Toward a Pragmatic Psychology

In this article I want to expand on the pragmatism that runs through Being Human: Human Being in order to think about what a pragmatic psychology might look like. Baert (2005) argued that a pragmatist science has to begin with an acknowledgment of the different interests that might be behind inquiry. The aims of inquiry are linked to useful and appropriate methods. I argue that in personality and social psychology the focus should primarily be on achieving hermeneutic understanding, rather than on finding causal explanation.     

协作的自然主义

The radical forms of naturalistic epistemology look more like revolutionary manifestos than a reasonable alternatives. A modest form of naturalism is worth promoting. This modest form can cooperate with hermeneutics to solve epistemic problems, and therefore wins the title of cooperative naturalism, and benefits from the hermeneutic account of experience. Cooperative naturalism somewhat bridges the gap between analytic and continental philosophy. Translated by Wang Huaping from Ziran Bianzhengfa Tongxun 自然辩证法通讯 (Journal of Dialectics of Nature), 2006, (4): 31–36     

Narrative Unity as a Condition of Personhood

Abstract: In this article I critically discuss a claim made by several writers in philosophy and the social sciences that for an individual to count as a person, a single personality, or the subject of a life, the experiences of the subject in question must take a narrative form. I argue that narrativity is a misleading and, in some ways of understanding it, implausible condition of what it is that adds unity to personhood and personality. I pursue this critique by considering canonical accounts of narrativity in philosophy and literary studies. I consider those connections between events that must hold for the sequence to be considered a narrative: causal, teleological, and thematic connections. I argue that for each of these, the condition that experiential sequences (for a given subject) must have this structure is empty: any life sequence that is reflected upon in an interpretive spirit can meet it. What the condition of narrativity amounts to, then, is the more basic requirement that the person must be able to look upon the factors and events of her life with a certain interpretive reflection, whether or not those factors and events have any particular narrative unity in a traditional sense.     

Interpreting Ecofeminist Environmentalism in African Communitarian Philosophy and Ubuntu: An Alternative to Anthropocentrism

Abstract

The question of what an African ecofeminist environmental ethical view ought to look like remains unanswered in much of philosophical writing on African environmental ethics. I consider what an African ecofeminist environmental ethics ought to look like if values salient in African communitarian philosophy and ubuntu are seriously considered. After considering how African communitarian philosophy and ubuntu foster communitarian living, relational living, harmonious living, interrelatedness and interdependence between human beings and various aspects of nature, I reveal how African communitarian philosophy and ubuntu could be interpreted from an ecofeminist environmental perspective. I suggest that this underexplored ecofeminist environmental ethical view in African philosophical thinking might be reasonably taken as an alternative to anthropocentric environmentalism. I urge other ethical theorists on African environmentalism not to neglect this non-anthropocentric African environmentalism that is salient in African ecofeminist environmentalism.     

Perelman's rhetorical foundation of philosophy

This article is a Gadamer-Perelman's debate. The author points out the limits of the gadamerian's hermeneutic conception of philosophy and criticizes this conception from Perelman's new rhetoric point of view. Instead of speaking of truth as an ontological originary experience, the rhetorical foundation of philosophy allows us to say that in philosophy the important is the contrastation and the confrontation of criteria and that, for that reason, philosophy is above all characterized by discussibility.Philosophical argumentation, like juridical argumentation, constitutes applications, to different domains, of a theory of argumentation which we consider as a new rhetoric.By identifying this theory with the general theory of persuasive speech, which seeks to obtain the intellectual as well as the emotional adherence of an audience, no matter which, we state that all speeches which do not aspire to an impersonal validity proceed from rhetoric. (Ch. Perelman,L'empire rhétorique, p. 177).But, if one does not admit that the philosophical thesis may be founded on evident intuitions, it will be necessary to reccur to argumentative technics to make them prevail. The new rhetoric then becomes the indispensable tool of philosophy. (Ch. Perelman,L'empire rhétorique, p. 21).     

BETWEEN THE OLD METAPHYSICS AND THE NEW EMPIRICISM: COLLINGWOOD'S DEFENCE OF THE AUTONOMY OF PHILOSOPHY

Collingwood has failed to make a significant impact in the history of twentieth century philosophy either because he has been dismissed as a dusty old idealist committed to the very metaphysics the analytical school was trying to leave behind, or because his later work has been interpreted as advocating the dissolution of philosophy into history. I argue that Collingwood's key philosophical works are a sustained attempt to defend the view that philosophy is an autonomous discipline with a distinctive domain of inquiry and that Collingwood's attempt to defend the autonomy of philosophy is intimately connected to his defence of intensional notions against the kind of meaning scepticism which came to prevail from the 1920s. I defend the philosophical claim that there is a third way between the idealist metaphysics with which Collingwood is often associated and the neo‐empiricist agenda which characterised analytic philosophy in mid‐century by defending the hermeneutic thesis that Collingwood's work is a sustained attempt to articulate a conception of philosophy as an epistemologically first science. Since there is a via media between the old metaphysics and the new empiricism there is no need to choose between a certain kind of armchair metaphysics and a scientifically informed ontology.     

