Hermeneutics and Historical Interpretation: A Comprehensive Analysis
Hermeneutics and Historical Interpretation
This document outlines key aspects of hermeneutic interpretation within a historical context.
Hermeneutic Interpretation in Context
Includes pre-understanding the purpose and justification of the hermeneutic method.
The Historical Approach to Text and Author
Locate historical context of the text and information about the author.
Applying the Hermeneutic Circle
Understanding the whole through its parts, and the parts through the whole.
Questions of Interpretation and Subtlety
Exploring the intention, meaning, and significance of the text. Considerations include: What is the intention? What does the text say? What is the meaning of the text? Who is it for? What does it say to me? What does it say now? Adding layers of meaning to reach a deeper or hidden understanding.
Polysemy
Identifying the different meanings within the text.
Worldviews
Employing different worldviews to facilitate a better interpretation of the text, such as functionalism, structuralism, and mathematicism.
Language
Analyzing the language content from a semiotic perspective: signs, codes, coding, decoding, connotation, denotation, signifier, signified, elements, etc.
Perspective of History in Antiquity vs. 19th Century
The Enlightenment men of the eighteenth century experienced a recent decoupling between life experience and expectations that future time can always be better than the past.
Continuum of Past, Present, and Future in Historical Research
This process is accelerated by the emergence and development of media consumption possibilities.
Characteristics of Historiography
Historiography is a specialized discourse that knows about the past, examining fingerprints or traces left by the past, to reunite what was previously separated. This form of discourse corresponds to the time experience of our own modernity.
Role of Writing in the Historical Method
From the beginning, discursive practice has been a battle against fiction, seeking to objectify the past. Identification was based on the difference between literature and oral tradition.
History as an Empirical Science
History can be considered an empirical science because the historian needs to observe and be in contact with the object of study in order to have sufficient evidence. One can never truly know the truth until they live it.
The Future as a Condition of Knowledge of the Past
The historian, through their research, applies that information in the future.
The Historian as a Second-Order Observer
The historian is considered a second-order observer because they were not present at the events. Everyone can give an interpretation of reality, making history subjective.
Realism in Historiography
The past is an illusion that becomes real through books and is received by groups, communities, or societies. It is a construction that takes place across our experiences in the present through historiographical conceptual structures established by other historians.
Criteria for Choosing a Suitable Communication Theory for Scientific Reconstruction of the Past
- Understanding the meaning of a statement is made contextually.
- Reference should be understood as a description dependent on culture as a whole.
- The main burden of communication is on the receiver, not the producer.
Methodology of Historical Research Supported by Communication Processes
Rebuilding a phenomenon or process by understanding its structure and operation, giving an interpretation.
5 Years of Historical Research Budgets
- The science of history is inscribed in the dynamics of society, a set of knowledge.
- History is always socially situated, studied from practices that enable their implementation.
- History is always situated and takes place through the mediation of practices, fulfilling a specific function depending on the time we’re looking at.
- History is a communicative process, and historiography insists that history as a discipline is writing.
- This means that the past is one thing, not a relationship.