INTERPRETATION

The sixty-six "books" which together make the Bible have, more than any others in world history, demanded interpretation. At the start of the early modern period, interpreting the Bible changed radically and permanently. There were two revolutions. The first was firmly within the life and traditions of the church.

The thirty-nine ancient Hebrew books of the Jewish Bible, known to Christians as the Old Testament, have always received active reinterpretation, even as part of their earliest daily religious use. Thus the tradition of midrashim, written commentaries on every passage or word, exemplified argumentative, if reverential, discussion down through the centuries. Christians often add fourteen early books found in the Greek version (the Septuagint), not the Hebrew, either printed scattered through the Old Testament or put together between the Testaments as the "Apocrypha."

The twenty-seven books of the New Testament were originally written in everyday (koine) Greek. They are dominated by the four Gospels and the thirteen Epistles, or letters, of Paul. The latter, of the greatest importance in the founding of Christian theology, do not set out to lay down a system, but rather to express the unique revelation of God in Christ by means of elaborate rhetoric, extensions of Hebrew expressiveness in image and symbol. Within those original Epistles, active interpretation is assumed by God's help in the light of the rest of Scripture and by that only. As has been said, Christianity was born in hermeneutics (the theory and methods of interpretation).

Humanist investigation, developed from the new philological scholarship in northern Italy (such as that of Lorenzo Valla, c. 1406–1457), worked toward establishing scholarly texts of the Hebrew and Greek originals. Soon printed editions of these were widely available, successfully challenging the Latin Vulgate, which was itself later revised. From these recently printed Hebrew, and then Greek, Scriptures, printed translations of the whole Bible into the chief European vernaculars were accomplished by the late 1530s—in some countries, of which England was the chief, in the face of ruthless opposition by the church. The church maintained that the Bible, which was only to be known in short passages, was too difficult a book to be understood without the highest learning or a special grace of understanding given to priests. Wide dissemination of manuscripts of the whole Bible in English in the 1380s, under the aegis of the Oxford scholar John Wycliffe, triggered a violent response: the church denounced reading the Bible in the vernacular as a heresy. Such "heretics" were handed over to the civil authorities for the severest punishment, often to the extreme of burning them alive.

TEACHING AND PREACHING

Within the church, interpretation of the Bible was at two levels. Addressing the common people remained, as it had been for over a thousand years, subordinate to the liturgy of the church. The Bible had authority, but alongside traditions and practices, including the "unwritten verities." The aim was—through the people's attentive participation in ceremonies—to enable true penitence, lamentation for sins, and the healing brought by the seven sacraments (baptism, confirmation, the Eucharist, marriage, penance, holy orders, and extreme unction). These would strengthen the bulwark of thorough Christian conduct. To this end, small and digestible selections of the Bible called pericopes, read in Latin in the Catholic Mass, were used as a basis for translation and exposition in the vernacular. Such passages to be interpreted could be a few words, a verse or a short paragraph; they were occasionally longer treatments in cycles based on a particular book. The purpose was always to underpin existing practice. Such sermons reinforced, as aids to pious reflection, the presentation of key Bible events such as the story of Adam and Eve, Noah's ark, and the Crucifixion and Resurrection in paintings on church walls and in stained glass windows, in occasional, and severely local, plays, and, for the wealthy, little books of piety. All these, as well as the readings (in Latin) in the liturgies, contained a great deal that was not in the Bible at all.

University lectures, printed Bible annotations and commentaries, and theological works (always in Latin) also showed considerable movement. At the end of the fifteenth century, John Colet (1466/1467–1519) gave lectures in Oxford (they have not survived) on Paul's Romans and 1 Corinthians. In them a corner had been turned in biblical interpretation, not because Colet dismissed the standard and hallowed method of allegory in Bible interpretation in favor of the literal Greek text (he did not, and in fact knew no Greek), but because he gave lectures on Paul at all and because he associated the apostle with the Christian life. His lectures were not, as could then have been assumed, on one of the basic theological works of the time, based largely on Scholastic method derived from Aristotle's logic, such as the nonbiblical Sentences of the twelfth-century Italian theologian Peter Lombard. Though Colet's Paul was on New Testament grounds unrecognizable, being mainly a moralist, he was at least present for himself in Scripture, and that was new. The chasm between medieval Scholasticism and exegesis was beginning to be crossed.

THE GREEK NEW TESTAMENT PRINTED

The great Dutch humanist scholar Desiderius Erasmus (1466?–1536) met and disputed with Colet while lodging in Magdalen College, Oxford. In the summer of 1504, in the Premonstratensian monastery at Louvain, Erasmus read Lorenzo Valla's Adnotationes in Novum Testamentum and discovered the possibility of a new humanist exegesis based on scientific philology (he caused that book to be reprinted in 1505). He had already found the commentaries of St. Jerome and the Egyptian Christian Origen's great third-century parallel edition of six versions of the Hebrew Scriptures, his Hexapla. Erasmus awoke to his life's work, to nourish moral and spiritual reform by the public renewal of biblical theology, based on scientific understanding of the original texts, linked to his fresh evaluations of the principal church fathers. The most influential result was his 1516 edition of the original Greek New Testament, the first ever printed.

The new philology set out to establish the original texts for study. In Spain Cardinal Francisco Ximénez de Cisneros gathered together the scholars who produced the remarkable four volumes of the Complutensian Polyglott, which printed the New Testament in Greek, and the Old Testament in Hebrew, Greek, and Aramaic alongside the Latin Vulgate, with elaborate further commentary. The New Testament was ready by 1514, but not printed, lacking the pope's imprimatur, which was not given until 1522.

THE BIBLE AND REFORM

In 1530, the French Bible translation (from the Latin) made by the humanist scholar Jacques Lefèvre d'Étaples (c. 1455–1536) in Paris was part of his larger intention of initiating Catholic reform through Bible preaching. He was attacked by the church authorities for giving the Word of God to "the humble," a criticism compounded by his not being an academic theologian. One of a circle of Catholic reformers, he wrote in favor of the then novel (later accepted) idea that neither the penitent sinner who anointed Christ's feet (Luke 7:37) nor Mary the sister of Martha (Luke 10:38–42) should be identified with Mary Magdalen (Luke 8:2–3, 23:49, 24:10). His generally trenchant views, expressed in prefaces to his 1523 New Testament translation, led, in spite of his royal protection by Marguerite de Navarre, the sister of King Francis I, to his Bible translation later being put on the Index of Prohibited Books. In the Catholic University of Louvain, Frans Titelmans, a lecturer on Scripture, provided in 1533 for Thomas Herentals's Den Speghel des kersten levens (The mirror of the Christian life) to be printed with his own Den Schat des kersten Gheloofs (The treasure of the Christian faith) with marginal references newly indicating the biblical sources of Catholic teaching and practice. Lefèvre's earlier New Testament in French had been printed in Antwerp in 1525. Though from the Latin, it was condemned on 25 August 1525 by the Paris Faculty of Theology, together with Erasmus's 1516 new Latin translation, his Novum Instrumentum. The latter had caused wide offense by its many corrections of the Vulgate text of the New Testament—he dared to open St. John's Gospel ("In the beginning was the Word . . .") with sermo, 'everyday speech', for the Word, instead of verbum, 'declaration'. At Luke 10:21, Christ thanked the Father for revealing the secrets of the kingdom not to babes but to stulti, 'fools'. These and many more caused scandal.

