Play, agreement and consensus

In this paper I employ the analysis of play to clarify the distinction between an agreement and a consensus, and I argue that it is the conditions supplied by the playful process that enable us to partake in the recognition and creation of truth. Gadamer's hermeneutical truth, unlike propositional truth, speaks of the interpretive act whereby meaning is recognized. This interpretive recognition of meaning is described by Gadamer as an occurrence of interpretive play orgenuine understanding. Regarding Gadamer's conception of truth as modelled on agreement rather than consensus, I demonstrate that it is in the process of play that we achieve the making and maintaining of the conditions that are necessary for agreement, and that the nature of understanding is most clearly revealed by viewing it as a playful process.     

Interpreting imaginative play in child psychotherapy: Towards a phenomenological hermeneutic approach

Abstract

Despite renewed interest and technical advances in play therapy with children, its theoretical basis remains weak. A phenomenological hermeneutic approach to play therapy offers a philosophically grounded theoretical understanding of the meaning of children's expressions through imaginative play in a therapeutic context. Drawing upon Gadamer's ontological concept of play and Ricoeur's theory of interpretation, a child's imaginative play is seen as a text that calls for interpretation. The understanding and interpretation of imaginative play in play therapy is illustrated by means of a case vignette of a young physically abused child.     

Philosophical Hermeneutics and Theological Education

This article explores the resources that the philosophical hermeneutics of Hans‐Georg Gadamer can bring to the challenge of teaching theology to undergraduates. The author offers a sympathetic reading of Gadamer but is influenced by the insights of liberation theology. In this interpretation of his work, Gadamer's contribution lies in his emphases on intersubjectivity and on praxis as the goal of historically conscious understanding — and thus of historically conscious theological education. To suggest what philosophical hermeneutics can tell us about the process of teaching and learning in theology, this essay examines Gadamer's approach to historicity, conversation, truth, objectivity, subjectivity, practical wisdom, and praxis.     

Meaning for Radical Contextualists: Travis and Gadamer on Why Words Matter

Charles Travis and Hans‐Georg Gadamer both affirm radical contextualism, the view that natural language is ineliminably context‐sensitive. However, they offer different accounts of the role linguistic meaning plays in determining the contents of utterances. I discuss the differences between Travis's and Gadamer's views of meaning and offer an argument in favour of the latter. I argue that Travis's view assumes a principled distinction between literal and figurative speech that is at odds with his wider contextualist commitments. By contrast, Gadamer's view, on which meaning is ‘fundamentally metaphorical,’ makes no such assumption and thus avoids the difficulty.     

True Identities: From Performativity to Festival

Some feminists have criticized Judith Butler's theory of performativity for providing an insufficient account of agency. In this article I first defend her against such charges by appealing to two themes central to Hans‐Georg Gadamer's hermeneutics. I compare her emphasis on the sociohistorical nature of agency with Gadamer's insistence on the historical nature of knowledge, and I examine the significance Butler assigns to repetition and note its affinities with Gadamer's conception of play. In the final part of the article I argue that in spite of providing an adequate account of agency, Butler's theory of performativity provides no way to allow us to evaluate performances. I show how Gadamer's account of festival, which builds on his concept of play, is useful in helping us make sense of how we might delineate true from false performances, and thus identities.     

The theory of justice from a hermeneutic perspective

In this article, I argue that Gadamer's hermeneutics of historical tradition does not imply a conservative stance on ethical and political issues. My essay seeks to show that Gadamer's philosophy leaves ample room for normative criticism, objectivity, and theories of justice at odds with conventional common sense. I critically examine Walzer's Spheres of Justice, reading it as an attempt to obtain a normative account of justice based on a hermeneutical framework of interpretation. I make several criticisms of Walzer's method and results, which I use to develop my own critical model for interpreting, criticizing, and revising traditional understandings, and common sense meanings. My conclusion is that we need to extend Gadamer's philosophy, in order to identify the ways that established traditions of understanding and common sense can result from, or produce, inconsistency, irrationality, hermeneutical incoherence, and meaningless deprivations or suffering. This essay thus seeks to develop an influential continental philosophy in a direction that makes fruitful contact with Anglo-American theories of justice, and normativity.     

