Questions.Did the terms function as a heuristic?
Were the terms hermeneutical in the sense that you were drawing on your reading? (Which raises an interesting question about how close to the text one has to be in order for a invention process to be hermeneutical.)
Berthoff talks about killer dichotomies: at what point, if ever, does the heuristic/hermeneutical divide become such a dichotomy? And if so, how do we address that? By seeing connections between the two? By adding new terms?
We did talk about technology and its relationship to invention, but of course technology has always been a factor. Was it simply an unacknowledged factor that should have been included, or is there something particularly pressing about technology now that makes it a visible part of invention?
KY: “Berthoff talks about killer dichotomies: at what point, if ever, does the heuristic/hermeneutical divide become such a dichotomy? And if so, how do we address that? By seeing connections between the two? By adding new terms?”
ReplyDeleteYes- they seem to oppose one another. But they also appear as balances to each other, or even as parts of each other’s usefulness-- more like hand in glove? Sprocket on gear? I am not sure they are even separable. I have rocked the two terms (heuristic/hermeneutic) off of each other ---these words’ meanings I admit to never quite grasping--- through common effort considering Rhetorical Invention. It is really a feeling of leaning one way, and then the other, when trying to understand the function of these words, as though they both hang more freight than I am able to estimate. This is what I was thinking about when I flagged the page (Invention 14) where Lauer’s survey of Greek roots for Invention turns to kairos (originating moment), or what I take to mean: discourse that is “seemly”, if fit correctly to the proper time, but “disgraceful”, if tailored poorly to a “rhetorical situation” (Bitzer) that is somehow misconstrued. So—interpretation is inherent (and key)—and that is hermeneutical (do we say hermeneutic when we mean exegesis?). But-- heuristics, or trial and error, as in a winnowing, or an Aristotelian sorting is also required, which I think means asking questions within a frame and making a judgment. All this even to identify a rhetorical situation- in the first place- let alone parse it. That is how I think both terms nest, twine, inform, or co-exist, even co-create one another. The Sophists’ dissoi logoi epistemology is a Janus-faced oracle: Janus, after all was
patron of concrete and abstract beginnings of the world…new historical ages, …the god of the home entrance (ianua), gates, bridges and covered and arcaded passages (iani) named after him. He was frequently used to symbolize change and transitions such as the progression of past to future, of one condition to another, of one vision to another, the growing up of young people, and of one universe to another… he could see into the past with one face and into the future with the other …He was representative of the middle ground between barbarity and civilization, rural country and urban cities, and youth and adulthood.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Janus
Could a more perfectly analogous fellow be discovered? I almost think one needn’t read Lauer’s book at all---- just understand those relationships.