Habits Of Interpretation Research Articles

Scripture and Habits of Interpretation: A Model of Practical Reasoning

In his 1998 Engaging Scripture: A Model for Theological Interpretation, Stephen Fowl conceives of biblical interpretation as a skill that is learned over time. Fowl’s perspective not only gives close attention to the habits that interpreters acquire in practice, but also clarifies the goals that readers recognize through their interaction with biblical texts. This paper builds upon Fowl’s approach by providing a critical analysis of practical reasoning in a twofold analysis. In the first part, we will interact with Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics and Elizabeth Anscombe’s Intention. Engaging with these philosophers shines light on what is meant by reasoning practically towards particular goals. In the second part, we will focus on how scripture portrays love and knowledge as habits of interpretation. In this part, it is proposed that love and knowledge will refine interpreters’ practical reasoning as they move towards particular ends. In conclusion, this article provides fresh angles for biblical interpretation by arguing that interpreters’ practical reasoning is sustained by the habits of love and knowledge.

Michael L. Raposa Plays with Peirce, Love, and Signs: Review Essay on Theosemiotic: Religion, Reading, and the Gift of Meaning

Michael L. Raposa Plays with Peirce, Love, and Signs: Review Essay on <i>Theosemiotic: Religion, Reading, and the Gift of Meaning</i>

What is So Special About Contemporary CG Faces? Semiotics of MetaHumans

This paper analyses the features of the 2021 software for the creation of ultrarealistic digital characters “MetaHuman Creator” and reflects on the causes of such perceived effect of realism to understand if the faces produced with such software represent an actual novelty from an academic standpoint. Such realism is first of all defined as the result of semio-cognitive processes which trigger interpretative habits specifically related to faces. These habits are then related to the main properties of any realistic face: being face-looking, face-meaning and face-acting. These properties, in turn, are put in relation with our interactions with faces in terms of face detection, face recognition, face reading and face agency. Within this theoretical framework, we relate the characteristics of these artificial faces with such interpretative habits. To do so, we first of all make an examination of the technological features behind both the software and the digital faces it produces. This analysis highlights four main points of interest: the mathematical accuracy, the scanned database, the high level of details and the transformative capacities of these artificial faces. We then relate these characteristics with the cultural and cognitive aspects involved in recognizing and granting meaning to faces. This reveals how metahuman faces differs from previous artificial faces in terms of indexicality, intersubjectivity, informativity and irreducibility. But it also reveals some limits of such effect of reality in terms of intentionality and historical context. This examination consequently brings us to conclude that metahuman faces are qualitatively different from previous artificial faces and, in the light of their potentials and limits, to highlight four main lines of future research based on our findings.

Artificial Skin and Biopolitical Masks, or How to Deal with Face-Habits

Building on the case study of the performative practice of voguing within ballroom culture among LGBTQIA+ communities, the aim of this article is to recognize a facial agency capable of putting into tension three thresholds of meaning: visibility and invisibility; identity and otherness; nature and artifice. On the basis of these tensions, interpretive habits concerning identity are incorporated into the face as a semiotic dispositif that negotiate sociocultural expectations and limitations. These habits, when agentively performed through the face, give shape to a communicative project that manipulates platforms of identity into biopolitical masks. The analysis will also give an account of how “worn” biopolitical masks reproduce and perform a facial monstrum, or warning, and how this specification warns others of the normativity of aesthetic and biopolitical appearance while activating an intentional transformation of identity.

Spenserian MomentsGordonTeskey Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2019. 552 pp. ISBN 13: 9780674988446. $47.00 (cloth).

Spenserian MomentsGordonTeskey Cambridge, <scp>MA</scp>: Harvard <scp>UP</scp>, 2019. 552 pp. <scp>ISBN</scp> 13: 9780674988446. $47.00 (cloth).

“Habit and creativity in judges’ definition and framing of legal questions”

The dominant social scientific approach to studying judicial behavior treats judges as strategic actors pursuing their political preferences under institutional constraint. The intellectual roots of this rational choice approach are in American law’s long but sporadic engagement with pragmatist ideas. This article challenges that approach: a fully pragmatist account of judicial action provides a better description of the intellectual and social work of judging, and better explains how judges reach a decision in difficult cases that most affect the development of law and its relationship to society. The article argues that the foundational intellectual problem for appellate judges is how to define the legal questions presented in a case. Definitions of legal questions arise from the interplay of habitual and creative action in the local social context of an appeals court. Professional and local interpretive habits and legal forms ordinarily do a great deal to define the key questions, which are not strictly determined when a case comes before a court. Unscripted small group interactions at oral arguments also figure in question definition; oral arguments are most important in the rare but legally important cases where habitual practices alone are insufficient to delimit the legal question judges must answer. Supported by extensive interviews with federal appeals judges and clerks, the article illustrates judges’ creative, interactional efforts to define an answerable question in a major asylum case decided in the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals. Building from this case, the article describes the factors that shape judicial question definition, and describes the conditions when creative judicial action is likely to be most prominent.

