> “For the most part, the Very Short Introductions range from worth reading to wonderfully appealing.”
Cannot recommend this series enough. If you want to know the best way to be a good citizen, to cut through the shroud of fake news, opinions, and context lacking information, this is it. Any time I hear a term I’ve never heard before on the news I go straight for these books. It started with “neoliberalism” a couple of years ago, and recently “hermeneutics”. Also, I began to wonder what does “Citizenship” actually mean? Not surprisingly these guys have a book on it.
Ack, what is "hermeneutics"!? I know it's a field of study and I get a little what it's about (though I'd need to see some more concrete examples to really get it I think)—but what baffles me is why people use 'hermeneutic' as an adjective when they could just say 'interpretation' or something simpler like that. Is there a legitimate reason to use that word? (aside from referring to the field of study.)
In English, if you want to make a word sound fancy, and especially if you want to construct a fancy compound word, you have to build the word out of Latin or Greek root words.
"Interpret" has Latin roots. "Hermeneutic" has Greek roots. "Understand" has German roots; doesn't it sound childish by comparison? (The word "childish" has German roots.)
Historically, this was a way of signaling class and education to others, especially in England, a country conquered by the Romans and then by the French. Common folk couldn't participate in academic discussions because they didn't understand Latin, and even those who could piece together some Latin couldn't understand Greek.
Eventually, these "fancy" words stuck, especially in English academia, and now we all have to use them if we want to sound academic.
While most of what you say is true, there might be a bit of embellishment in the "common folk" part.
Education in much of Europe has its roots in the church. The lingua franca of the Catholic Church was Latin. Therefore educated people knew and spoke Latin.
Many Greek words were borrowed into Latin from Greek, so Latin speakers would know those, too. Other Greek words made it into English via other languages like French and Arabic. I think I'm leaving out a Greek component, but I can't remember what.
In short, for a long time, being educated meant you knew Latin because that's the language you were taught in, and Greek kind of went hand-in-hand with the Latin and Latin-learning context of the church.
There's also a massive influence of Greek thinking that is pervasive in western education from the lineage of Thales, Plato, Aristotle, etc. These people basically founded the tradition of non-trade non-hereditary learning in the west.
Naturally, they spoke Greek and so it comes through in things like geometry and philosophy quite strongly.
I think the uses I've seen of it have been recent enough that that authors probably aren't focusing much on that aspect. If you compare those three words, 'interpret', 'understand', 'hermeneutic', the first thing that stands out most to me is relative commonness in the English language. Hermeneutic is far less known than the other two—so you'd think you'd want to avoid it unless you really need it (assuming your goal is to communicate which, sigh, sadly it often isn't so simple of course).
The other thing that stands out becomes clear when I try to find forms of 'interpret' and 'understand' that actually match the way 'hermeneutic' is used. I think they would be 'interpreting' and... well, there isn't anything very close for 'understand' really. I think the way it's used (when it's used as an adjective rather than referring to the field of study) the meaning is something like, "involving interpretation"; e.g., "the hermeneutic necessity inherent in all communication". It probably also has some connotations that authors like brought in, like an implication that the interpretation relativizes or at least colors whatever it is that's being understood/communicated?
In any case, I think it's still kind of unclear and annoying because even if there is a legitimate difference, I'm pretty sure people just use it to sound cool over frequently.
My vague understanding is hermeneutics is interpretation + context. so, for a programmer 1 + 1 could be 2, or it could be 10, depending on what layer you're working at, and how you're choosing to represent things. and that's an easy one where you can just ask the computer. a better example might be all the variations of call by value or call by need. or maybe scope of variable binding. it's still interpretation, but it has a context that give weird answers if you're not used to that evaluation order.
Something more vague, like law, is interpreted, and it's important to consider all the prior interpretations and try to sort out what makes sense in context, and it's important to get whoever you're arguing with to agree to the relevant context.
It's the interpretation of religion so I think it warrants a separate name (since if you let someone interpret your holy book for you you've essentially given them a great deal of power over your decision making).
Doesn't it mean interpretation of religious texts? That is, someone can say hermeneutic and we know they are not just talking about interpretation, but interpretation of a specific genre of literature.
That's historically true. But from the Wikipedia article, for instance:
> Modern hermeneutics includes both verbal and non-verbal communication[6][7] as well as semiotics, presuppositions, and pre-understandings. Hermeneutics has been broadly applied in the humanities, especially in law, history and theology.
For example, the hoax paper at the heart of the Sokal affair[0] was entitled Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity.
Cannot recommend this series enough. If you want to know the best way to be a good citizen, to cut through the shroud of fake news, opinions, and context lacking information, this is it. Any time I hear a term I’ve never heard before on the news I go straight for these books. It started with “neoliberalism” a couple of years ago, and recently “hermeneutics”. Also, I began to wonder what does “Citizenship” actually mean? Not surprisingly these guys have a book on it.