Reply: Strict Meaning and Reductive Hermeneutics

Abstract

Professor Shirley's interesting paper on and Reductive Hermeneutics is a complex one for its length. In the brief space allotted him, he discusses alternative semantic theories; he contrasts dreams and language; he probes the nature of intentionality; and he examines the relationship of daydreams those we dream while asleep. While I cannot hope cover all these topics, I would like respond what I take be the central point of his paper. He argues that there can be no such thing as reductive hermeneutics in the sense in which Ricoeur (explicitly) and Freud (implicitly) use that term because any hermeneutic must help us find the strict or unique of a text, and reductive hermeneutics simply cannot do this. For one thing, he says, both Freud and Ricoeur mistakenly think that dreams have meanings in the strict or unique sense in which the of is is snow is white and in which dog means dog. What they really need, he suggests, is a different, an extended sense of according which meanings are inferred from their signs as causes from their effects or diseases from their He suggests that Freud and Ricoeur confused these senses of meaning, that is, that they thought they were using meaning in its strict sense when they were actually employing it in its extended sense. The examples Shirley gives of in its extended sense are excellent, if surprising ones, for we can find them in the works of Freud and Ricoeur. To take only one of many examples available us, Freud writes in chapter two of The Interpretation of Dreams (ID, p. 133) of establishing the of a dream by treating the dream itself as a symptom, and he suggests that one should apply to dreams the method of interpretation that had been worked out for symptoms. The meanings of dreams are for Freud traced (ID, p. xv), they are unravelled (ID, p. 132), they are discovered (ID, p. 140) and, of course, they are analyzed. (ID, p. 140) All of these activities are more like the way we reach Shirley's extended meanings than the way we arrive at the strict of, say, is white. Ricoeur addresses this problem on pages 49-53 of Freud and Philosophy (FP) as he distinguishes the meanings sought by formal logic