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Hermeneutics and Postmodernism: Can We Have a Radical Reader-Response Theory? Part II

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 October 2008

Paul R. Noble
Paul R. Noble
Affiliation:
Department of Religious Studies, Suffolk College, Ipswich IP4 1LT
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Extract

The flaws in Fish's hermeneutics that were diagnosed in Part I (it is now argued) are consequences of his underlying epistemology. This is a version of anti-foundationalism which claims that facts are the product of interpretation; but a careful study of how this issue is handled by N. R. Hanson and Thomas Kuhn shows that Fish's epistemology is fundamentally unsound. An alternative account of the fact-interpretation relationship is then proposed, and the outline of an objectivist, readerindependent hermeneutics are sketched. This is further developed by showing how a common argument against objectivism (based on the historical situatedness of reason and knowledge) may be refuted.

Type
Research Article
Information
Religious Studies , Volume 31 , Issue 1 , March 1995 , pp. 1 - 22
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1995

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References

1 Stephen Moore, D., Literary Criticism and the Gospels: The Theoretical Challenge (New Haven, Yale University Press, 1989)Google Scholar; for the discussion of Fish and his potential consequences for biblical studies see especially pp. 113–30.

2 See Fred W. Burnett, ‘Postmodern Biblical Exegesis: The Eve of Historical Criticism’, and Adam, A. K. M., ‘The Sign of Jonah: A Fish-eye View’; both in Semeia 51 (1990), 51–80 and 177–91Google Scholar respectively.

3 Doing What Comes Naturally: Change, Rhetoric, and the Practice of Theory in Literary and Legal Studies (Oxford, Clarendon, 1989), p. 344Google Scholar; cf. p. 143.

4 Ibid., p. 436.

5 E.g. Radicals and the Future of the Church (London, SCM, 1989), p. 43Google Scholar. Cupitt's anti-foundationalism is perhaps most fully set out in his The Long-Legged Fly: A Theology of Language and Desire (London, SCM, 1987), and What Is a Story? (London, SCM, 1991)Google Scholar. (I am grateful to Elizabeth Burns for guidance on these points.)

6 Is There a Text in This Class?: The Authority of Interpretive Communities (Cambridge MA, Harvard University Press, 1980), pp. 233–41.Google Scholar

7 Ibid., p. 237.

8 Ibid.

9 Ibid., p. 239; Fish's italics.

10 Ibid.; Fish's italics.

11 Ibid., p. 331.

12 Ibid., p. 331; italics added. Cf. also Ibid. pp. 136, 173, 198f, 269–72, 294–7, 332–5, 356; and Doing What Comes Naturally pp. 78–9, 81–3, 344–7, 436–67 passim.

13 See Is There a Text in This Class? pp. 110, 158, 275; Doing What Comes Naturally pp. 75, 77, 78, 95, 100, 105, 112, 115, 118, etc.

14 Is There a Text in This Class?, p. 165.

15 Fish; Ibid. p. 243.

16 For detailed discussion see Achinstein, Peter, Concepts of Science: A Philosophical Analysis (Baltimore, Johns Hopkins Press, 1968), pp. 157–201Google Scholar; see also Putnam, Hilary, ‘What Theories Are Not’, in Putnam, , Mathematics, Matter, and Method: Philosophical Papers Volume 1 (Cambridge, CUP, Second edition 1979), 215–27CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For a broader discussion of Logical Empiricism and its problems see Frederick Suppe, ‘The Search for Philosophical Understanding of Scientific Theories’, in Suppe (ed.), The Structure of Scientific Theories (Urbana, University of Illinois Press, 1974), 1–241.Google Scholar

17 Hanson, Norwood Russell, Patterns of Discovery (Cambridge, CUP, 1958), pp. 4–30Google Scholar. Hanson is much indebted (as he acknowledges throughout) to Ludwig Wittgenstein's discussion of seeing in the Philosophical Investigations.

18 Patterns of Discovery, pp. 5f.

19 Ibid., p. 7.

20 Cf. Hanson's Figure 1 in Ibid., p. 9; cf. also his discussion on p. 12 of the Goblet-and-Faces diagram.

21 Ibid. p. 7.

22 This is a reproduction of Hanson's figure 8, Ibid., p. 15.

23 Ibid.

24 Ibid., p. 22.

25 Ibid., p. 21.

26 Ibid., p. 20.

27 Ibid. note 6 to p. 17, printed on p. 182.

28 Paul M. Churchland has suggested that in some circumstances the planets Mercury, Venus, Jupiter, and Saturn could together provide a ‘baseline’ relative to which the motion of the horizon could be directly observed; see Churchlan, , Scientific Realism and The Plasticity of Mind (Cambridge, CUP, 1979), pp. 30–34CrossRefGoogle Scholar. This does not, however, help Hanson's account of seeing-that, because in these special circumstances Tycho and Kepler would both see the horizon move. Tycho would then have to explain this as a merely apparent motion, just as in the usual circumstances of observation Kepler has to explain the motion of the sun above the fixed horizon as merely apparent.