Psychoanalysis and the hermeneutic turn: a critique of Narrative Truth and Historical Truth

Through a discussion of Donald Spence's Narrative Truth and Historical Truth, a critical introduction to the hermeneutic or interpretive perspective is presented. Spence's book has generally been assumed to offer a hermeneutic reformulation of psychoanalysis. However, its presuppositions are incompatible with fundamental tenets of contemporary hermeneutic thought, as expressed in the philosophies of Heidegger, Gadamer, and the later Wittgenstein. Spence's basic assumptions are classically empiricist and positivistic. His vision of human experience is essentially associationistic and Humean; it treats experience as involving two processes, the passive reception of raw sense data and a subsequent projection of meaningful interpretation. Spence advocates the gathering of brute data while denying or downplaying the epistemological value of theorizing and of interpretive understandings. These assumptions are contrasted with those of the hemeneutic philosophers. Unlike these philosophers, Spence tends to dichotomize coherence and correspondence theories of truth. As a result, he wavers between relativism (regarding therapeutic interpretations) and objectivism (regarding scientific knowledge).     

Naturalizing and Interpretive Turns in Epistemology

In this paper I want to suggest that causal and interpretive approaches to epistemology are in tension with one another. Drawing on the work of hermeneutic writers I suggest that epistemological justification is an interpretive process. The possibility of rational justification requires attention to our locatedness within the domain of reasons, into which we have been culturally initiated. The recognition that there is no transcendent processes of rational justification has to be addressed from within this framework and cannot be resolved in a naturalizing way. The turn to hermeneutics in the context of epistemology allows us to reassign a central role to experience within epistemological justification. Here the very features of experience which render problematic its role in empiricist accounts form the basis of its position in hermeneutic ones. This presents us with an immanent conception of rationality, in place of the transcendent conception which so many writers have problematized.     

On the Advantages and Disadvantages of Reading Heidegger Backwards: White's Time and Death ∗

In Time and Death: Heidegger's Analysis of Finitude, Carol White pursues a strange hermeneutic strategy, reading Heidegger backwards by reading the central ideas of his later work back into his early magnum opus, Being and Time. White follows some of Heidegger's own later directives in pursuing this hermeneutic strategy, and this paper critically explores these directives along with the original reading that emerges from following them. The conclusion reached is that White's creative book is not persuasive as a strict interpretation of Heidegger's early work, but remains extremely helpful for deepening our appreciation of Heidegger's thought as a whole. Most importantly, White helps us to understand the pivotal role that thinking about death played in the lifelong development of Heidegger's philosophy.     

Pluralism, Indeterminacy and the Social Sciences: Reply to Ingram and Meehan

This article defends methodological and theoretical pluralism in the social sciences. While pluralistic, such a philosophy of social science is both pragmatic and normative. Only by facing the problems of such pluralism, including how to resolve the potential conflicts between various methods and theories, is it possible to discover appropriate criteria of adequacy for social scientific explanations and interpretations. So conceived, the social sciences do not give us fixed and universal features of the social world, but rather contribute to the task of improving upon our practical knowledge of on-going social life. After arguing for such a thorough-going pluralism based on the indeterminacy of social action, I defend it from the post-modern and hermeneutic objections by suggesting the possibility of an epistemology of interpretive social science as a form of practical knowledge.     

Horizons of hermeneutics: Intercultural hermeneutics in a globalizing world

Starting from the often-used metaphor of the “horizon of experience” this article discusses three different types of intercultural hermeneutics, which respectively conceive hermeneutic interpretation as a widening of horizons, a fusion of horizons, and a dissemination of horizons. It is argued that these subsequent stages in the history of hermeneutics have their origin in—but are not fully restricted to—respectively premodern, modern and postmodern stages of globalization. Taking some striking moments of the encounter between Western and Chinese language and philosophy as example, the particular merits and flaws of these three types of hermeneutics are being discussed. The claim defended is that although these different types of hermeneutics are mutually exclusive from a theoretical point of view, as interpreting beings in the current era we depend on each of these distinct hermeneutic practices and cannot avoid living them simultaneously.     