The Individual Reader

ABSTRACT How do we read? For critics, now a few years deep into what has been called “the method wars”, the approaches are numerous, but most of all, are collective. Whether critique or postcritique, or the idiosyncratic in between, what is undeniable about the explosion of methods beyond the hermeneutics of suspicion is that it renders us, critics, in the plural. In his first collection of essays and interviews, Strong Opinions, Vladimir Nabokov proclaimed that “a work of art has no importance whatever to society. It is only important to the individual, and only the individual reader is important to me”, but as Zadie Smith despaired in her 2004 essay “Read Better”, “the idea of the ‘individual reader’ [has] gone into terminal decline”. Looking to the contemporary autocritical novel, however, we find plenty of readers resistant to the interpretative habits of professional readers, drawing attention to the limitations of institutional reading and extoling the aesthetic affordances of reading limited to the individual. Rather than rehashing the motivations and sensibilities involved and required by reading critically that the method wars have revived, then, this article submits to the “individual reader” offered by autocritical novels by Rachel Cusk, Ben Lerner, and Valeria Luiselli.

The embarrassments of confession: Reading Margery Kempe today

An underexplored but key point of critical and affective response to Margery Kempe’s Book is its perceived double excess: an over-eagerness to over-share the self that can potentially ‘embarrass’ the reader. Insomuch as triggers for embarrassment – what counts as excessive or inappropriate – are coded according to gendered and racialized social norms, undercurrents of embarrassment silently perpetuate the power relations behind traditional negative responses to the text, responses we like to believe we’ve left behind. This essay takes Kempe’s text as a case study for analyzing the habits of interpretation that lead to ‘embarrassed’ readings of confession, and explores the implications of such habits for how we read confessions and self-revelations today, particularly those from speakers marked as different from the mainstream, as Kempe persistently has been. A closer look at the embarrassment response highlights for us the intersections of confessional practice, the reading of intentions (hidden or otherwise), and the struggle for rights to interpretation itself.

ROBERT LEVIN’İN MOZART YORUMCULUĞU BULGULARININ UYGULAMA PRENSİPLERİ

Avusturyalı klasik dönem bestecisi Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart hakkında yapılan araştırmalar piyanist ve müzikolog Robert Levin’in öncülüğünde hızlanarak gelişme kaydetmiş, bulgular müzisyenler ve müzikologlar arasında yayılmaya başlamıştır. Mozart’ın beste yapma ve eser yorumlama davranışlarını detaylarıyla inceleyen Levin, sadece Mozart değil, klasik dönem hatta genel olarak yorumculuk anlayışını değiştirebilecek güçte bulgular elde etmiştir. Bu bulgular ışığında Levin, bir bütün olarak yorumculuk disiplinine, sanatına ve bilimine büyük katkılar sağlamıştır. Ancak yapılan kayıtlar, gerçekleşen konserler ve yarışmalardan anlaşılmaktadır ki, geçtiğimiz yüzyılın yorumculuk alışkanlıkları bugün bu bulgulara hala direnmektedir. İşte bu çalışmanın amacı, bilgilerin uygulanabilmesine katkıda bulunarak bu direnci ortadan kaldırmak, Mozart yorumu konusundaki temel sorun ve yeni bulguların en zorlayıcı taraflarından biri olan doğaçlama konusunu inceleyip yöntemler geliştirerek hem yorumcuya hem de yorumcu adayı öğrencilere yol göstermektir.