29 For a perceptive discussion of the theory ladenness of observation-language, see Mary Hesse's ‘Theory and Observation’, reprinted in Hesse, , Revolutions and Reconstructions in the Philosophy of Science (Brighton, Harvester, 1980), 63–110.Google Scholar

30 Kuhn, Thomas S., The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, Second Edition, enlarged, 1970)Google Scholar; the quotation is the title of chapter X, pp. 111ff.

31 Ibid., p. 111.

32 See especially Fish's summary of (what he takes to be) Kuhn's views on facts and inter-paradigm disputes in Doing What Comes Naturally, pp. 486f. I shall discuss this below.

33 Ibid., p. 121; italics added.

34 Ibid. p. 129; italics added.

35 Ibid. p. 150; italics added.

36 For a full discussion of this distinction, see Hoyningen-Huene's, Paul excellent Reconstructing Scientific Revolutions: Thomas S. Kuhn's Philosophy of Science (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1993), pp. 31–6Google Scholar. ‘Phenomenal world’ is Hoyningen-Huene's term; e.g. p. 33 and passim.

37 Kuhn, Ibid. p. 111.

38 Ibid., pp. 123, 124.

39 Cf. Kuhn, Ibid. pp. 118f.

40 Cf. Kuhn, Ibid. pp. 119f.

41 Doing What Comes Naturally, p. 487; cf. Fish's account of the ‘story-relative’ identification of facts, reviewed in section I above.

42 Although I am about to argue this from Kuhn's Aristotle–Galileo example, Kuhn himself appears not to have adequately grasped the point. For my present purposes, however, it is unnecessary to go further into the precise details of Kuhn's own views.

43 Kuhn, Ibid. p. 129. The role of scientific theories in deciding what it is relevant to observe had already been pointed out some time before this by Karl Popper; Popper, e.g., ‘The Bucket and the Searchlight: Two Theories of Knowledge’ (originally delivered as a lecture in 1948; reprinted in Popper, Karl R., Objective Knowledge: An Evolutionary Approach (Oxford, Clarendon, revised edition 1979), 341–61), pp. 342–6Google Scholar; ‘Science: Conjectures and Refutations’ (originally delivered as a lecture in 1953; reprinted in Karl Popper, R., Conjectures and Refutations (London, RKP, fourth edition (revised) 1972), 33–65), pp. 44–9Google Scholarpassim.

44 ‘The Function of Measurement in Modern Physical Science’ (reprinted in Kuhn, Thomas S., The Essential Tension (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1977), 178–224), p. 201.Google Scholar

45 ‘The Function of Measurement in Modern Physical Science’, pp. 202–4, 209–11; The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, pp. 52f, 67f, 82f, 97, 169, etc.

46 Cf. my fuller discussion of this point in section VI of Part I, and section IV below.

47 This important difference has also been pointed out by Scholes, Robert; Textual Power (New Haven, Yale University Press, 1985) 158Google Scholar. That Fish himself has completely missed the point is graphically illustrated by his remark, ‘I suspect that, despite the wide circulation of Kuhn's arguments, most scientists continue to think of themselves as constrained in their labours by an unchanging nature’ (Doing What Comes Naturally, p. 157; my italics). In fact Kuhn himself is adamant that scientists are ‘constrained’ in just this way!

48 Kuhn is here rejecting the Popperian thesis of verisimilitude, which claims that successive theories within a particular discipline tend to converge towards a more accurate picture of the world. For Kuhn's rejection of this see his The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, pp. 170–73; ‘Postscript – 1969’ (included in the second edition of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 174–210), pp. 206–7; ‘Logic of Discovery or Psychology of Research?’ (in Kuhn, , The Essential Tension, 266–92), pp. 288–9Google Scholar; ‘Reflections on my Critics’ (in Imre Lakatos and Alan Musgrave (eds.), Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge (Cambridge, CUP, reprinted with corrections 1974), 231–78), pp. 264–5.Google Scholar

49 Reconstructing Scientific Revolutions, p. 35.

50 ‘Second Thoughts on Paradigms’, pp. 308–9; ‘Discussion [following the presentation of ‘Second Thoughts on Paradigms’]’ (in Suppe, (ed.), The Structure of Scientific Theories, 500–517), pp. 509, 511Google Scholar; ‘Reflections on my Critics’, p. 276; ‘Postscript – 1969’, pp. 192–3. For a full discussion see Hoyningen-Huene, , Reconstructing Scientific Revolutions, pp. 42–63Google Scholarpassim; ‘stimulus ontology’ is Hoyningen-Huene's term (Ibid., p. 47 etc.).

