RORTY: I might explain that the last few sentences of my remarks were written before I knew what Dreyfus would say. Having heard his remarks, I'm not sure that Dreyfus and I differ, for I would like to take what he calls the religious rather than the secular line. I agree that "micropractices" left over from an earlier day help us resist the disciplinary society, and I think it would be advantageous if we could come up with a cultural paradigm (...) which embodied more of them and less of the Cartesian tradition of scientism. (shrink)

THE ISSUE about hermeneutics in modern philosophy and social science goes back to Dilthey and to his claim that we must distinguish between what we could call the natural and human sciences. The claim is that there is something special about the subject matter of the latter which forbids us simply to carry over the method elaborated in natural science to the study of man. But to many, this distinction has seemed unjustified, even obscurantist. One of the important traits of (...) modern science has been its concern about method, ever since Descartes’ great discourse on the subject. To put the sciences of man outside the ban of the methods of natural science seems to be to put them outside the range of science itself. On this view, science must be in principle a unity; or at least it must involve a set of démarches which are the same without discrimination as to the object studied. (shrink)

IN A recent work I have attempted to show that visual space tends to have a Euclidean geometrical structure only when the environment is filled with a repetitive pattern of regularly faceted objects carpentered to exhibit simple standard Euclidean shapes, and tends to have a hyperbolic structure when vision is deprived of these clues. I conclude that visual perception--and by analogy, all perception--is hermeneutic as well as causal: it responds to structures in the flow of optical energy, but the character (...) of its response is also hermeneutical, that is, it has the capacity to "read" the appropriate structures in the World, and to form perceptual judgments of the World about which these "speak." The clues that are "read" perceptually as giving a Euclidean visual space are engineered objects, such as streets and buildings with repetitive architectural elements. These scientific artifacts of human culture belong to a family of readable technologies central to the phenomenological and existential-hermeneutical analysis of natural science. (shrink)