PRAGMATIC INQUIRY AND RELIGIOUS COMMUNITIES: CHARLES PEIRCE, SIGNS, AND INHABITED EXPERIMENTS BRANDON DANIEL-HUGHES

Reviewed by: Pragmatic Inquiry and Religious Communities: Charles Peirce, Signs, and Inhabited Experiments by Brandon Daniel-Hughes Gary Slater (bio) Brandon Daniel-Hughes Pragmatic Inquiry and Religious Communities: Charles Peirce, Signs, and Inhabited Experiments London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018; xxix + 250 pp., incl. index What does it mean to understand religious traditions most fundamentally as communities of inquiry? This is the question raised by Brandon Daniel-Hughes' Pragmatic Inquiry and Religious Communities, which uses Peirce's writings on inquiry to frame religious traditions as "large-scale hypotheses, expressed in religious symbols, narratives, and rituals that work to signify reality…by cultivating beliefs and rules for action that may truly indicate the real world and orient believers with it by guiding them into more harmonious relations with one another and their environments" (p. 23). Academic interest in Peirce and religion has been steady for several decades, and has perhaps even grown in recent years. Such interest extends at least as far back as the work of Robert C. Neville, Michael Raposa, Robert Corrington, or Peter Ochs, [End Page 356] also encompassing such younger figures as Annette Ejsing and Leon Niemoczynski. Daniel-Hughes' book is a worthy contribution to this discourse. It helps to summarize the development of the book's argument across its six chapters. The book's first two chapters are its most careful in terms of the Peircean source material. Daniel-Hughes spends Chapter 1 unpacking Peirce's theory of inquiry. A highlight of the first chapter is a lucid exposition of "The Fixation of Belief," which, in spite of this being one of Peirce's best-known writings, feels fresh in the way in which Daniel-Hughes reframes inquiry as a communal as well as individual pursuit. Specifically, Daniel-Hughes uses Peirce's theory of inquiry to get at the insider/outsider issue regarding religion, showing how one can "toggle" between first-person and third-person perspectives for religious experience. As he puts it: Peirce is often praised for calling attention to the first-person perspective and noting that inquiry is always a contextual affair, thereby giving the lie to any context-neutral or "God's-eye view" theory of inquiry. But we misread Peirce if we take him to suggest that we are, so to speak, trapped in a cycle of perpetually unreflective inquiry… We can… inquire into how best to inquire, and this sort of inquiry entails taking up the third-person philosopher's point of view and coming to see ourselves and our habits of inquiry as both agents and objects of inquiry. The particular genius of Peirce's theory of inquiry is that it recommends developing intelligent habits of toggling between the two perspectives when appropriate. (P.22) What such toggling gets us, Daniel-Hughes suggests, is the ability to extend naturalistic inquiry into the interpretive habits of religious communities to reveal how "beliefs that we inhabit are not first principles or certain foundations; they are a biologically and socially evolved collection of overlapping and sometimes contradictory forms, behaviors, and customs that we have inherited from our environments, our ancestors, our cultures, and our earlier selves" (p. 15). Chapter 2 builds from Peirce's theory of inquiry to develop a fourfold taxonomy for inquiry rendered as a Cartesian graph, with the horizontal axis of the graph charting inquiry in terms of risk and the vertical axis in terms of self-control. This graph establishes at least two claims that later emerge as central to the book's arguments. The first is that scientific and religious forms of inquiry are continuous; the second is that religious inquiry contains both progressive and conservative elements. Chapters 3 and 4 develop from this basis for inquiry a robust exploration of how religions-as-inquiry structure other types of hypotheses. For example, Daniel-Hughes argues that religious inquiry is fundamentally communal in nature, which is a claim for which Peirce's texts offer plenty of support. Two distinctions emerge [End Page 357] here as particularly important. The first distinction is between good and bad forms of religious inquiry. At the risks of oversimplification, good religious inquiry draws from indigenous sources of self-correction and points toward harmony...

Yūnus Emre, Niyāzī-i Mıṣrī ve İsmāʿīl Ḥaḳḳī Bursevī’de Türk Tasavvuf Şiirine Özgü Mażmūn Arayışları

Yūnus Emre, Niyāzī-i Mıṣrī ve İsmāʿīl Ḥaḳḳī Bursevī’de Türk Tasavvuf Şiirine Özgü Mażmūn Arayışları

Toward a Peircean Approach to Perlocution

ABSTRACTIn this article I propose to interpret Austin's conception of perlocution in light of Peirce's philosophy of signs, through the lens of his notions of thirdness and speculative rhetoric in particular. I suggest that the traditional notion of speech genre, examined within the context of Peirce's semiotic framework, can make sense of the regularities and predictability that are characteristic of a large part of our discursive practices. More specifically, I argue that crystallized “habits of interpretation,” correlated to purposeful speech genres instantiated in given circumstances of enunciation, could be construed as predetermining the range of future interpretive conduct. In that perspective, this process of determination could be thus conceived as relatively predictable, at least for communication situations activating well-defined speech genres. In the end, I suggest that Peirce's conception of rhetoric draws attention to the necessarily constrained interpretive habits of our discursive life, yielding an original perspective on the notion of perlocution.

