Hermeneutics and Cognitive Science: A Preliminary Approach

Abstract

The text is believed the main source of information the man thought about and felt in the remote past. Hence it follows that hermeneutics, as a domain of science, related to understanding and interpretation of texts, is the main source realizing the way people thought and felt in the remote past. However, nowadays investigation of narrative strategies is located far on the periphery of cognitive science. Therefore, the main purpose of this paper is to change the current situation. In order to demonstrate the possibility for such a change the author proposes some general ideas of applying hermeneutic procedures to cognitive science and illustrates them with two examples, with The Code of Hammurabi, the Babylonian law code, dated back to around 18th century B.C., and the modern autobiography of Eugenia Grigorievna Kiseleva, an uneducated Russian woman with a 4-year primary school education, published in 1996 in its original version, without editor corrections. The cognitive base for the narrative analysis is L. Vygotsky's concept of complex thinking and his interpretation of K.Levin's theory of psychological field.