author and lodges in a text, where a reader is able to hold that object in common with the author. Vanhoozer largely agrees, although he is uncomfortable with the "subject-object" language Hirsch uses.

28. meaning as "performative act"
Kevin Vanhoozer. V prefers to think of the meaning of texts as a matter of an author's performative act, drawing on the speech-act theory of Austin and Searle (see below). Schenck accepts the validity of this model as it relates to the intended meaning of authors. In practice, however, Wittgenstein's more basic language game model proves a much more flexible explanation of how meaning actually works in practice.

29. "language games" in "forms of life"
Ludwig Wittgenstein. Words do not have meanings in themselves. The meaning of a word is a function of its use in a particular "language game" in a particular "form of life." We thus do not know what the word "fire" means unless we know what language game is being played--whether that of jobs, firing squads, pop songs, or something burning. Vanhoozer agrees with some of this, but clearly prefers to go on to Austin and Searle. Schenck things Wittgenstein's approach is more all-encompassing.

30. speech-act theory
Originated by J. L. Austin and further systematized by John Searle. Speech act theory recognizes that words do not only inform, but they "do" things. When a couple says "I do" at a wedding altar, they are not only informing each other of their willingness to marry--they indeed marry each other with the words. The words do something beyond informing. Vanhoozer strongly agrees and builds his hermeneutic on these principles. Schenck agrees that words can work this way.

31. locutionary content
Austin and Searle. The part of speech that is fairly obvious is the (propositional) content, the sense of the words. Vanhoozer agrees. Schenck says fine.

32. illocutionary force
Austin and Searle. The key to authorial intent for Vanhoozer is the illocutionary force of the words. This is what the author intended to do with the words--promise, command, assert, etc... Schenck says fine.

33. Vanhoozer's definition of infallibility and inerrancy
Using the concept above, Vanhoozer seems to process the above terms in the following way. To say the Bible is infallible is to say that it always does what it is intended by God to do--its illocutionary force is always accomplished. To say the Bible is inerrant is to say that when the illocutionary force of a Scripture is to make an assertion, the locutionary content of that assertion is always true.

34. perlocutionary force
Austin and Searle. If the locutionary dimension of a speech act is the sense of the words and the illocutionary force is what the words are intended to do, the perlocutionary force of a speech act is its effect. Authors of course usually intend for their words to have a certain effect on their audiences. Of course they do not always have that effect. Vanhoozer agrees. He does not consider the intended perlocutionary force of a speech act to be part of the meaning, but rather of the significance of the utterance. Schenck says fine.

35. meaning and significance
E. D. Hirsch. Hirsch makes a helpful distinction between the meaning of a word and its significance. An utterance will only have one legitimate meaning, the intended one, but it may have countless significances. Different readers thus change the significance of an utterance, but not its meaning. Vanhoozer agrees. Schenck thinks this distinction is very helpful, but ultimately believes there are potentially far more than a single meaning that may be found in the same words as well, depending on the "language game" a reader plays with them.

36. Vanhoozer on the role of the Spirit
Vanhoozer sees the role of the Spirit as one of illuminating a reader's mind as regards the meaning of a text, its intended locutionary content and illocutionary force. Yet the Spirit may bring about countless different significances to the text, perlocutionary forces, depending on the reader, audience, and situation. Schenck believes that the Holy Spirit certainly can do these things. But the NT and church history indicates that the Holy Spirit also plays with the potential meanings of biblical words as well.

37. typology versus allegory
An important distinction for modernist evangelical scholarship of the late twentieth century was to distinguish allegory from typology as interpretive methods. In particular, typology is said to build figural interpretations off of literal ones, while allegory is said not to be concerned about the literal meaning. Vanhoozer acknowledges that there are allegories in the biblical text, but sees these as explicit ones that recognize the literal meaning. He would distinguish sharply between allegory and allegorizing, where the latter is said to be an orientation around meanings that disregard the literal meaning or original intent of the words.

Schenck does not think the NT knows or cares about this distinction, which is more modern than ancient. Even the distinction between so called Antiochene and Alexandrian exegesis is overplayed as modern controversies have over-read the distinctions of another day.

38. Vanhoozer on literal versus literalistic
The literal meaning for Vanhoozer is the intended meaning in his locutionary and illocutionary force. A literalistic reading is one that insists on taking a text literally even when that is not the author's intent. Schenck says fair enough.

39. definitions of metaphor
For Aristotle, a metaphor was little more than the substitution of one thing for another. For Ricoeur, however, a metaphor involves the creation of new meaning by the juxtapositioning of two unlike things. Schenck agrees and thinks that Vanhoozer is okay with this as well.

There you have it. The second half of our advanced hermeneutics class at IWU in a nutshell.