Hermeneutics versus Science?: Three German Views - John M. Connolly and Thomas Keutner

Hermeneutics Versus Science? is the first English translation of essays by Hans-Georg Gadamer, Wolfgang Stegmüller, and Ernst Konrad Specht that debate the nature of science and interpretation. These essays introduce the hermeneutics dispute—specifically whether interpretations of literary texts are decidably true or false—in its most recent form in German philosophy. The collection begins with two essays by Gadamer that present the central elements of his position: "On the Circle of Understanding" and "Mythopoetic Inversion in Rilke's Duino Elegies." Stegmüller's "Walther von der Vogelweide's Lyric of Dream-Love and Quasar 3C 273" and Specht's "Literary-Critical Interpretations: Psychoanalytic Interpretations" follow, bringing into the debate important issues from the philosophy of science and the theory of meaning. Stegmüller argues that a proper understanding of Thomas Kuhn's philosophy of science and Hilary Putnam's theory of meaning undermines traditional arguments for the autonomy of the humanities. He develops his view with an extended comparison of literary and scientific interpretations of data, both of which have the form, he contends, of "hypotheses." Specht attacks Stegmüller's position by claiming that hypotheses are, in principle, decidable within the framework of the governing paradigm; since many literary interpretations are de facto undecidable, they are therefore not hypotheses. Specht calls this interpretation "constructive," and argues that interpretations in psychoanalysis are also constructive in nature. In an extensive introduction, John M. Connolly and Thomas Keutner place the contemporary debate within its historical context, demonstrating its relevance to Anglo-American philosophy. Drawing on a recent development in semantics, they offer a reconstruction of the central question of decidability

John M. Connolly, Associate Professor of Philosophy at Smith College, and Thomas Keutner, Lector in Philosophy at the FernUniversität Hagen, translated and edited Absicht, the German version of G.E.M. Anscombe's Intention.