Being With Andres: Commentary on Paper by Ellen F. Fries

A good interpretation contributes to the patient's feeling of being witnessed or recognized. Recognition is an affective experience, not a matter of truth value, so that the truth in an interpretation, while it may be necessary to the recognition, is not sufficient. In fact, since interpretation is hardly the only form in which recognition can be couched, a good outcome can take place apart from any kind of interpretation. But this does not mean that new understanding is unimportant. It's just that the place of that new understanding in clinical process matters more than its content. I discuss Ellen F. Fries'case of Andres from this perspective.     

Does Conversation Need Shared Language? Davidson and Gadamer on Communicative Understanding

In a rare discussion of Gadamer's work, Davidson takes issue with Gadamer's claim that successful communication requires that interlocutors share a common language. While he is right to see a difference between his own views and Gadamer's on this point, Davidson appears to have misunderstood what motivates Gadamer's position, conflating it with that of his more familiar conventionalist interlocutors. This paper articulates Gadamer's view of the role of language in communicative understanding as an alternative to both Davidson's and that of the conventionalist writers Davidson critiques. It is argued, first, that Gadamer employs a conception of what individuates a language, and thus of what it means for two speakers to “share” a language, that Davidson never considers. By emphasizing the role of “application” in the historical development of languages, Gadamer develops a view in which languages are distinguished not by their particular semantic or syntactic rules, but by subtle differences between the concepts they express. Second, it is argued that the instances of “asymmetrical” communication—communication between interlocutors who have different sets of concepts at their disposal—that motivate Gadamer's position pose a challenge to Davidson's account of interpretative charity.     

Shared Meaning and the Convergence among Observers' Personality Descriptions

ABSTRACT “Shared meaning” is a parameter in Kenny's (1991) rater agreement model concerning the extent to which two raters agree about the trait-implicative meaning of the observations they have made of a target. In the first study, 201 individuals rated observations relevant to friendliness and organization on the meaning dimensions of typicality, difficulty level, and evaluation. They also rated 25 targets on the two constructs. We found strong support for a modest relation between the similarity of meaning ratings and the similarity of target ratings, especially for raw, as opposed to standard score, ratings. In Study 2 we considered shared meaning in a version of Kenny's model that included the consistency and communication parameters. Judge pairs (N= 110) evaluated two targets described by play and openness on several personality dimensions. Shared meaning significantly contributed to rating agreement for both targets, but consistency and communication, as manipulated in this study, did not. Implications of employing the broader consensus model in experimental studies are discussed. If I say “sorrow,” you'll know exactly what I mean only if you've experienced it in the same sense I have. -Joel Peterson, Ravenswood's Winemaker, in Darlington (1991)     

Tarski on the Necessity Reading of Convention T

Tarski’s Convention T is often taken to claim that it is both sufficient and necessary for adequacy in a definition of truth that it imply instances of the T-schema where the embedded sentence translates the mentioned sentence. However, arguments against the necessity claim have recently appeared, and, furthermore, the necessity claim is actually not required for the indefinability results for which Tarski is justly famous; indeed, Tarski’s own presentation of the results in the later Undecidable Theories makes no mention of an assumption to the effect that the definition of truth implies the biconditionals. This raises a question: was Tarski in fact committed to the necessity claim in the important papers of the 1930s and 40s? I argue that he was not. The discussion of this apparently esoteric interpretive issue in fact gets to the heart of many important questions about truth, and in the final sections of the paper I discuss the importance of the T-biconditionals in the theory of meaning and the relation of deflationary and inflationary theories of truth to the semantic paradoxes.     

