INTERPRETATION AND ARGUMENTATION

1. The arts of understanding

Hermeneutics, exegesis and interpretation are the arts involved in the understanding of complex texts such as the Bible, the Criminal Code, the Koran, the Iliad, the Communist Manifesto, the Talmud, the Upanishads, etc. (Boeckh [1886], p. 133 ; Gadamer [1967], p. 277 ; p. 280). Texts require an exegesis because they are written in forgotten languages, or are historically distant, or arehermetic. The fellowship considers that vital things depend on what such texts say and mean precisely. This meaning is not immediately accessible to the contemporary reader. It must be established and preserved in order to be transmitted as well as possible.

Hermeneutics is a philosophical approach to interpretation, defined as an effort to share a form of life, a search for empathy with the text, its author, the language and the culture in which it was produced. Hermeneutic understanding is thus opposed to the physical explanation sought in the natural sciences, where “to explain” has the meaning of “subsume under a physical law”.

Psychoanalysis and linguistics have shown that ordinary actions and words also can require interpretation.

The theoretical language of interpretation is complicated by the morphology of the lexicon, as is always the case when a theory develops within ordinary language. What is the difference should be made between hermeneutics, exegesis and interpretation?
Their three respective lexical series contain a term designating the agent exegete, hermeneutist, interpreter; two of them contain a noun referring to the process and result, interpretation, exegesis, which, as hermeneutics, can also refer to the field of study. Only one series contains a verb, namely to interpret: This verb will therefore be used for the three series, imposing its meaning on the whole lexical field.

In the philological and historical sense, exegesis is a critical activity whose object is typically a text belonging to a cultural or religious tradition taken in its material conditions of production and original practices, linguistic conditions (grammar, lexicon), rhetorical conditions (genre), historical and institutional context, genesis of the work in its links with the life and milieu of the author. Philological exegesis establishes the text, reveals its meaning(s), and thus contributes thus to resolving conflicting interpretations or articulating different levels of interpretation. It stabilizes the “literal meaning”, that is the core meaning of the text, and thus determines the material to be interpreted. In a broad sense, exegesis includes interpretation; both seek to overcome the distance created by history, between the text and its readers.
The purpose of philological exegesis is to express the meaning of the text; it seeks to create the conditions for a certain projection of the reader into the past. Interpretative exegesis (or interpretation, hermeneutics) seeks to reformulate that meaning to make it accessible to a contemporary reader; it actualizes the meaning of the text. This is the connection between hermeneutics and the rhetoric of religious preaching lies.
Exegesis aims at understanding the meaning as expressed by the text; interpretation and commentary push the meaning of the text beyond the text itself. In contrast to philological exegesis, interpretation can be allegorical. Philological interpretation is exoteric, whereas hermeneutics can be esoteric.

2. Rhetoric and hermeneutics

The task of hermeneutics is to make intelligible to one person the thought of another through its discursive expression. In this sense, rhetoric as the « art of persuasion » is the counterpart of hermeneutics as the “art of understanding”; their directions of fit are complementary.
Rhetoric takes the perspective of a speaker/writer striving to persuade an addressee, the listener/reader. In contrast, hermeneutics takes the perspective of a reader/listener who seeks to understand a speaker/writer who is addressing him through a text.
Rhetoric is related to live speech, taking into account the beliefs of the listener, trying to minimize his efforts; hermeneutics is related to distant speech, to reading: the reader must to adapt to the meaning of the text.

Taken together, hermeneutics and rhetoric establish a dual cultural communicative competence, to understand and to be understood. The rejection of rhetoric in the name of pure intellectual demand results in the transfer of the burden of understanding to the reader, and thus requires hermeneutics.

3. Interpretation and argumentation

The interpretive process is applied to any component of discourse , from words to whole texts, in order to derive its meaning, and this meaning is necessarily (expressed in) another discourse. The interpretive relation thus links two discourses, and the link between the interpreting and the interpreted utterance is made according to transition rules that are not different from the general argumentation schemes.

In the case of argumentation, the argument can be any statement that expresses a true or accepted view of reality. In the case of interpretation, the data, the argument statement, is the utterance to be interpreted, in the precise form it has in the text. Once this statement is available, the linguistic mechanisms are the same. If we consider the argument-conclusion relation in its greatest generality, we will say that the conclusion is what the speaker has in mind when he states the argument, and the conclusion is the meaning of the argument. The argumentative relation is thus no different from the interpretive relation. When the listener/reader has grasped the conclusion of the text, he has achieved an authentic understanding of that text. This amounts to saying that  there is always a lack of meaning  within the statement, and the statement is only given meaning in relation to a later statement. Meaning is thus constructed in an endless process, see orientation.

As with argumentation, interpretation is valid to the extent that it is based on principles that conform to a transitional law accepted by the interpreting community concerned, such as the community of lawyers or theologians for example:

The rabbis regarded the Pentateuch as a unified, divinely communicated text, consistent in all its parts. Consequently, by adopting certain principles of interpretation (middot; “measures,” “norms”). it was possible to uncover deeper meanings and to provide for a more complete application of its laws
Jacobs & Derovan, 2007, p. 25

The same principles apply to the Muslim legal-religious interpretation (Khallaf [1942]), or to legal interpretation. The forms of argumentation used in law are the same as those used in the interpretation of all texts to which, for whatever reason, are considered to have a systematic character. This is because they are considered to be the best expression of the legal-rational views of the time, because they come from a divine source or from an individual genius, see Juridical Arguments.

This postulate of strong, even perfect coherence is fundamental for the structuralist interpretation of texts, as well as to the interpretation of legal texts or religious texts, as mentioned in the previous quotation. It may conflict with the genetic argument which constructs the meaning of a text through inferences justified by “preparatory works”, such as the manuscripts, or by the author’s intentions, as revealed , for example, by his or her correspondence. Arguments based on genetic evidence are one aspect of the philological interpretation of the text. They may be viewed with suspicion by true believers, because genetic arguments assume that the text has a non-divine, at least partially human origin.