Scottish Common Sense Realism

Implicit in Scottish commonsense realism is a "picture theory" of language, which say that "words are directly knowable by the mind and, in addition, are direct representations of the objects to which they refer. Logically, therefore, words and sense impressions are identical in that each refers directly to objects. Those objects, in turn, are directly and with utmost certainty known by the mind." The most important Scottish commonsense realist, Thomas Reid (1710-96), put it this way: "Language is the express image and picture of human thoughts; and from the picture we may draw same certain conclusions concerning the original [object to which language refers]."

In Christian Smith, The Bible Made Impossible (Grand Rapids: Brazos, 2011), 56.

Multiple Perspectives

Should those of us interested in interpreting the Bible assimilate its texts to a series of equations? Doesn't the Bible point us in a different direction by telling us that we need four different interpretations of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus as well as epistles interpreting the Christ event by a variety of authors?

Westphal, Whose Community? Which Interpretation? (Loc. 768-70 Kindle Ed.)

Romantic Hermeneutics

1. Deregionalization - Schleiermacher set out to develop a general hermeneutics that would apply to culturally significant texts regardless of their subject matter.  He sought to identify the general features of interpretation that were common to rather than distinctive of the various disciplines.

2. The Hermeneutical Circle - The notion that the parts always have to be interpreted in terms of the whole--and vice versa.

3. Psychologism - It begins with the assumption that language is primarily to be understood as the outer expression of the inner psychic life.  This hermeneutics is often labeled "romantic" because it shares this expressivism with the wider cultural traditions call romanticism.  The goal of interpretation, then, is to reverse the process of writing, to work back from the outer expression to the inner experience, to reconstruct, re-create, refeel, reexperience, relive that inner experience.

4. Objectivism - Dilthey is especially insistent that interpretation be "scientific" so that its findings may be "objective" and rise to the level of "universal validity."  The prestige and power of the natural sciences seem to suggest that rational respectability requires that the disciplines that relate to distinctly human meaning (Geisteswissenschaften, humanities, human sciences) must aspire to a comparable objectivity, especially against the possibility of some sort of historical relativism.

Westphal, Whose Community? Which Interpretation? (Kindle Ed.)