A Right to Understand Injustice: Epistemology and the “Right to the Truth” in International Human Rights Discourse

People's “right to truth” or their “right to know” about their government's human rights abuses is a growing consensus in human rights discourses and a fertile area of work in international and humanitarian law. In most discussions of this right to know the truth, it is commonly seen as requiring the state or international institutions to provide access to evidence of the violations. In this paper, I argue that such a right naturally has many epistemic aspects, and the tools of social epistemology can be helpful in elucidating what such a right entails. As a beginning for this project, I draw on those resources to argue that the right to know the truth is only meaningful if it includes a right to understand the abuses, and that such understanding can only come through the development of community epistemic capacities. Given this, I further argue that the state has a duty to support the development of these capacities, and that a critical place for beginning this process is in public schools.     

Confusion of Horizons: Gadamer and the Christian logos

This paper argues for Gadamer's indebtedness to logs Christology. Gadamer's language philosophy and hermeneutic experience both depend on theological insights gleaned mainly from St. Augustine and German Pietism. In Truth and Method , Gadamer uses Augustine's rewriting of Platonism to establish his language philosophy and employs the Pietist formula of application to describe the hermeneutical experience as word event. Gadamer's silence about these influences in his later works leave his interpreters and critics (such as Jürgen Habermas) puzzled about his seeming naïve trust in philosophical hermeneutics as a means to improve human interaction. This article tries to contribute to an understanding of Gadamer's hermeneutics by arguing that Gadamer's optimism in language and reason make sense when seen in the theological context from which crucial elements of his philosophy are derived.     

Kant's transcendental idealism and contemporary anti‐realism

This paper compares Kant's transcendental idealism with three main groups of contemporary anti‐realism, associated with Wittgenstein, Putnam, and Dummett, respectively. The kind of anti‐realism associated with Wittgenstein has it that there is no deep sense in which our concepts are answerable to reality. Associated with Putnam is the rejection of four main ideas: theoryindependent reality, the idea of a uniquely true theory, a correspondence theory of truth, and bivalence. While there are superficial similarities between both views and Kant's, I find more significant differences. Dummettian anti‐realism, too, clearly differs from Kant's position: Kant believes in verification‐transcendent reality, and transcendental idealism is not a theory of meaning or truth. However, I argue that part of the Dummettian position is extremely useful for understanding part of Kant's position – his idealism about the appearances of things. I argue that Kant's idealism about appearances can be expressed as the rejection of experiencetranscendent reality with respect to appearances.     

Revisiting the Reformation—Shakespeare and Fletcher's King Henry VIII

Abstract

This paper looks afresh at William Shakespeare's and John Fletcher's Henry VIII. The piece, while obsessed with truth, makes no attempt to define the nature of that truth—and truth is closely related to the issue of the Reformation. Henry VIII's role is questioned. The terms ‘Lutheran’ and ‘heretic’ appear as by-words to describe the threat of up-and-coming new influences around the king. The opposition of the Catholic Wolsey and the Protestant Cranmer in the play is all-important. Wolsey emerges as somewhat reformed from his disgrace. Cranmer, like Wolsey, is demonized; however his prophecy at the end of the play is highly significant. Prophecy in Tudor England tended to be subversive and part of the implications of Cranmer's prophecy are that James should model himself on Elizabeth. However, Cranmer's prophecy also announces that Elizabeth, ever a virgin, will manage to engender her successor, King James. As the play is about to close, Cranmer's prophecy about the reign of Elizabeth I and that of James I cannot dispel the impression that Henry VIII's reformist intentions remain inconclusive. Shakespeare, it seems, never veered in his view that religious reformations are not ‘once and for all events'. Something has happened that has altered the world, but the full meaning of these events is denied.     

The effects of mothers' teasing: Do Japanese infants read their mothers' play intention in teasing?

The focus of this study was whether an infant can understand the playful intention in the mother's teasing behaviour. The mother's teasing behaviour can elicit playful interaction with the infant on the one hand, or can result in the infant's distress. In other words, teasing may function as the turning-point in mother-infant interaction. Thus it was hypothesized that the consequence of mothers' teasing behaviour would be positive or negative depending on the success or failure in communication of both mothers' play intention with play signs and infants' interpretation of the play signs. Subjects were 20 mothers and their infants aged from 10 to 13 months (M = 11 months) who were observed during 10 minutes of free play with toys that evoke minor surprise and/or fearfulness. Results showed that about one-third of mothers' teasing behaviour elicited the infant's enjoyment. Especially, mothers' playful teasing accompanied by a smile or laugh led most successfully to infant enjoyment. In contrast, mothers' pretence teasing elicited no particular response from infants. These data suggest that around their first birthday infants develop some understanding of the play intention latent in mothers' teasing behaviour.     