Yet the triumphant fulfilment of Erasmus's aims of reform came increasingly, and then overwhelmingly, outside the church, although that was something he did not wish. He unleashed the second revolution in Bible interpretation by printing in 1516 that New Testament in Greek noted above, setting it alongside his Latin New Testament to justify his many changes. Easily available to scholars throughout Europe, this work became at once the basis for quite fresh translations of the New Testament into all the vernaculars. Within twenty years, ordinary people could read for themselves, or hear read, the whole New Testament.

VERNACULAR BIBLES

In the chief vernaculars, Martin Luther was first in 1522: his large and beautiful German Septembertestament (September testament) became a bestseller. A Dutch New Testament followed in 1526, the same year as William Tyndale's very influential English New Testament, which had been printed in Worms and was smuggled into England. Pierre-Robert Olivétan's French Bible of 1535 included a New Testament from Erasmus's Greek. And so it continued.

Revised and always massively reprinted, in the first sixty years of the sixteenth century these and others rapidly widened the scope and shifted the methods and function of Bible interpretation and have never been seriously opposed since. The guiding principle was access to what the text says in the original language, as precisely as possible, rather than the elaborations, often fanciful, permitted by earlier hallowed doctrine or practice.

UNDERSTANDING THE WHOLE BIBLE

Opposing the pope and Catholic tradition as sole authorities, Protestants understood from Scripture itself that it should be exposited to all believers in their own language as a whole text. For Protestants the entire New Testament was paramount, particularly the Epistles of Paul. They declared that the New Testament authorized only two sacraments (the Lord's Supper and baptism), not seven, and that neither purgatory nor the concomitant system of indulgences was biblical. They believed that, following the model of the earliest congregations described in Acts and the Epistles, and newly visible to all readers, the Holy Spirit led the faithful into comprehension of Scripture without an intermediary priest. The words of Jesus were first addressed to the lowly: even plowboys were capable of understanding. The Bible was no longer in a remote language, nor declared to be so difficult that only those lengthily educated (in Latin) could interpret small portions of it for the parvuli, the little people attending the liturgies. Preachers could assume in the hearers detailed knowledge of the whole Bible. That knowledge was the new element.

UNIVERSAL READING

The Protestant Reformation was university-led, but biblical theology in its new development was not, as before, consumed only within college walls. Erasmus wanted everyone to read and study the Scriptures—weavers, plowboys, Turks and Saracens, and even women. Erasmus's influential Paraphrases of the New Testament in English, published in the 1520s and 1530s and often reprinted, elucidating the Greek text for every New Testament book except the Apocalypse (Revelation), were, after 1549, by royal command to be placed in every English parish church, adjacent to an English Bible.

In Protestant Europe, the new vehicle of interpretation was the whole of Scripture in the vernacular for everyone (massively bought and studied) with prologues, marginal cross-references and commentaries, elaborate concordances, pictures, and maps. Theological teaching now focused on Paul, taken as a whole, with special emphasis on the sinner's justification by his own faith, without intermediary priest, but supported by his local congregation. Martin Luther's Paul in, for example, his Prologue to the Epistle to the Romans in successive New Testaments, or in his influential printed sermons in German, is indeed fully present, almost overwhelmingly, as the touchstone of all Christian faith. Luther's Preface to Romans in English was one of the two earliest Protestant documents circulating in England. He found in Paul not only "justification by faith alone" but the imperative to educate the German-speaking people in the new biblical theology, under the banner of sola gratia, sola fides, sola scriptura ('grace alone, faith alone, Scripture alone'). His huge output as a theological writer was matched by a similarly large readership.

Sixteenth-century leaders of Bible interpretation—Philipp Melanchthon, Martin Bucer, Huldrych Zwingli, Johannes Oecolampadius, and others—all wrote with the aim of elucidating Scripture. John Calvin (1509–1564) approached the Bible text as a lawyer: not for nothing was a Bible first divided into verses in his Geneva, a convenience for identifying texts in a network of references internal to Scripture. More than Luther, Calvin was a linguist and scholar of ancient languages. The output of Bibles from Geneva in European languages was a response to the desire of Calvin and his colleagues to combine a scrupulous new accuracy of text and the widest popular dissemination.

Under Calvin, Luther's sola scriptura reached its full power. Every reader of Geneva Bibles, in French or English, was taught, by means of the marginal annotations and cross-referencing, that Scripture should only be interpreted in the light of Scripture. As Tyndale put it, the kingdom of heaven is the word of God. Calvin's greatest value lay in his insistence that theology, which now meant biblical theology, uniquely revealed not this church practice or that, but the overarching sovereignty of God.

ACCESSIBLE ILLUMINATION OF THE WHOLE

It is important to recognize that fresh interpretation of the Bible in early modern Europe was done, to by far the greatest extent, in the annotations in vernacular Bibles, read in vast numbers (well over a million English Bibles, mostly Geneva versions, were bought before 1640). Individual study, alone or in groups, at home, in the back of the church, or in the field, allowed absorption of marginal interpretation, which was almost entirely direct textual elucidation toward a literal understanding or internal cross-referencing.

See also Calvin, John ; Calvinism ; Church of England ; Erasmus, Desiderius ; Humanists and Humanism ; Luther, Martin ; Lutheranism ; Melanchthon, Philipp ; Reformation, Protestant ; Zwingli, Huldrych.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Cambridge History of the Bible. Vol. 2, The West, from the Fathers to the Reformation. Edited by G. W. H. Lampe. Cambridge, U.K., 1969. Vol. 3, The West, from the Reformation to the Present Day. Edited by S. L. Greenslade. Cambridge, U.K., 1963.

Daniell, David. The Bible in English: Its History and Influence. New Haven and London, 2003.

Moeller, Berndt. "Scripture, Tradition and Sacrament in the Middle Ages and in Luther." In Holy Book and Holy Tradition, edited by F. F. Bruce and E. G. Rupp, pp. 113–135. Manchester, U.K., 1968.

Peel, Albert. "The Bible and the People: Protestant Views of the Authority of the Bible." In The Interpretation of the Bible, edited by C. W. Dugmore, pp. 49–73. London, 1946.

