Hermes was considered to be the inventor of language and speech, an interpreter, a liar, a thief and a trickster. These multiple roles made Hermes an ideal representative figure for hermeneutics. As Socrates noted, words have the power to reveal or conceal and can deliver messages in an ambiguous way. The Greek view of language as consisting of signs that could lead to truth or to falsehood was the essence of Hermes, who was said to relish the uneasiness of those who received the messages he delivered.
Hermeneutics emerged as a theory of human understanding in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries through the work of Friedrich Schleiermacher and Wilhelm Dilthey. Modern hermeneutics includes both verbal and nonverbal communication as well as semiotics, presuppositions, and pre-understandings.
"Hermeneutic consistency" concerns the analysis of texts to achieve a coherent explanation of them. "Philosophical hermeneutics" refers primarily to the theory of knowledge initiated by Martin Heidegger and developed by Hans-Georg Gadamer in his Truth and Method (1960). It sometimes refers to the theories of Paul Ricœur.
After these preliminary sketches of the history of hermeneutics, the technical terms "interpretation, explanation" were introduced into its philosophy mainly through the title of Aristotle's work On Interpretation. It is one of the earliest (c. 360 B.C.) extant philosophical works in the Western tradition to deal with the relationship between language and logic in a comprehensive, explicit and formal way.
Now, if one acknowledges that: understanding is as important as explanation, that language and historicity inform interpretation, that inquiry can be viewed as a conversation between scholars, and that ambiguity is inevitable—and one seeks to integrate such understandings into one's approach to research, one cannot help but recognize the necessity of qualitative research as a medium to attend to these insights, and furthermore identify hermeneutics as an implicit philosophical underpinning for research in the qualitative tradition.
Whereas the conventional methodological attitude in the social sciences justifies qualitative approaches as exploratory or preparatory activities, to be succeeded by standardized methodologies and techniques as the actual scientific procedures (assuring precision, validity, and objectivity), we regard hermeneutic procedures as the basic method for gaining precise and valid knowledge in the social sciences.
The ambiguity referred to previously is an irrationality; it is a sort of madness that is inflicted upon the receiver of the message. Only one who possesses a rational method of interpretation (i.e., a hermeneutic) could determine the truth or falsity of the message.
Gadamer says writings in hermeneutics are frequently viewed as dense and impenetrable, particularly to North American audiences and those unfamiliar with the Continental Philosophical tradition. Further, it is suggested that hermeneutics can fruitfully be partnered with a critical approach. In this regard, a critical attitude and a metaxological approach (metaxology= ( logos of the metaxu : reasoning) means that human beings have their being, and become selves, in "the between," between being and nothing, determinacy and indeterminacy, immanence and transcendence, unity and plurality, self and other-to-self)are explored and a conceptualization of critical hermeneutics is proposed.
Friedrich Ast, a student of Friedrich Schelling, had the aim to provide a methodology through which the whole of world-historical spirit could be retrieved. Individual utterances are neither to be understood with reference to their author, nor with reference to their place within the semiotic system, but according to their location within world-history. This, Ast thought, was possible through the combination of a synthetic and an analytic approach, the former focusing on the whole, the latter on the particular parts of which this whole consists. Ast thereby extends the scope of the hermeneutic circle. Originally conceived in terms of the relationship between the parts and the whole of the text, the hermeneutic circle now includes the text's relationship to historical tradition and culture at large.
Publishing his Teoria generale della interpretazione (1955), Emilio “Betti approaches hermeneutics from a non-ontological point of view, explicitly connecting himself to the legacy of Schleiermacher and Dilthey. Hermeneutics, for Betti, should confine itself to the epistemological problems of interpretation, and not try to engage with the deepest conditions of human existence. Speech and texts, Betti argues, are objectified representations of human intentions. To interpret their meaning is to breathe life into these symbolically mediated intentions. This is possible because although the interpreter's individuality and the individuality expressed in the text are constitutively different, the interpreter may overcome her own point of view in order to get a grasp on the meaning of the text. At issue is an attempt to re-create the original process of creation: not in order to reach the psychological state or content of the author, but to get at the true and only meaning of the text”. (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy).
Hermeneutics is defined as the art or the art of understanding or interpretation of the traces of human existence set by writing, or by similar means to writing, by Dilthey. In Schleiermacher, who is older than Dilthey, hermeneutics is seen as the art of understanding the speech in general, both oral discourse (psychological interpretation) and written (grammar interpretation). Gadamer and Ricoeur accuse both of psychologism because both would have a prevalence of understanding the psychology of who is expressed in speech, whether oral or written, rather than to understand what is actually said in the speech. I'm not quite agree with that criticism. Jean Grondin also disagrees. The attempt to Ricoeur, whom I dedicate myself more, is to follow the hermeneutical project both Heidegger and Gadamer, hermeneutics enrolling in an ontological ground to transform it into a philosophical discipline. But Ricoeur's proposal is that this philosophical hermeneutics not miss the epistemological dimension he had with Schleiermacher and Dilthey, in order philosophical hermeneutics can become the common ground on which dialogue human sciences, without losing, sorry I insist, his philosophical enclave. Sorry for may written English too! Greetings!
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