Homophily and interpretation

We know sociologically that the principle of "homophily" (love for and attraction to what is similar to oneself) is one of the strongest forces operating in social life. As a result, biblicists (and most other Christians) who interpret the Bible in the same way have a very strong tendency to cluster together into homogeneous social networks of similarly believing people. One name for that when it is institutionalized is "Protestant denominations." Most people--including most biblicists--tend to live in relatively "small" worlds, in the subcultures and social circles with which they are most at home and comfortable. Homophily is powerful this way--even the most seemingly "cosmopolitan" people tend actually to live in parochial worlds. In fact, empirical research shows that evangelicals tend to live in more religiously homogeneous worlds than most (though not all) other religious Americans. For biblicists these relatively small worlds can function as effective "polausibility structures" to sustain the "reality" and believability of their particular assumptions and convictions--as the same small worlds that most everyone else, including atheists and adherents of every other belief system, so for them.

Christian Smith, The Bible Made Impossible (Grand Rapids: Brazos, 2011), 60-61.

Wittgenstein

For Wittgenstein, meaning and truth are not related--at least not directly or primarily--to an external world of "fact" waiting to be apprehended. Instead, they are an internal function of language. Because the meaning of any statement is dependent on the context--that is, on the "language game"--in which it appears, any sentence has as many meanings as contexts in which it is used. Rather than assertions of final truth or truth in any final ultimate sense, all our utterances can only be deemed "true" within the context in which they are spoken. Further, viewing language as a "game" presumes that language does not have its genesis in the individual mind grasping a truth or fact about the world and then expressing it in statements. Rather, language is a social phenomenon, and any statement acquires its meaning within the process of social interaction.

Stanley Grenz and John Franke, Beyond Foundationalism (Louisville, Westminster John Knox, 2001), 42.

Sociology of Knowledge

Basically, sociology of knowledge states that no act of coming to understanding can escape the formative power of the background and the paradigm community to which an interpreter belongs.

Grant Osborne, The Hermeneutical Spiral (Downers Grove: IVP Academic, 2006), 505.

Principles of Interpretation

1. A close reading of the text cannot be done without a perspective provided by one’s preunderstanding as identified by a “sociology of knowledge” perspective.
2. I must distinguish presupposition from prejudice.
3. We must seek controls that enable us to work with presuppositions (the positive) rather than to be dominated by prejudices (the negative).
a. We must be open to new possibilities.
b. We must understand the dangers of merely assuming our presuppositions.
c. The interpreter must not only address the text but must allow the text to address him or her (the hermeneutical circle).
d. Polyvalent interpretations per se are unnecessary, but a pluralistic or polyvalent attitude is critical.
4. We must all good hermeneutical principles to shape our exegesis and to control our tendency to read our prejudices into the text.
a. Consider the genre or type of literature and interpret each according to the proper rules of their particular language game.
b. The structural development of the passage provides a control against artificial atomistic exegesis.
c. Semantic research further helps the reader to discover the sense and reference of the passage.
d. A judicious use of background information helps us avoid the opposite error, namely, ignoring the historical aspect in favor of the poetic.
e. The implied author and implied reader in the text provide an indispensable perspective for the intended meaning of a text.
f. The question of verification of competing interpretive possibilities is essential for any system. This is a threefold process: inductively, deductively, sociologically.

Grant Osborne, The Hermeneutical Spiral (Downers Grove: IVP Academic, 2006), 516-519.

Deconstructionism

Five criticisms of deconstructionism from Thiselton:
1) If textual meaning is a community product, texts can never transform readers “from outside"
2) prophetic address has lost its power and in fact achieves the opposite, for its message is constructed by the very community it purports to address
3) notions like grace or revelation are illusions, since there are no givens
4) the “message of the cross” becomes no more than the “linguistic construct of a tradition”
5) nothing can ever be counted as error in the development of doctrine, for it is all little more than a social construct.

In Grant Osborne, The Hermeneutical Spiral (Downers Grove: IVP Academic, 2006), 482.