Prickett, Stephen. "Introduction." In Reading the Text: Biblical Criticism and Literary Theory, edited by Stephen Prickett, pp. 1–11. Oxford and Cambridge, Mass., 1991.

Shuger, Debora Kuller. The Renaissance Bible: Scholarship, Sacrifice, and Subjectivity. Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London, 1994.

Wood, James D. The Interpretation of the Bible: A Historical Introduction. London, 1958.

Zim, Rivkah. "The Reformation: The Trial of God's Word." In Reading the Text: Biblical Criticism and Literary Theory, edited by Stephen Prickett, pp. 64–135. Oxford and Cambridge, Mass., 1991.

David Daniell

Hermeneutics

CRITICISM OF HERMENEUTICS

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Hermeneutics is a German word of Greek origin translated as interpretation in English. In the modern period it was originally used to refer to biblical interpretation and later to the general approach to literary and legal studies. In the past fifty years it has described an alternative to positivist approaches to the study of society. Positivist social science subscribes to methodological monism—the idea that there is a single scientific method, modeled after the natural sciences, that is the means for accumulating objective knowledge about the social and political world. As science, it looks to exclude normative and moral claims or evaluations about the social world. While acknowledging the importance of a scientific understanding of some aspects of the social world, hermeneutics rejects the methodological privilege that positivism ascribes to the natural sciences. Hermeneuticists argue that a more fundamental understanding and explanation of social life may be found in the meaning that action has for social and political actors. The emphasis on meaning implies that social behavior be construed as a text or text-analogue to be interpreted, according to Paul Ricoeur in Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences (1981), rather than as an object of scientific and technological understanding. In this respect hermeneuticists hold that the study of social life is more closely related to explanation and understanding of literary texts than to the objective study of physical objects or biological processes. Moreover, proponents argue that hermeneutics shows that the explanation of social life has a necessary moral or normative dimension to it.

Two of the earliest proponents of hermeneutics were Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768–1834) and Wilhelm Dilthey (1833–1911). Schleiermacher argued that the understanding of literary texts, legal documents, religious practices, or works of art require that one start with the object of interpretation and work backward to ascertain the intention of the author. Dilthey, building on Schleiermacher’s work, argued that historical events as well as works of art are the meaningful embodiment of the subjective intention of social actors and authors. Both thinkers, according to Hans-Georg Gadamer (1900–2000) in Truth and Method (1989), strove to develop an approach to interpretation that would uncover the objective meaning of the object of inquiry.

Schleiermacher and Dilthey formed the basis of what became known as the hermeneutics of recovery. The hermeneutics of recovery presupposes that the task of social inquiry is to capture the original intention or meaning that motivates and informs social action. This presupposes that there is an original, intended meaning that is determinate of social behavior and institutions. This version of hermeneutics often presupposes that empathy is a primary requirement for understanding social action and that explanations are to be couched in the subjective beliefs and intentions of actors.

A second approach, the hermeneutics of suspicion, is grounded in the work of Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900), Karl Marx (1818–1883), and Sigmund Freud (1856–1939), according to Ricoeur. It takes what proponents argue is a more critical approach to interpretation than found in the hermeneutics of recovery. The hermeneutics of suspicion maintains that the subjective intentions or conventional understanding of social actors is misleading and a distortion of social reality. Whether it is the conventional accounts of morality (Nietzsche), the ideology of the capitalist political economy (Marx), or the self-misunderstandings of individuals concerning the genuine motivations for their behavior and particularly their neuroses (Freud), the conscious, subjective, and prevailing understandings of society and social relations remain at the level of mere appearances and function to obscure and distort the reality that the social investigator needs to uncover to reveal the true meaning behind the apparent world.

More recently, two thinkers who have had the greatest impact on hermeneutics have been Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) and Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951). Both Heidegger and Wittgenstein emphasize the priority of language for understanding human existence. For both, language is not just a tool that human beings possess. What is distinctive about human beings is that their experience of the world and their social relations are constituted by and expressed in language. Conversely, language gets its sense from the way of life (Wittgenstein) or the historical horizon (Heidegger) within which it evolves. Hence, there is a close connection between language and the social reality it helps to constitute and embody; the two are intertwined. The meaning of social action must be explained in terms of the linguistic tradition within which it is located, and the linguistic tradition in turn is explicated by reference to the meaningful behavior of social actors. This to-and-fro movement of interpretation is what is meant by the hermeneutic circle.

Heidegger and Wittgenstein have influenced a wide range of interpretive social scientists (Hiley, Bohman, and Schusterman eds. 1991). Perhaps the two most important are Hans-Georg Gadamer (1989; see also Malpas, Arnswald, and Kertscher eds. 2002) and Charles Taylor (b. 1931) (1985, 1995), both of whom go beyond the hermeneutics of recovery and of suspicion. Building on Heidegger’s accounts of language and historicity, Gadamer argues that because human behavior and human understanding are historically and linguistically situated, a person’s understanding of the world is always both enabled and constrained by the person’s linguistic-historical tradition. This means that the prejudices or prejudgments of that tradition are an inescapable and necessary part of people’s attempts to understand themselves as well as other historical traditions. This does not, however, mean that people are trapped in a prison of language. Rather, Gadamer argues that a dialogue with the other encourages openness to the experience of other historical traditions. The result is a fusion of horizons that transcends previous understandings.

Taylor makes a similar point concerning language. Drawing on both Heidegger and Wittgenstein, he argues that language and the social practices in which it is embedded form a social imaginary that serves to express an understanding of the possibilities for human beings and for social and political life. Because that understanding is often inchoate, tacit, and imperfectly articulated, the goal of the social theorist is to give an expression to that social imaginary. Taylor ties this reformulation of the self-understanding of social life to the possibility of deep forms of moral and political evaluation and reflection on the part of social and political actors (Taylor 1985a, 1985b, 1995). Moreover, building on the work of Gadamer, Taylor argues that Gadamer’s account of the fusion of horizons is pertinent not just for the understanding of other historical situations. It is also important in understanding other contemporary cultures and ways of life. The dialogical process that takes place in such efforts makes mutual understanding possible, though not guaranteed. Moreover, it makes greater reflective understanding of ourselves possible as well (Taylor in Malpas, Arnswald, and Kertscher 2002, 277–298)

The most recent significant development in hermeneutics is found in the work of Italian philosopher and social theorist Gianni Vattimo. In Beyond Interpretation: The Meaning of Hermeneutics for Philosophy (1997), Vattimo argues that taking the anti-essentialism of Nietzsche more seriously enables a more radical approach to hermeneutics and interpretation. He looks to challenge the distinction between the natural and the human sciences and to encourage a dialogue among science, art, religion, and ethics. Perhaps most important, along with Taylor he sees a more robust role for religion in the public sphere in what some hermeneuticists describe as a post-secular society.

