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SSStttooonnnyyy BBBrrrooooookkk UUUnnniiivvveeerrrsssiiitttyyy The official electronic file of this thesis or dissertation is maintained by the University Libraries on behalf of The Graduate School at Stony Brook University. ©©© AAAllllll RRRiiiggghhhtttsss RRReeessseeerrrvvveeeddd bbbyyy AAAuuuttthhhooorrr... Gadamer’s Hermeneutic Holism A Dissertation Presented by Peter Erik Fristedt to The Graduate School in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Philosophy Stony Brook University May 2008 Copyright by Peter Erik Fristedt 2008 Stony Brook University The Graduate School Peter Erik Fristedt We, the dissertation committee for the above candidate for the Doctor of Philosophy degree, hereby recommend acceptance of this dissertation. Lorenzo Simpson – Dissertation Advisor Professor, Department of Philosophy Eduardo Mendieta - Chairperson of Defense Associate Professor, Department of Philosophy Hugh J. Silverman Professor, Department of Philosophy Georgia Warnke Professor of Philosophy University of California, Riverside This dissertation is accepted by the Graduate School Lawrence Martin Dean of the Graduate School ii Abstract of the Dissertation Gadamer’s Hermeneutic Holism by Peter Erik Fristedt Doctor of Philosophy in Philosophy Stony Brook University 2008 This dissertation uses the resources of philosophical hermeneutics to address problems that arise in holistic accounts of meaning. Holism holds that meaning is context-dependent, where ‘context’ is typically construed as one’s total theory of the world. Such a view makes communication difficult between total theories that differ even slightly, as slight differences within a total theory translate into global theory difference. The question the dissertation asks is whether one can retain a holistic view of meaning while avoiding such problematic consequences. I begin by considering Quine’s and Davidson’s versions of holism, arguing that the consequences of holism are in part due to the tendency of holists to think of total theories as consisting of sets of interconnected statements. I find an alternative to this view in the work of Hans-Georg Gadamer, and devote the middle three chapters of the dissertation to outlining his philosophy of interpretation. Total theories—worldviews—are for Gadamer networks of interrelated beliefs and questions. For the interpreter, questions open up the distinction between the being of the thing in question and its presentation in an interpretation. This distinction is in play in all interpretation, but it also collapses in all interpretation: the object of iii interpretation is always encountered as both distinct and non-distinct from the way in which it is understood. Interpretations directly access the object, but they do not do so exhaustively—they always capture an “aspect of the thing itself.” The consequences for meaning are that in a worldview I understand things that I understand to transcend that worldview. Indeed, content for Gadamer just is the presentation in an interpretation of a thing that transcends that interpretation. But if that is the case, then content cannot be strongly determined by the particular total theory that is its context. On this view, content is dependent, not on individual contexts, but on the potentially infinite number of contexts in which the thing itself can be interpreted. Since no single context determines content exhaustively, there need be no global communication failure between worldviews—and some of the worries about holism are alleviated. iv For My Parents TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction 1 1. Holism in the Philosophy of Language 6 1.1 Holism and Semantic Wholes 6 1.2 Quine and the Emergence of Holism 15 1.3 Davidson and Holism without Borders 28 2. Tradition 44 2.1 The Hermeneutic Circle 45 2.2 Tradition and Interpreter 53 2.3 Historically Effected Consciousness 58 2.4 Openness and the Logic of Question and Answer 66 2.5 The Logic of Question and Answer and Truth 76 3. The World 82 3.1 Being and Presentation 83 3.2 World as Formal Totality 89 3.3 World as Horizon 93 vi 3.4 World as Text 101 4. Truth 104 4.1 Language and Metaphysics 108 4.2 The Medium of Language 118 4.3 The Paradox of the Sache 128 4.4 The Event of Truth 133 5. Hermeneutic Holism 147 5.1 The Semantics of the Question 149 5.2 The Sache and the Possibility-Conditions of Interpretation 153 5.3 Coda: How Much Do Two People Need to Agree about in 163 Order to Understand Each Other? Abbreviations of Frequently Cited Texts 172 Bibliography 173 vii INTRODUCTION What happens when people talk to each other? There are lots of ways for people to make verbal utterances—they can complain, beg, argue, chatter. But typically when we say that two people are ‘talking to each other,’ we mean