Why Tugendhat's Critique of Heidegger's Concept of Truth Remains a Critical Problem1

With what right and with what meaning does Heidegger use the term ‘truth’ to characterize Dasein's disclosedness? This is the question at the focal point of Ernst Tugendhat's long‐standing critique of Heidegger's understanding of truth, one to which he finds no answer in Heidegger's treatment of truth in §44 of Being and Time or his later work. To put the question differently: insofar as unconcealment or disclosedness is normally understood as the condition for the possibility of propositional truth rather than truth itself, what does it mean to say – as Heidegger does – that disclosedness is the “primordial phenomenon of truth” and what justifies that claim? The central aim of this paper is to show that Tugendhat's critique remains unanswered. Recent Heidegger scholarship, though it confronts Tugendhat, has not produced a viable answer to his criticism, in part because it overlooks his basic question and therefore misconstrues the thrust of his objections. Ultimately, the paper suggests that what is needed is a re‐evaluation of Heidegger's analysis of truth in light of a more accurate understanding of Tugendhat's critique. The paper concludes by sketching the profile of a more satisfactory reply to Tugendhat's critical question, advocating a return to Heidegger's ‘existential’ analyses in Being and Time in order to locate the normative resources Tugendhat finds lacking in Heidegger's concept of truth.     

Why Truthmaking Is Not a Case of Grounding

Truthmaker theorists often express their core commitment by saying that truth is grounded in being, and grounding theorists often take truthmaking to be a paradigm case of grounding. But I will argue that truthmaking is not a case of grounding. What is crucial for understanding truthmaking is not grounding but rather meaning (in a broad sense including reference). Truth is still constrained by how things are, so even if (so-called) truthmakers don't play a role in grounding truths, the methodological program of truthmaker theory survives. Here I lay out my understanding of truth and truthmaking, and distinguish two conceptions of grounding. I argue that truthmaking is not plausibly seen as a case of grounding on either conception. I argue further that treating truthmaking as grounding threatens to violate a plausible irreflexivity principle, and makes trouble for the view that grounding is transitive. I then suggest that there is no genuine relation of truthmaking (which there would have to be if it were a true case of grounding). Finally, I show how the core insights of truthmaker theory are preserved by the understanding of truthmaking that I favor.     

Tension within Triangulation

Philosophers disagree about how meaning connects with history. Donald Davidson, who helped deepen our understanding of meaning, even disagreed with himself. As Ernest Lepore and Kirk Ludwig note, Davidson's account of radical interpretation treats meaning as ahistorical; his Swampman thought experiment treats it as historical. Here I show that while Lepore and Ludwig are right that Davidson's views are in tension, they are wrong about its extent. Unbeknownst to them, Davidson's account of radical interpretation and Swampman thought experiment both rely—in different ways—on the same model of triangulation. I revise one of those ways to resolve the tension within Davidson's views. I close by detailing what role history should play in Davidson's views overall.     

Construct no idols

A constructivist perspective views knowledge as indeterminate. Human beliefs bear no necessary direct relationship to reality, yet we tend to objectify them and treat them as real. I liken this tendency to idolatry, the xwrship of a created image as though it were the ultimate. Idolatry occurs when we believe that we know a final truth. I consider some implications of this metaphor for constructivist thought, including the notion that hypotheses originally served only to account for observations, but with the success of modern science, people have come to treat them as though they represent truth. To transcend idolatry requires active recognition that humans invent constructs and that our understanding of reality requires awareness of the central role of human participation. We might facilitate this process by becoming more aware of the metaphorical use of language. I discuss a technique from semantics, which elaborates on Kelly's suggestion that we view language as invitational, as a useful tool for this purpose.