CRITICISM OF HERMENEUTICS

Despite what proponents see as the promise of interpretive approaches to the study of social life, a number of criticisms have been offered of hermeneutics. One criticism continues to be advanced by conventional social scientists. Focusing on earlier forms of hermeneutics, they claim that empathic understanding may be a useful tool in formulating better hypotheses, but it does not exhaust the range of behavior that is of interest to social science. Moreover, it is not a criterion of verification in the research process, according to those committed to scientifically defined social inquiry.

A second criticism originates with critical theory and the work of Jürgen Habermas. In his debate with Gadamer, Habermas argues that despite its importance for social inquiry, the hermeneutic emphasis on tradition, prejudices, and internal standards of rationality limits its critical leverage on prevailing ideologies that mask the social reality and specifically the exercise of power (Habermas 1987). Critical theorists maintain that this reflects an inherent, politically conservative bias.

A third criticism, from a perspective reminiscent of Michel Foucault (1926–1984), argues that hermeneutic/interpretive theory is still committed to conventional conceptions of truth and the self that are constituted by dominant discursive practices of the self and politics. These, in turn, deploy categories and practices of identity and difference that privilege some forms of human beings and understanding and marginalize or disqualify others. Hermeneutics fails to acknowledge the extent to which it is implicated in prevailing notions of the self and politics.

Needless to say, interpretive theorists have responded to each of these criticisms. To the first they point out that the emphasis on language and its relation to social practice requires explanation that goes beyond empathic understanding. It involves the investigator in what the anthropologist Clifford Geertz (1987) calls depth interpretation. To the second and third criticisms, thinkers such as Gadamer and Taylor acknowledge the limitations of hermeneutics. Consequently, each argues that no historical prejudgments can be allowed to go unchallenged and that one needs to be aware of the ways that prevailing practices of politics and the self influence the possibilities of social explanation. What is perhaps most important, however, is not so much the specific responses of hermeneutics to its critics as the hermeneutic claim that because of the self-interpreting nature of human beings, social science is best understood as a form of practical reason analogous to Aristotle’s fourth-century BCE discussion of practical wisdom in Book VI of the Nicomachean Ethics. This, according to Gibbons (2006), commits hermeneuticists to a dialogue with social actors and competing perspectives as the most promising response to theoretical contestation and pluralism.

SEE ALSO Anthropology, Linguistic; Essentialism; Freud, Sigmund; Geertz, Clifford; Literature; Marginalization; Marx, Karl; Nietzsche, Friedrich; Philosophy; Positivism; Social Science

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Aristotle. 2000. Nicomachean Ethics. Trans. and ed. Roger Crisp. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press. (Orig. created fourth century BCE.)

Gadamer, Hans-Georg. 1989. Truth and Method. 2nd ed. Rev. Trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall. New York: Crossroad.

Geertz, Clifford. 1987. From the Native’s Point of View: On the Nature of Anthropological Understanding. In Interpreting Politics, ed. Michael T. Gibbons, pp. 133–147. New York: New York University Press.

Gibbons, Michael T. 2006. Hermeneutics, Political Inquiry, and Practical Reason: An Evolving Challenge to Political Science. American Political Science Review: Centennial Edition 100 (4): 563–571.

Habermas, Jürgen. 1987. The Hermeneutic Claim to Universality. In Interpreting Politics, ed. Michael T. Gibbons, pp. 175–202. New York: New York University Press.

Hiley, David R., James F. Bohman, and Richard Shusterman, eds. 1991. The Interpretive Turn: Philosophy, Science, Culture. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

Malpas, Jeff, Ulrich Arnswald, and Jens Kertscher, eds. 2002. Gadamer’s Century: Essays in Honor of Hans-Georg Gadamer. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Ricoeur, Paul. 1981. Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences: Essays on Language, Action, and Interpretation, ed. and trans. John B. Thompson. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press.

Taylor, Charles. 1985a. Human Agency and Language. Vol. 1 of Philosophical Papers. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press.

Taylor, Charles. 1985b. Philosophy and the Human Sciences. Vol. 2 of Philosophical Papers. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press.

Taylor, Charles. 1995. Philosophical Arguments. Cambridge, MA:Harvard University Press.

Vattimo, Gianni. 1997. Beyond Interpretation: The Meaning of Hermeneutics for Philosophy. Trans. David Webb. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

Michael T. Gibbons

INTERPRETATION

Interpretation seeks to bring out, within the confines of the analytic method, the latent meaning of a subject's words and behavior; its aim is to reveal unconscious desires and the defensive conflicts that are linked to them. Technically, interpretation consists in making manifest this latent meaning, in accordance with the rules dictated by the various phases of the treatment.

The first version of the theory of interpretation was delineated by Sigmund Freud in his psychoanalytic study of dreams (1900a) and is applicable to other products of the unconscious, such as parapraxes, slips of the tongue, and symptoms. For Freud, psychoanalysis was an art of interpretation, but he preferred the term "construction" as a description of the core of the psychoanalytical method, that is, the unveiling of the unconscious. This "construction" of the unconscious is entirely a matter of applying successive interpretations to the different aspects of a case. The interpretations allow an overall perspective to emerge and thus define a strategy for the treatment; however, it might also be tactically necessary at times to adjust to unforeseen developments.

Interpretation is not just a matter of what needs to be expressed and its actual utterance: it conveys its own meaning, one that disturbs that defensive arrangements meant to maintain the effectiveness of repression. Care must be taken not to provide a premature "translation" of unconscious content, as this risks discouraging the patient, reinforcing his resistance and creating a purely intellectualized understanding. Firstly, the affects associated with these defensive structures need to come to expression, and this implies a struggle of wills. While interpretation is characterized by the necessary intelligibility of its formulations—its reductiveness—as well as by its closeness to manifest representation, generalization, and theorization, it also has a darker and more complex dimension that relates to the polysemy of language, personal symbolism, or the history of the affects involved. Bringing out these affects opens up an economic dimension in which instinctual energy forces the representation into the open. This is made possible, first of all, through the workings of the transference and the counter-transference.

In "The Dynamics of Transference," Freud insisted that interpretation should not begin before the appearance of the transference, and specified that the goal in interpreting the patient's transference is "to compel him to fit these emotional impulses into the nexus of the treatment and of his life-history, to submit them to intellectual consideration and to understand them in the light of their psychical value. This struggle between the doctor and the patient, between intellect and instinctual life, between understanding and seeking to act, is played out almost exclusively in the phenomena of transference. It is on this field that victory must be won" (1912b, p. 108).

What the interpretations communicate to the patient in terms of the construction of the unconscious, and on the basis of the transference, is indissociable from the analyst's reconstruction which is based on the analysis of his own counter-transference. The analyst responds to the transference demands with only a minimum of authority, allowing him to make the counter-transference into a tool for exploring the unconscious of the patient. For Freud, the unconscious of the patient is consequently revealed through the unconscious of the analyst.

