Paradigm lost — Paradigm regained: The persistence of hermeneutical conceptions in the empiricized study of literature

Abstract

In this paper I argue within the frameworks of Kuhnian (or Lakatosian, if you prefer) methodology of science that a new paradigm for the study of literature, especially the one advocated by Norbert Groeben will neither be an innovating substitution of the prevailing paradigm nor will it constitute revolutionary progress, if the hard core and the negative heuristic of the program to be dislodged are adopted by the proponent of the dislodging program. In this respect I shall try to exhibit that Groeben's concepts of paradigm and paradigm-change-by-empirization primarily effect an extension of the sophistication of the traditional theory of literature, that is, in terms of an increase in methods. Thus I venture to claim that Groeben despite his pretended interest in matrix-change holds a principle of tenacity as well as a principle of proliferation. The proliferating aspects of the empiricized paradigm will not be interpreted in this essay as a function of the positive heuristic of the hermeneutical paradigm, but rather as a result of a retrogression to positivism. I shall furthermore discuss Groeben's conception of the theory and methodology of empirical sciences. In this context I shall above all isolate his viewpoint on science as a system of those statements which are directly susceptible to the verdict of sense-data. Put very roughly, amendments qua empirization apparently do not demand too great a sacrifice on the part of a conservative scholar of literature, as long as he can hold his intradisciplinary values, models, and exemplars. And where traditionalists should have rejected the empiricized program, one might conclude that some of those rejections originated from a more or less vague insight into Groeben's positivistic epistemology.