51 ‘Second Thoughts on Paradigms’, p. 308.

52 ‘Postscript – 1969’ p. 193, cf. p. 192; similarly in ‘Reflections on my Critics’, p. 276.

53 Ibid., pp. 44–7.

54 I argued at the end of Part I (by a somewhat different route) that in fact Fish does fall into solipsism. In the light of the arguments I have been developing in Part II we can now appreciate more fully why this is.

55 The verbs which Fish uses for what interpreters do include ‘produce’, ‘construct’, ‘make’, ‘shape’, ‘create’, ‘constitute’, ‘write’, ‘call into being’, and ‘manufacture’. The objects of these verbs include ‘texts’, ‘sentences’, ‘utterances’, ‘formal features (of texts)’, ‘author's intentions’, ‘evidence’, ‘poems’, ‘meanings’, ‘all objects’, ‘ourselves’, ‘Reality, the Real World, Objective Fact’, ‘truth’, ‘institutions’, ‘the field of enquiry [and] the entities that populate it’; see Is There a Text in This Class? pp. 1, 163, 167, 169, 171–3, 178, 180, 243f, 310, 322, 327, 331f, 338, 357, 367, and passim. Similar terminology can also be found throughout Doing What Comes Naturally.

56 As might be expected, Kuhn's philosophy also seems to be afflicted with similar difficulties; see Hoyningen-Huene, , Reconstructing Scientific Revolutions, especially pp. 122–30.Google Scholar

57 I have discussed this more fully in The Canonical Hermeneutics of Brevard Childs, S.: A Critical Reconstruction (Unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of Cambridge, 1992)Google Scholar, section 2.3.

58 The following details are drawn entirely from Fish's account in Doing What Comes Naturally, since my present concern is solely with the logic of Fish's argument, not with the merits or demerits of Iser's position or the cogency of Fish's criticism of it.

59 Ibid., p. 78.

60 These points are based on ‘The World's Classics’ edition, Thackeray, William Makepeace, Vanity Fair: A Novel without a Hero, edited with an introduction by John, Sutherland (Oxford, OUP, 1983).Google Scholar

61 In addition to his critique of Iser, see his replies to Dworkin in Ibid., chapters 4, 5, and 16.

62 Cf. Kuhn's observation that ‘There are logically possible theories that no sane scientist could ever have made nature fit’; see p. 12 above. See also Part I, sections III and V, where I have shown exegetically that Fish's own examples of supposed reinterpretations do indeed prove to be self-refuting.

63 See Doing What Comes Naturally pp. 221–5, 436–41, 517–21.

64 Ibid., p. 437.

65 Rorty, Richard, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Oxford, Basil Blackwell, 1980), p. 329.Google Scholar

66 Ibid.

67 Ibid., p. 330.

68 ‘This rhetoric [concerning the importance of separating science from religion] has formed the culture of Europe’; Ibid., pp. 330f.

69 Ibid. p. 331; Rorty's italics.

70 Rorty's account is somewhat anachronistic in setting up Copernican against Ptolemaic astronomy. By the time Bellarmine interviewed Galileo (in 1616) a greatly improved version of heliocentric astronomy had been published by Kepler in his Astronomia Nova (1609). Meanwhile, most astronomers who could not accept a mobile earth had nonetheless abandoned Ptolemy's system in favour of Tycho Brahe's. Tycho's astronomy retained a static earth and yet was mathematically equivalent to Copernicus's De Revolutionibus, thus retaining the technical gains of the latter (which by now were becoming widely recognised among those who were mathematically competent to understand them).

71 Gingerich, Owen, ‘Johannes Kepler’, in René Taton, and Curtis, Wilson (eds.), Planetary astronomy from the Renaissance to the rise of astrophysics Part A: Tycho Brahe to Newton (Cambridge, CUP, 1989), 54–78; p. 77.Google Scholar

72 Kuhn, Thomas S., The Copernican Revolution: Planetary Astronomy in the Development of Western Thought (Cambridge MA, Harvard University Press, 1957), pp. 199f.Google Scholar