„Der Felsen aber war Christus“ (1 Kor 10,4)

This article examines Paul’s enigmatic statement that “the rock was Christ” (1 Cor 10:4) from the perspective of ancient understandings and habits of allegorical interpretation. Paul’s use of the exodus story can be addressed as an exemplum type of allegory, as described by Quintilian and applied for exegetical purposes by Heraclitus and Philo. In contrast to previous scholarship, it is shown that the employment of different tenses in allegorical formulas is a matter of style rather than of content so that Paul’s use of ἦν instead ἐστίν does not contradict the fact that it is meant to designate the allegorical sense of the term “rock”.

Knowing your audience: the contingency of landscape design interpretations

ABSTRACTTo address visual communication issues in landscape planning and design processes, an analytical framework that enables the study and possible anticipation of the interpretation of visual design representations is presented here. This framework consists of a hybrid theory of Peircean social semiotics and Laclaudian post-foundational discourse analysis (PDA). The semiotics of Peirce, through the concept of the interpretant, enable the conceptualization of the discourses that make up the socio-political contexts of design projects as so-called ‘interpretive habits’. This framework is demonstrated by partly reconstructing the socio-political context of Rebuild by Design, a design competition organized in the wake of hurricane Sandy in New York. It is suggested through this demonstration that the sign systems and discursive networks that influence the interpretations of design images by different stakeholders can be partially uncovered during the design process itself. By recognizing these interpretive habits during specific phases of the design process, planners and designers could potentially better anticipate the productive and counter-productive interpretations of their design representations.

Habits of Theological Reason in Spiritual Formation

Habits of Theological Reason in Spiritual Formation Mark Graves (bio) Spiritual formation of theological reason can benefit from a gradually increasing understanding of the human person driven in part by scientific advances in investigating the human brain and cognition. As cognitive neuroscientists discover the biological foundations of mental processing, those findings that currently inform psychological categories of perception, problem solving, learning, memory, and language comprehension and generation can begin informing the theological category of reason. As a step toward incorporating contemporary scientific findings into theological, nonreductive models of the human person, the current investigation revisits Thomas Aquinas' concept of habits and the pseudo-Dionysian schema of formation to demonstrate how a scientifically plausible model of graced interpretive habits can inform the development of theological reason within a participatory relationship with Mystery. Given a contemporary understanding of the mind, how does one develop the capacity for theological reason? Several levels of theories and models are needed to characterize theological reason ranging from the occasionally borderline mystical through language, culture, mental processing, and brain function to their molecular foundations, and each reduction would explain some aspects in greater detail while losing some of that level's holistic ramifications. However, a carefully selected series of theories can increase the knowledge of reason gained while decreasing the information lost during the reductive mappings. To minimize reductionistic loss across multiple disciplines requires a coherent philosophical framework by which one understands each level's theories and models. For the formation of theological reason, the process of developing "habits" (classically, habitus) is an effective and fruitful category upon which to build. Theological reason is characterized as building theological habits of interpretation, and the formation of theological habits coheres with the development of behavioral, cognitive, and other psychological habits. It may also depend upon some of the neurobiological processes underlying habituation, learning, and memory formation. Reinterpreting habitus within a contemporary scientific understanding of the human person furthers an ecumenical approach to spiritual formation [End Page 35] while retaining the valuable contributions of Aristotelian and Neoplatonic thought throughout the history of Western spirituality. Using habits as a foundational construct, one can define theological reason as a spiritual practice where one forms interpretive habits to know theological loci, such as God or Christ. In particular, an Orthodox Christian understanding of Mystery serves as a test case to demonstrate the benefits of modeling religious concepts in terms of tradition-mediated, interpretive habits rather than essences or arbitrary social constructions. Developing theological constructs that incorporate scientific findings also enables directed empirical study of those constructs. Skills like juggling or driving a London taxicab sufficiently change brain function such that anatomical differences are apparent compared to novices in those areas. Brain scans (fMRI imaging) of Buddhist monks (and others) have found empirical differences compared with novice meditators.1 Directing scientific studies to examine theologically refined models may yield deeper insights into human dimensions of spiritual formation and theological reason as well as lay a foundation to pursue further empirical theological investigations. A model of interpretative habits coheres with contemporary findings of cognitive neuroscience that identify the multimodal, plastic, distributed brain processes underlying mental reasoning processes. Although more physicalist or systemic models may better satisfy reductionist or integrative research agendas, respectively, theologians working to incorporate contemporary science into categories typically studied using methods from the humanities are not limited to scientific research categories previously developed without social scientific or philosophic input. Selecting models for theological use must meet most of the requirements for scientific model development, and may substitute broader coherence for reductionist simplicity as well as methodological fruitfulness for experimental potency. Interpretive habits model cognitive processes of theological reason in a way that supports ecumenical investigation of spiritual formation within a broad theological context. This article focuses on how interpretive habits can model the spiritual formation of theological reason with respect to communally defined loci such as Mystery. Despite significant and often heated debates concerning differing Christian views on justification, sanctification, deification (theosis), humanity's natural moral state, and the role of grace in salvation, spiritual formation across major Christian traditions likely share a core set of developmental processes. As psychologists and neuroscientists develop a deeper understanding of those developmental processes, scholars of...