The primary goal of interpretation is the lifting of resistance: the cure is not the result of a premature recognition of whatever has been repressed, but occurs through a victory over the resistances at the source of this ignorance. Thanks to the love-transference and the psychoanalyst's patience, the analysand should be able to accept the psychoanalyst's "translation" without these revelations about their unconscious adding to their conflicts or symptoms. Freud rejected any interpretation that is isolated from the symbolic material issuing from the unconscious, and indicated that it would be a mistake to think that the interpretation of dreams is central to all analyses.

As Michel Fain wrote, "While the turning of 1920 [Beyond the Pleasure Principle, 1920g] shattered the metapsychology of 1915, conceptions from the first topic continued to influence Freud's conception of interpretation" (1983). It would seem useful to emphasize the necessary complementarity of the two topics, neither being able alone to account for the theoretical role of interpretation.

"The path that starts from the analyst's construction ought to end in the patient's recollection; but it does not always lead so far. . . If the analysis is carried out correctly, we produce in him an assured conviction of the truth of the construction which achieves the same therapeutic result as a recaptured memory" (Freud, 1937d, pp. 265-66).

Interpretation has recently become one of the latest focuses in the epistemological debate over the status of psychoanalysis. The "experimental" point of view, in which interpretation is conflated with a generalizable scientific truth that results from verifiable protocols and can be duplicated within the context of multidisciplinary research, includes certain models from psychoanalytical theory, comparing them with other developmental models or conceptual tools from psychopathology.

Conversely, the "hermeneutic" point of view results in a purely relative, narrative, and pragmatic conception of truth, whereby the interpretation is only a new version of the life story that makes the patient feel better. Consequently it tends towards a language of action that valorizes the conscious dimension. Highlighting the narrative point of view obviously involves challenging the status of metapsychology (Schafer, Roy, 1983), but the "scientific" point of view ultimately leads to the same tendency.

A closely related notion, often mentioned when clinical cases are being discussed, is that of "intervention." It is often used by default, when the analyst wants to utter words that are deemed appropriate, without the elements of the construction justifying those words being clearly established. It is given that analysts do not merely proffer interpretations during the session—in addition they may request a clarification, verify an element already referred to in the treatment, encourage the patient to continue speaking, and the like.

However, because of the transferential situation, it is impossible to predict the outcome of these interventions, whose inoffensive, innocent, or insignificant character cannot be affirmed a priori. Jean Cournut has criticized the illegitimacy of this notion, adding that, in his view, "the term 'intervention' should be eradicated from the lexicon of psychoanalysis" (1983).

Jacques Angelergues

See also: Amnesia; Bernfeld, Siegfried; Construction de l'espace analytique (La-) (Constructing the analytical space) ; Construction-reconstruction; "Constructions in Analysis"; Dream interpretation; Hermeneutics; Interpretation of dreams (analytical psychology): Interpretation of Dreams, The ; Over-interpretation; Psychoanalytical treatment; Technique with adults, psychoanalytic; Technique with children, psychoanalytic; Transference; Transference and counter-transference; Translation; Violence of Interpretation, The: From Pictogram to Statement .

Bibliography

Fain, Michel. (1983). Introduction. Revue Française de Psychanalyse, 67, 3, 707-716.

Freud, Sigmund. (1900a). The interpretation of dreams. Part I, SE, 4: 1-338; Part II, SE, 5: 339-625.

——. (1912b). The dynamics of transference. SE, 12: 97-108.

——. (1937d). Constructions in analysis. SE, 23: 255-269.

Schafer, Roy. (1983). The analytic attitude. London: Hogarth.

Further Reading

Britton, Ronald, Steiner, John. (1994). Interpretation: Selected fact or overvalues idea?, International Journal of Psychoanalysis 75, 1069-1078.

Busch, Fred. (2000). What is a deep interpretation? Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 48, 237-254.

Friedman, Lawrence. (2002). What lies beyond interpretation, and is that the right question?, Psychoanalytic Psychology,19, 540-551.

Ogden, Thomas. (1997). Reverie and interpretation. Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 66, 567-595.

interpretation, interpretive sociology In one sense, any statement is an interpretation: if I call this thing in front of me a desk (rather than a dressing table) then I am interpreting a battery of sense impressions; if I say I feel happy (rather than, say, drunk) then I am interpreting certain physical sensations and a mental state. Not all sociologists recognize such a wide use of the word. Some, for example, use it more narrowly as in the sense of interpreting statistical data.

Interpretive sociology is a term usually confined to those sociological approaches which regard meaning and action as the prime objects of sociology. These differ in the extent to which they view interpretation as problematic. symbolic interactionism and much Weberian sociology, for example, generally interprets meaning on a commonsense level. Phenomenological sociology possesses a quite elaborate theory of interpretation, as do ethnomethodology, hermeneutics, and structuralism. Interpretive theories differ as well in the degree to which they go beyond the actor's own understanding of what he or she is doing.

For Max Weber (The Methodology of the Social Sciences, 1904–17), verstehen (or understanding) of people's actions is the method par excellence of sociology. Understanding and interpretation are closely related, and most sociologists would now recognize that some interpretation is involved in all acts of understanding, although some maintain a more naïve view that there are unproblematic meanings in social reality which can be directly understood. Weber distinguishes descriptive understanding (for example ‘John is walking across the room and opening a window’) and explanatory understanding (‘He is opening the window in order to ventilate this stuffy room’). In fact, both statements require an interpretation of what is happening, the second merely going rather further than the first. It is argued that the more complete our understanding or interpretation, the closer we are to a full explanation of an action. Alfred Schutz (in The Phenomenology of the Social World, 1932) develops a more elaborate conception by extending Weber's work and exploring the formation of goals from the stream of experience. This leads him to distinguish ‘because’ motives (which lie in past experience) from ‘in order to’ motives (which point to a future state of affairs that the actor wishes to bring about).

Most modern sociological conceptions of understanding recognize that it is also a process of interpretation. Some try to avoid this, by arguing that what we should be searching out are the rules by means of which we understand and interpret, since these remain the same whatever the content of interpretations. This lies behind Peter Winch's idea that all social action is rule-following; as well as the ethnomethodological focus on conversational rules; the concerns of structuralism with the rules which enable the production of meaning from an underlying structure; and, less obviously, the interest of post-structuralism in the constant and shifting play of meanings. Anthony Giddens (in The Constitution of Society, 1984) argues that all explicitly formulated rules become sites for interpretation, and the rules that are most basic to human action and interaction are not formulated, but rather, as far as the actor is concerned, are pre-conscious. They are, therefore, like the rules that govern mathematical progressions, and tell us how to proceed in the same way. Thus, given the beginning of a sequence (say 2, 4, 6, 8), we know how it continues (10, 12, 14) without necessarily knowing the rule which governs this progression.

