Hermeneutics and history

Abstract

The history of academic neologisms tells us that the primary impact of Allan Bell's thoughtful essay is unlikely to result in a lasting change in field nomenclature. This is unsurprising. Scholarly identities are deeply implicated in the names by which we have been accustomed publicly to announce ourselves and our interests, and we should not perhaps expect an imminent field adoption of Discourse Interpretation over Discourse Analysis (Bell, 2011: 520). The latter designation, to use the terms that Bell himself applies to the vagaries of translation, may indeed come to be seen increasingly as 'unhelp ful', but in any event it will continue to enjoy the residual force of its 'established' status (Bell, 2011: 528). However, there are more important consequences of Bell's interven tion. Long-term changes in practice will ultimately yield outcomes reaching beyond short-term changes in nomenclature. We might therefore more realistically expect some productive elaborations of the characteristic ways in which we seek to approach and investigate discourse as a consequence of Bell's timely engagement with hermeneu tics as it has been theorized and practised in the writings of Paul Ricoeur. An encyclopae dic scholar, complex, scrupulous and prolific, Ricoeur was also an exceptionally hospitable thinker, and it is no surprise that his ideas have continued to exert a widening attraction across the human and social sciences since his death. Allan Bell's essay can be seen as a significant contribution to this gathering tendency, particularly highlighting perceived affinities between contemporary discourse analysis and Ricoeurian hermeneu tics, to the degree that Bell is able to claim that many of the observations and inflections of the latter might almost be seen to 'have come from a CDA manifesto' (Bell, 2011: 536). As Bell notes, careful and judicious borrowing from other intellectual fields can sharpen or even transform the customary principles and practices of the parent disci plines within which each of us, so to speak, has been raised. In my own case that field is history, and specifically the history of education; my work involves both archival