How Lenin’s language is made: Material of history and technique of ideology

T here is a connection between the formal theory and the history in which formalists were submerged, the history which they represented and the history which they reflected in their scholarly and literary works. This connection is not limited by the use of historical, biographical or artistic material for the illustration of theoretical ideas. Formalists described literature as the destruction of the habits of perception and interpretation formed by the everyday life. In this sense the mechanisms of literature and history turned out to be isomorphous with each other. The concept of defamiliarization formulated by V. Shklovsky becomes, then, not only a universal mechanism of art, but also an immanent law of history. While formalists tended to bare the device — the “literariness” of literature, the revolution was seen by them as “baring” the historical device of history itself. A special issue of the journal LEF published in 1924 under the title “Lenin’s Language” was dedicated to the study of the political language of the revolutionary leader. Participants of this special issue included representatives of OPOIAZ and the Moscow Linguistic Circle. Description of V. Lenin’s language as one which followed the laws of poetic language that had been “discovered by Formalists” was an official opportunity for them to extend their theory of literary evolution into the sphere of social history as a whole. T he very concept of the “device” that bares the “completeness” of a literary work found its application in the critical analysis of ideology. In this manner, ideology is revealed as opposed to history in precisely the same manner as automatized practical language is opposed to poetic language. Lenin’s language is transformed into an agent of poetic, revolutionary disavowal of ideology, the durability of which relies on the ideological automatization of false consciousness and everyday habits of perception.

A Guide to Kant’s Treatment of Grace

This Guide is designed to restore the theological background that informs Kant’s treatment of grace in Religion to its rightful place. This background is essential not only to understand the nature of Kant’s overall project in this book, namely, to determine the “association” or “union” between Christianity (as a historical faith) and rational religion, but also to dispel the impression of “internal contradictions” and “conundrums” that contemporary interpreters associate with Kant’s treatment of grace and moral regeneration. That impression, we argue, is the result of entrenched interpretative habits that can be traced back to Karl Barth’s reading of the text. Once we realize that such a reading rests on a mistake, much of the anxiety and confusion that plague current discussions on these issues can be put to rest.

Book Review: Learning the Interpreter’s Craft: David I. Starling, Hermeneutics as Apprenticeship: How the Bible Shapes Our Interpretive Habits and Practices

Book Review: Learning the Interpreter’s Craft: David I. Starling, Hermeneutics as Apprenticeship: How the Bible Shapes Our Interpretive Habits and Practices

Chains of Power and Their Representation

Power is the ability to send and bind someone else to act on one’s behalf, a relation that depends upon habits of interpretation. For persons attempting to complete projects, power involves communicating with, recruiting, and controlling subordinates and confronting those who are not in such a relationship of recruitment. This leads to a basic theoretical vocabulary about power players and their projects—a model of rector, actor, and other. As multiple relations of sending and binding become mutually implicated, chains of power—understood as simultaneously social and symbolic—emerge. The vocabulary presented for analyzing power is developed with reference to a series of instances, including the exploitation of labor and police violence. Finally, the paper analyzes a case study of an imperial encounter on the American frontier and examines therein a shift in how political power was represented, with implications for the sociology of transitions to modernity.

Loving Literature: A Cultural History

Loving Literature: A Cultural History