Hermeneutics is the science of interpretation and maintains an interest in the content as well as the form of what is being interpreted. The term itself originated with the practice of interpreting sacred texts. It works on the principle that we can only understand the meaning of a statement in relation to a whole discourse or world-view of which it forms a part: for example, we can only understand (say) the statements of monetarist economics, in the context of all the other contemporary cultural phenomena to which they are related. We have to refer to the whole to understand the parts and the parts to understand the whole—the so-called hermeneutic circle. This in turn involves putting ourselves in the position of the author of the text and looking at the meaning of what is produced in relation to its context. Whereas biblical interpretation aimed at the correct meaning, it is now generally acknowledged that there is no such entity, although many philosophers hold that an approximation to the truth is possible. The German hermeneutic philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer, for example, argues this is possible through a shared tradition (Truth and Method, 1960).

It should be evident by now that the systematic investigation of interpretation is largely the province of the philosophy of social science, and its influence on sociological investigation is variable. Perhaps its most important contribution has been to the problem of understanding other cultures, given the possibilities for cultural relativism. If we take Winch's position, for example, we must understand a culture in its own terms, through its own rules, and without imposing the framework of our own culture. In a classic paper on ‘Understanding a Primitive Society’ (in B. Wilson , Rationality, 1970)
he argues that we cannot make any judgement about the truth or otherwise of Azande beliefs about witchcraft. In Azande society, there are witches and witchcraft, whereas in our society we have science and scientists. The two are just different and one is not superior to the other by any transcendent standard: for us, science is better, but for the Azande witchcraft is better. All we can do is understand, this being made possible by the fact that we share a common human condition, since each society has to find a way of regulating and dealing with the birth of new members, sexual relations, and death.

For those approaches that posit the existence of a social structure independent of people's conception of their social world, the problem of the nature of understanding is much less important.

Hermeneutics (Gk., hermeneutikos, ‘interpretation’, from Hermes, the Greek messenger of the gods). The discipline arising from reflection on the problems involved in the transmission of meaning from text or symbol to reader or hearer. Since there is no privileged or ‘correct’ meaning of an utterance, hermeneutics has sometimes been summarized in the question, ‘whose meaning is the meaning of the meaning?’ —i.e., there are many possible and legitimate meanings to be found in any text.

The modern discussion of hermeneutics derives from the early Romantic movement. Kant's emphasis on understanding was essential: Verstand (understanding) is the underlying human capacity for thought and experience, and Verstehen (acts of understanding), which are present in all thought and experience, are the expression of the distinctively human rationality. For Schleiermacher (the key figure in the development of hermeneutics), hermeneutics could no longer be a matter of uncovering a single given meaning in a text by chipping away at the obstacles which at present obscure it. Rather, hermeneutics ‘is an unending task of understanding’. Every utterance, verbal or nonverbal, belongs to a linguistic system (Sprache), but it belongs also to the lived experience (Erlebnis) of the one who utters. There is thus a hermeneutical circle which it is the task of hermeneutics, conceived of as the art of understanding, to close.

Wilhelm Dilthey (1833–1911) took what he understood of Schleiermacher much further. His On the Construction of the Historical World in the Human Sciences (1910) abandoned the view that understanding rests in human language-competence, and claimed instead that it rests in the whole life-process: it is a Lebenskategorie (a category of life). By this he meant that the process of life is a constant ‘scan’ of circumstances so that they can be understood and so that appropriate reactions can be initiated. What has to be ‘understood’, therefore, by the scientist of human behaviour is always a life-expression (Lebensausserung), which points back to a lived experience (Erlebnis) as its source. The expressed meaning (Ausdruck) can be apprehended only by relating the two, but that in itself is a ‘lived experience’ on the part of the one who apprehends, part indeed of a continuing ‘lived experience’ which constitutes a ‘pre-understanding’. The closing of the hermeneutical circle now becomes the connecting of two culturally and historically embedded lives, not to achieve ‘the meaning’, but to create a new horizon of meaning from the connection, the fusion of horizons. For Emilio Betti (1890–1968), this offered the best hope for a tolerant society, since there is no one meaning, closed to all revision, ever to be attained.

Against what may seem to be a steady drift toward subjectivism (‘meaning is for me’), ontological hermeneutics (associated especially with the later Heidegger and Hans-Georg Gadamer, Wahrheit und Methode …, 1972, ‘Truth and Method’, 1975) has sought to integrate the truth which lies behind language and which alone makes intelligible utterance possible. While it seems obvious to say that ‘what are true are sentences’, Gadamer insists (as do critical realists in the natural sciences) that there is what there is ‘over and above our wanting and doing’. Gadamer argues that ‘the truth finds us’. Language is the surface where truth becomes visible.

While hermeneutics is thus an issue in many disciplines, it is central to the interpretation of religious utterance, and of religious and sacred texts. In the Christian tradition, there have in fact been many different styles of exegesis of the Bible. In the medieval period, scripture was expected to yield a fourfold meaning: the literal (letter) sense; the allegorical or typological sense (the meaning in the context of the drama of salvation); the moral sense (the practical meaning in terms of conduct); the anagogical sense (the meaning in relation to the purposes of God in eternity). For the Reformers, much of this had produced eisegesis (reading meaning into the text) rather than exegesis. The fusion of horizons between text and reader reconciles these extremes by allowing the continuing creativity of the Holy Spirit to bring God's truth and the truth of God to the surface of a particular moment.

HERMENEUTICS

The term hermeneutics is used broadly to describe the process of justifying interpretation through exposing the criteria used to produce it. The form is also used, by extension, to designate a twentieth-century philosophy for which interpretation is either a condition for accessing meaning through thought, and therefore a condition of every science of mind as such, thus implicating the normativity of logic, or the praxis of thought itself, no product of thought being capable of escaping infinite reinterpretation since it would then no longer be living thought but dead thought.

In a limited sense, Logic, as understood by Aristotle's Organon, has been and remains the framework of hermeneutics. "Hermeneia," Paul Ricoeur writes, "in the fullest sense, is the meaning of the sentence"—and goes on to criticize an "overly 'lengthy' concept" of interpretation. But this is also the case when "hermeneutics" is understood as biblical exegesis (an "overly restricted" sense). Here it is theology, understood as an exclusive theory and therefore as a preestablished doctrine, that conditions truth and falsehood, and thus access to the determination of meaning. It should not be surprising therefore to find within the result of the interpretation what we were trying to find from the start.

