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Naturalizing Biblical Hermeneutics a Case for Grounding Hermeneutical Theory in the Sociocognitive Sciences

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Language and Culture Archives Naturalizing Biblical Hermeneutics A Case for Grounding Hermeneutical Theory in the Sociocognitive Sciences Richard Brown ©2010, Richard Brown License This document is part of the SIL International Language and Culture Archives. It is shared ‘as is’ in order to make the content available under a Creative Commons license: Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivativeWorks (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/). More resources are available at: www.sil.org/resources/language-culture-archives. Naturalizing Biblical Hermeneutics A Case for Grounding Hermeneutical Theory in the Sociocognitive Sciences A thesis submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy by Richard Brown Brunel University Supervised at London School of Theology an Associated Institution of Brunel University 1 August 2010 Naturalizing Biblical Hermeneutics Abstract Most theories of biblical hermeneutics were developed within literary and philosophical frameworks that were antipsychologistic. Without a grounding in empirical research, hermeneutical theories have been largely intuitive, with little empirical criteria for substantiating their claims or arbitrating among differing interpretations. The one exception has been those approaches that utilized linguistics and discourse analysis, but even these were conducted in a structuralist framework that was antipsychologistic. In the last fifty years, however, the so-called ‘cognitive revolution’ has turned this around in most disciplines in a broad movement called cognitive science. Relevant to hermeneutics is the fact that research in various branches of cognitive science has led to a wealth of studies that shed light on the natural cognitive processes involved when people interpret one another and compose written communications. Since meaning is a cognitive phenomenon and the interpretation of others is a sociocognitive activity, it would seem reasonable to naturalize hermeneutical theory by grounding it in the empirical sociocognitive sciences. My thesis is that doing so leads to insights and concepts that justify this naturalization. To demonstrate this thesis I present results from relevant strands of sociocognitive research, with reflections from philosophical sources, and show the value of applying them to the definition, theory, and practice of biblical hermeneutics. I show that a sociocognitive conceptual framework makes it possible to give empirical support and definition to the concepts of reconstructive hermeneutics, authorial meaning, original context, exegesis, exposition, translation, and reader’s significance, and to redefine the roles of exegete, reader, expositor, and translator. I apply sociocognitive conceptual tools rather briefly to a wide range of textual phenomena in the Bible, both to clarify the theoretical concepts involved and to show how they can illuminate potential meanings in new ways. I apply them to biblical terms and concepts to show that they can facilitate a more comprehensive analysis of biblical concepts and theology. Long Abstract Most theories of biblical hermeneutics were developed within literary and philosophical frameworks that were antipsychologistic. Without a grounding in empirical research, hermeneutical theories have been largely intuitive, with little empirical criteria for substantiating their claims or arbitrating among differing interpretations. The one exception has been those approaches that utilized linguistics and discourse analysis, but even these were conducted in a structuralist framework that was antipsychologistic. In the last fifty years, however, the so-called ‘cognitive revolution’ has turned this around in most disciplines in a broad movement called cognitive science. Relevant to hermeneutics is the fact that research in various branches of cognitive science has led to a wealth of studies that shed light on the ii natural cognitive processes involved when people interpret one another and compose written communications. Since meaning is a cognitive phenomenon and the interpretation of others is a sociocognitive activity, it would seem reasonable to naturalize hermeneutical theory by grounding it in the empirical sociocognitive sciences. My thesis, therefore, is that the goals of reconstructionist biblical hermeneutics, both exegetical and expositional, would be well served by basing hermeneutics on a sociocognitive conceptual framework that is grounded in the empirical sciences. To demonstrate this thesis I present results from relevant strands of sociocognitive research and philosophical reflection, develop them into aspects of a sociocognitive model of hermeneutics, and show the value of applying them to the definition, theory, and practice of biblical hermeneutics. The definition and value of each aspect of the model is exemplified with brief applications to a wide range of textual phenomena in the Bible, both to clarify the theoretical concepts involved and to show how they can illuminate potential meanings and their likelihood in new ways, even prior to thorough engagement with the biblical studies literature on the passages involved (for which space is lacking in the present work). My argument is that the proposed shift from a philosophical to naturalized paradigm is supported by the hermeneutical value of the benefits that result from doing so. Since reconstructive hermeneutics is concerned with understanding the knowledge that was conveyed in communicative events, it needs to be based on a reliable theory of human knowledge. In Chapter 1 I show the value of basing hermeneutics on a naturalistic theory of knowledge, meaning one based on empirical research into the cognitive nature of human knowledge. I draw on various strands of cognitive research to present aspects of such a theory, then show how an interpreter can use them as conceptual tools to illuminate aspects of biblical meaning. Among other things it is claimed that a person’s concepts and beliefs (including values) are not atomistic but are part of a complex conceptual system that consists largely of mutually dependent concepts and schemata. The chief features of this system constitute a person’s worldview. An individual belief may be viewed as a semantic structure that relates particular concepts together (i.e. a proposition or assumption) and that is qualified by an epistemic attitude that could range from confidence to doubt and denial (i.e. a disbelief). Beliefs are typically altered in the course of a communicative event, with changes either to the addressee’s propositional content or her epistemic attitude towards that content or both.1 In Chapter 2 I present a naturalized epistemological basis for evaluating the epistemic status of beliefs and hypotheses, using reliabilist criteria developed by Alvin Plantinga, William Alston, and others. These depend on the proper functioning of one’s cognitive faculties in contexts for which they are suited. I argue that this constitutes a cognitively grounded epistemological basis for the hermeneutical task of evaluating candidate interpretations. It also 1 Speakers/authors will be referred to with masculine gender, addressees and interpreters with feminine. iii Naturalizing Biblical Hermeneutics supports my claim for the hermeneutical value of understanding how cognitive faculties properly function in communicative contexts. Naturalistic epistemologists see their task as identifying the cognitively optimal processes for forming and evaluating beliefs. It follows from this that the task of naturalistic hermeneutics is to identify the cognitively optimal processes for evaluating interpretations of communicative events, and that a naturalized hermeneutical model is adequate to the extent that it embodies optimal cognitive processes of interpretation. Since our own reasoning processes are never completely objective and require confirmation from others, our hermeneutical methods and criteria should be well enough defined that others can duplicate them to achieve similar results. I argue in what follows that reliable, well-defined conceptual tools can be developed by grounding hermeneutics in the results of empirical science. In Chapter 3 I present a cognitive theory of conceptual knowledge. Communications lead to the propagation of conceptual knowledge through a society or community of practice and its transmission to new generations, with the result that knowledge and cognition are social as well as individual, and different societies have different public conceptual systems. Concepts are dynamic, however, and individuals continue to have individual variations; the points of difference in individual concepts and beliefs provide the substance of informative communications. As a consequence, for an interpreter to understand the lexical semantics of a text, she needs to understand the concepts and schemata of the public conceptual system it reflects, and how that system differs from her own. To the extent that she lacks cognizance of that system, she will automatically project her own conceptual system onto it, leading to misconstrual of the lexical semantics of the author’s text. On the other hand, when an author was conveying new information to his addressees, he was drawing it from his personal concepts and commending it to his addressees for inclusion in their personal concepts. So the better the interpreter understands the personal conceptual systems of the author and his addressees, the better she can understand what was being communicated between them and not misconstrue the author’s informative
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