that they are talking about something—they are having a conversation about a particular subject matter. If this is what happens, we might want to ask how it is possible for me to understand what it is you are saying about this subject matter. How can I be sure that I have understood you? We are all familiar with the phenomenon of ‘talking past one another’—i.e. when two people appear to be having a conversation, but in fact neither really understands what the other is saying. And that we sometimes misunderstand each other ought not to come as a surprise—we are not the same person, after all, and our beliefs differ about a number of topics. But is it possible that we not just misunderstand each other, but systematically misunderstand each other? If Smith comes from a society of secular scientists, and Jones from a society of religious fundamentalists, will there be much they can agree on? It may be that Jones does not know particle physics, and thus will not be able to understand Smith when she holds forth on the Large Hadron Collider. And Smith, dismissive of religion in general, may be prohibited from seeing Jones’s beliefs as addressing basic questions about the place of humankind in the universe. Yet another possibility presents itself. Let’s say that this fraught conversation does in fact turn to the topic of religion. Given how differently Smith and Jones understand religion, can they really be said to be talking about the same thing? To Smith, religion is the product of gullible, superstitious minds, and contains doctrines that are plain false, if not nonsensical. To Jones, it is a source of wonder, reverence, and the deepest truths available to us. Do we really want to say that “religion” means the same thing for Smith and Jones? But if it does not mean the same thing, it is not clear that they are talking about the same thing. And in that case, they are surely not disagreeing about religion. We seem to have gone from the run of the mill case of misunderstanding of a topic to something rather more drastic—the breakdown in understanding between people with apparently broadly different views of things. What has happened? 1 The encounter we have described is one that is paradigmatic for discussions of what has come to be called semantic holism. Semantic holism is the position that the meaning of a sentence is dependent upon its relation to the rest of the sentences in a total theory of the world. Another way of putting it is to say that individual sentences do not have meaning outside of a very broad context—an individual sentence taken out of its total theory does not mean what it does within it. Hence the breakdown in understanding between Smith and Jones: what Smith says about any given thing is a function of her entire web of beliefs; Jones, whose web of beliefs is different, thus understands what Smith says differently than Smith does. Only if Jones could somehow have access to everything Smith believes could she understand some particular statement of Smith’s. Meaning, on this picture, becomes relative to the total theory in which it occurs. We may go one step further: if we combine the view that meaning is holistic with the claim that what our words refer to is a function of what they mean (i.e., that meaning determines reference), then we get not only the relativity of meaning, but the relativity of reference—and thereby the relativity of truth. Consider Smith and Jones above with their two different conceptions of “religion”: if meaning determines reference, it turns out that Smith and Jones are actually referring to different things. What their words mean is a function of their total theory of the world, and what their words refer to is a function of what they mean—thus reference too becomes relative to one’s total theory of the world. And assuming for the moment that our words refer to what there is, then what there is will also depend on one’s total theory of the world. And finally, if one takes truth to consist in the reference of our sentences to what there is, it seems that on this view truth, like meaning and reference, is also relative to total theory. This dual claim—that truth and meaning are relative to webs of belief, conceptual schemes, total theories, or worldviews—will occupy us in this dissertation. Now, the perhaps obvious question is why anyone would hold that truth and meaning are relative in the first place. A major reason is arguably that the alternative seems to involve a commitment to a long since suspect metaphysics. If truth and meaning are not relative to scheme, that surely means they must in some sense be ‘absolute.’ But over the course of the 20th century the idea that things like truth and meaning could be absolute has come to sound increasingly old-fashioned.

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