Understood as philosophy, hermeneutics rejects the fact that logical concepts, in the Hegelian sense, can present and determine meaning, or that the "logic of the concept" can be its concretization; nor can the concept serve as a criterion of signification. However, hermeneutic finality can remain with the concept in the sense of discourse, or, on the contrary, an interpretation that falls short of the separation of words and things, an interpretation of the constitution of a possible world by each and for all, or even a fundamental process of "leveling" the language of the unconscious.

Freud considered that analytic interpretation, at the clinical situation, transmutes the patient's dreams into the true creative and critical power of subjectivity. For this reason interpretation is not and could not be an "extension" of the dream, as Ludwig Wittgenstein claimed, believing to have found in this a critique of the unscientific nature of Freudian "hermeneutics." Since, according to Wittgenstein, to interpret a dream is to prolong it, Freud's method of dream interpretation remains within the dream from the point of view of its scientific value. Thus one can also say that hermeneutics risks arbitrariness or relevancy that is only superficial to the extent that it can drift into an imaginary free association of ideas in connection of symbiotic or "esoteric" object, whereas this free association must itself be the object of a rigorous interpretation with reorganized and shared criteria; so hermeneutics also runs the risks of falling into a "delirium of interpretation," a psychotic hermeneutics used by the schizophrenic, who cultivates a discourse of paradoxes in order to protect himself from ambivalence and conflict (Paul-Claude Racamier).

Dominique Auffret

See also: Amplification (analytical psychology); Deferred action; Interpretation; Philosophy and psychoanalysis.

Bibliography

Ricoeur, Paul. (1965). History and truth. (Charles A. Kelbley, Trans.). Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. (Original work published 1955)

——. (1970). Freud and philosophy: An essay on interpretation. (Denis Savage, Trans.). New Haven: Yale University Press. (Original work published 1965)

——. (1974). The conflict of interpretations (Don Ihde, Ed.). Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. (Original work published 1969)

INTERPRETATION

The art or process of determining the intended meaning of a written document, such as a constitution, statute, contract, deed, or will.

The interpretation of written documents is fundamental to the process and practice of law. Interpretation takes place whenever the meaning of a legal document must be determined. Lawyers and judges search for meaning using various interpretive approaches and rules of construction. In constitutional and statutory law, legal interpretation can be a contentious issue.

Legal interpretation may be based on a literal reading of a document. For example, when john doe signs a will that names his wife, Jane Doe, as his personal representative, his intent to name her the administrator of his estate can be determined solely from the specific language used in the will. There is no need to consider the surrounding facts and circumstances that went into his choice.

When the intended meaning of the words in a document is obscure and conjecture is needed to determine the sense in which they have been used, mixed interpretation occurs. In such a case, the words express an individual's intent only when they are correctly comprehended. If John Doe refers only to "my wife" in his will, a probate court will have to determine who his wife was at the time of his death. How a lawyer or judge ascertains intent when words are unclear is typically governed by rules of construction. For example, the general definition of a word will govern interpretation, unless through custom, usage, or legal precedent a special meaning has been attached to the term.

When a court interprets a statute, it is guided by rules of statutory construction. Judges are to first attempt to find the "plain meaning" of a law, based solely on the words of the statute. If the statute itself is not clear, a court then may look to extrinsic evidence, in this case legislative history, to help interpret what the legislature meant when it enacted the statute. It is now common practice for statutes to contain "interpretation clauses," which include definitions of key words that occur frequently in the laws. These clauses are intended to promote the plain meaning of the law and to restrict courts from finding their own meaning.

Concern over whether courts apply strict or liberal methods of interpretation has generated the most controversy at the constitutional level. How the U.S. Supreme Court interprets the Constitution has been widely debated since the 1960s. Critics of the warren court, of the 1950s and 1960s, charged that the Court had usurped the lawmaking function by liberally interpreting constitutional provisions.

This criticism led to jurisprudence of "original intent," a philosophy that calls on the Supreme Court and other judges to seek the plain meaning of the Constitution. If plain textual meaning is lacking, the justices should attempt to determine the original intentions of the Framers. Those who advocate an original intent method of interpretation also emphasize the need for the justices to respect history, tradition, and legal precedent.

Opponents of original intent jurisprudence argue that discerning the intent of the Framers is impossible on many issues. Even if the original intent is knowable, some opponents believe that this intent should not govern contemporary decision making on constitutional issues. In their view the Constitution is a living document that should be interpreted according to the times. This interpretive philosophy would permit justices to read the Constitution as a dynamic document, with contemporary values assisting in the search for meaning.

cross-references

Judicial Review; Plain-Meaning Rule.

INTERPRÉTATION

The review Interprétation was born in 1967 of a meeting between the desire to challenge the practice and teaching of psychiatric thinking in Canada, on the part of a team of the Research and Teaching Service of the Laurentides Hospital (directed by Marcel Lemieux),—and the passion and commitment of the psychoanalyst who became its editor-in-chief, Julien Bigras.

Having taken from the very beginning the course of interdisciplinarity, for the purpose of furthering reflection through the encounter of the various human sciences, the review, independently of any school, opened itself up equally to literary and artistic milieux, making much room for foreign authors, especially French. Conrad Stein was editor for France between 1967 and 1971. The editorial committee for the first numbers of the review comprised: André Saint-Jean, Claude Lagadec, Pierre Mathieu, Carlo Serlin, Laurent Santerre, Rémi Savard, andÉlizabeth Bigras. After a break of seven years, the review began publishing again, with the same editor-in-chief and a new editorial committee, including Jean-Jacques Couvrette, François Peraldi, and Josette Garon.

The review has published many articles on specifically psychoanalytical themes, such as, for example, the psychoanalytic process, fantasy life, and psychoses, or on the question of the training, education, and commitment of psychoanalysts, as well as on the theories and works of Freud and authors who have written about and after him. There have been also a number of articles relating to anthropology, sociology, literature, pedagogy, semiology, philosophy, theology, and the theory of communication.

This review has published texts of many different forms: clinical and theoretical articles, translations, conferences, and congress reports. Exchanges have taken the form of letters, discussions, and responses; authors have also published original creative works, such as poems, stories, and theatrical scenarios. The review has organized encounters and colloquia, playing an important catalytic role in the Quebec milieu. A crossroads of the human sciences, it has kept open the question of the wealth, but also the limits of interdisciplinarity, as well as that of the limits of psychoanalysis.

Josette Garon

See also: Bigras, Julien Joseph Normand; Canada.

hermeneutics, a term for the theory of interpretation, employed at first in biblical scholarship, but then also more generally in the humanities and social sciences. In modern literay theory and related fields, the term refers to a philosophical tradtion, predominantly German, in which certain general problems of interpretation arise. It originates in the lectures of the theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768–1834), who proposed that comprehension of the grammatical sense of a text was insufficient without a larger intuitive grasp of the author's intention. The philosopher Wilhelm Dilthey (1833–1911) later developed the implications of this idea, and formulated the problem of the ‘hermeneutic circle’: that we cannot understand any part of a text or of a historical period without understanding the whole, yet we cannot understand the whole without understanding its parts. His answer to the conundrum is that we reconcile part and whole through successively adjusted provisional understandings or intuitive projections.