On the hermeneutic fore-structure of scientific research

The paper provides an overview of the hermeneutic and phenomenological context from which the idea of a “constitutional analysis” of science originated. It analyzes why the approach to “hermeneutic fore-structure of scientific research” requires to transcend the distinction between the context of justification and the context of discovery. By incorporating this approach into an integral “postmetaphysical philosophy of science”, I argue that one can avoid the radical empiricism of recent science studies, while also preventing the analysis of science's discursive practices from collapsing into the frames of radical anti-epistemological critique mandated by some hermeneutic philosophers. This revised version was published online in August 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

On the hermeneutical nature of modern natural science

An effort is made in this essay to show the intrinsic hermeneutic nature of the natural sciences by means of a critical reflection on data taken from the history of classical mechanics and astronomy. The events which eventually would lead to the origin of Newton's mechanics are critically analyzed, with the aim of showing that and in what sense the natural sciences are essentially interpretive enterprises.     

自本体与对本体:中西哲学的诠释学基础

中西哲学的根本性差异是自本体思维与对本体思维的差异。所谓自本体的思维,是认为认知对象与认知主体无法分开,强调本体的自我呈现。而对本体思维则首先将存在视之为客观实有,然后去探究这客观实有的真实。自本体思维与对本体思维都是人的二重性存在的客观反映。对于对本体方式来说,它重视对人的工具理性式的生存状态的探究,而自本体则关心人作为价值理性的生存状态的探究。由于人的工具性层面与价值性层面不仅相互补充与依存,而且会相互涵摄,因此,未来哲学的发展,要求我们同时采取自本体思维与对本体思维的方式;而所谓中西哲学的融会与贯通,是指它们在各自保持自身的诠释学传统的基础上,同时理解与吸收对方的诠释学立场与传统。     

Toward a General Theory of Understanding. Schutzian Theory as Proto-hermeneutics

This paper aims to explore the relations between Schutzian theory and hermeneutics. After presenting the connections between hermeneutic thought and Schutz’s work from a historical point of view, it will argue that despite its significant differences from hermeneutic theory, Schutzian theory can be utilized as a kind of proto-hermeneutics. By now, the heterogeneous movement of the interpretive social sciences has reached an established position, but with their growing reliance on the impulses coming from philosophical hermeneutics, the latent problem comes to the foreground: the former demand for an action-theoretical grounding has faded away. Currently, action theory itself is no more dominated by the work of interpretively minded authors, but by the theories of rational choice. This results in a false opposition between the explanatory models, which base their arguments on historical, cultural, and linguistic factors, and those, which focus on the plane of the decisions of individuals. Bypassing the objectivism present in both the rational choice approach and hermeneutics, Schutz’s pragmatic theory of the life-world, originating from both interpretive and pragmatic intellectual influences, may be useful to overcome this opposition, and can serve as a proto-hermeneutical point of departure: that is, as a theory which cannot alone take over the duty of hermeneutics, but which can complement hermeneutics on a fundamental level.     

The hyperreality of clinical ethics: A unitary theory and hermeneutics

Medical ethics nowadays is dominated by a conception of ethics as the application of moral theories and principles. This conception is criticized for its depreciation of the internal morality of medical practice and its narrow view of external morality. This view reflects both a lack of interest in the empirical realities of medicine and a neglect of the socio-cultural value-contexts of medical ethical issues, including the creative development of a broader philosophical framework for a practicable medical ethics. Several alternative approaches and conceptions have been proposed. The unified clinical ethics theory, developed by Graber and Thomasma, is an interesting attempt to synthesize these alternative approaches. It correctly identifies as the crucial problem the present disconnectedness of medical ethics from theoretical philosophy as well as the practice of medicine. In this paper, however, it is argued that the unitary theory should take more serious attention to the hermeneutic character of medicine as well as ethics. This implies that the unitary theory must in fact transform itself into aninterpretive clinical ethics theory. The theoretical characteristics and practical consequences of an interpretive theory of medical ethics are discussed in the present paper.     

A Hasty Retreat From Evidence: The Recalcitrance of Relativism in Feminist Epistemology

While feminist epistemologists have made important contributions to the deconstruction of the traditional representationalist model, some elements of the Cartesian legacy remain. For example, relativism continues to play a role in the underdetermination thesis used by Longino and Keller. Both argue that because scientific theories are underdetermined by evidence, theory choice must be relative to interpretive frameworks. Utilizing Davidson's philosophy of language, I offer a nonrepresentationalist alternative to suggest how relativism can be more fully avoided.