In the philosophical tradition of Heidegger and his followers, hermeneutics reaches far beyond mere interpretation, as ‘understanding’ is held to precede its objects. In modern literary theory, a return to hermeneutic problems is found in E. D. Hirsch's Validity in Interpretation (1967), which distinguishes between a work's determinate ‘meaning’ and its variable ‘significance’, and in various alternatives to his view (for which, see reader-response theory). An especially influential modern hermeneuticist is the French philosopher Paul Ricœur (1913– ), who has noted a distinction between the religious ‘hermeneutics of the sacred’, which seeks to restore an original meaning that has become obscured, and the modern ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’, which seeks (as in Marx and Freud) a concealed meaning behind misleading appearances.

hermeneutics In Greek = ‘interpretation’: hence, the understanding of biblical texts, including their historical context. The word is also used in a wider sense, to mean the interpretation of a text and its application to the reader after the historical examination has been done; the work of discerning how a NT text written in the cultural context of the 1st cent. CE can be understood in a modern cultural context. It is a movement from ‘what it meant’ then to ‘what it means’, taking into account empirical evidence of today. For some NT scholars this has involved detaching the essential message of the gospel from the mythological frame in which it has been enclosed. Bultmann's hermeneutical vehicle for the reinterpretation has been that of the modern philosophy of existentialism.

Although the term ‘hermeneutics’ originated in the 17th cent., it is held that it began in the NT itself, when Paul used contemporary Jewish methods of interpreting the OT for preaching the significance of Jesus. In subsequent ages, allegorical and typological methods were practised. At the Reformation the doctrine of Justification by Faith was adopted as a canon of interpretation. But only a literal sense of the text was regarded as legitimate by Calvin, who feared that faithful interpretation could otherwise be distorted by merely human values. The history of interpretation is one of the resources at the disposal of modern communicators.

interpretation in mus. is merely the act of perf., with the implication that in it the performer's judgement and personality have a share. Just as there is no means by which a dramatist can so write his play as to indicate to the actors precisely how they should speak his lines, so there is no means by which a composer can indicate to a performer the precise way in which his mus. is to be sung or played—so that no two performers will adopt the same slackenings and hastenings of speed (incl. rubato), the same degree of emphasis on an accented note, and so forth. The matter is further complicated by composers’ latitude in use of metronome markings as applied to a term such as allegro or moderato (e.g. varying in one work from   = 160 to   = 100 for allegro). Thus there is no ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ interpretation in the strict sense, but in matters of style and taste, a performer's ‘interpretation’ may be felt by listeners to be out of sympathy with, or a distortion of, the composer's intentions.

hermeneutics the theory and practice of interpretation. During the Reformation hermeneutics came into being as a special discipline concerned with biblical criticism. The Protestant theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher expanded the discipline from one concerned with removing obstacles preventing readers from gaining the proper understanding of a text to one concerned in addition with analyzing the necessary conditions for readers coming to any understanding of a text. The philosopher Wilhelm Dilthey expanded the discipline still further by conceiving of all of the human and social sciences as hermeneutical enterprises and trying to construct a method uniquely for them, instead of borrowing one from the natural sciences. In the 20th cent. hermeneutics has been developed by the philosophers Hans-Georg Gadamer and Paul Ricoeur.

Bibliography: See D. Hoy, The Critical Circle: Literature, History, and Philosophical Hermeneutics (1978); K. Mueller-Vollmer, ed., The Hermeneutics Reader (1985).

interpretation Unintelligible utterances required the gift of interpretation (1 Cor. 12: 10); and translation from one language to another was a kind of interpretation (Ezra 4: 7; Acts 9: 36; Heb. 7: 2). The interpretation of the OT by Jesus followed rules prescribed by distinguished rabbis such as Hillel. Christian scholars in the 2nd and 3rd cents. CE in Alexandria used the method of allegory as a means of acceptable biblical interpretation. In Antioch preference was given to the literal meaning of scripture but the method of typology was employed by John Chrysostom and others. During the Middle Ages the interpretation of the Bible was increasingly brought into the service of doctrine and at the Reformation Luther and Calvin used the Bible to develop their characteristic theological views, but without allegorical exegesis. Modern interpreters of the Bible use all the resources of criticism; the guiding principle is a determination first to elucidate what the text precisely says.

hermeneutics. The science of the methods of exegesis. Whereas exegesis is usually the act of explaining a text, hermeneutics is the science or art by which exegetical procedures are devised. In theology hermeneutical theory arises out of awareness of the ambiguity of a sacred text and the consequent analysis of the art of understanding. The Protestant emphasis on the importance of Scripture and belief in the possibility of comprehending it, encouraged reflection on the act of understanding, as well as a return to more literal exegesis. In modern times F. D. E. Schleiermacher gave new prominence to the act of correctly understanding all human utterance and thereby subsumed biblical hermeneutics into a general theory of interpretation. Subsequently interpretation rather than perception has been seen as the fundamental mode of man's relation to the world, and some theologians regard hermeneutics, rather than metaphysics, as the central task of Christian theology.

interpretation The process of attaching meanings to the expressions of a formal language – or the meanings so attached. Without interpretation, expressions are purely formal entities, neutral with respect to meaning; this neutrality allows one to separate syntatic from semantic concerns, and to consider different interpretations for one formal language. The following are examples: propositional logic interpretations attach Boolean values to primitive symbols; predicate logic interpretations involve relations or functions over some underlying set; algebras similarly attach sets and functions to the symbols of a signature. Interpretations are made in the semantics of programming languages. An interpretation can give completely arbitrary meanings to primitive symbols. By contrast, a model must also satisfy certain logical sentences.

hermeneutics (her-mĕ-newt-iks) n. the study of interpretation as a human experience and activity. Originally concerned with clarifying the meaning of biblical texts, it has since broadened and is now applied to the exploration, description, and interpretation of human phenomena to uncover hidden meanings and enhance understanding.

hermeneutics science of interpretation. XVIII. — modL. hermēneutica — Gr. hermēneutikḗ, sb. use of fem. sg. of adj. (see -IC, -ICS), f. hermēneutḗs, agent-noun f. hermēneúein interpret, f. hermēneús interpreter.

her·me·neu·tics / ˌhərməˈn(y)oōtiks/ • pl. n. [usu. treated as sing.] the branch of knowledge that deals with interpretation, esp. of the Bible or literary texts.

hermeneutics the branch of knowledge that deals with interpretation, especially of the Bible or literary texts.

hermeneutics See INTERPRETATION.