Hermeneutics, Practical Wisdom, and Cognitive Poetics

Abstract

AbstractIt may seem trivial to stress that our background knowledge is essential for literary interpretation, but what about practical wisdom, the inarticulable background knowledge? Can we articulate all the things that we know and are able to do in literary interpretation? Are we fully aware of all the assumptions behind our literary arguments? Instead of generally reflecting the status of hermeneutics at a macro-level, this essay argues that one way for hermeneutics to remain meaningful today is not to be tried as a theoretical whole, but as a source of sporadic inspiring arguments. To show that, at a micro-level, we can evaluate the strength of these arguments case by case without generalizing, we analyze from a cognitive perspective Gadamer’s argument that practical wisdom is crucial for literary interpretation. Using cognitive science to provide insights for literary study does not make the latter subservient to the former. Rather, cognitive poetics is a two-way street where each field complements the other by providing hypotheses and functioning as a testing ground. By demonstrating that we know more than we can tell in literary interpretation and that the three features Aristotle and Gadamer attribute to practical wisdom (contingent, inarticulable, and only learnable through experience) are at least tentatively empirically justified, this essay argues that hermeneutics has offered a noteworthy example for the two-way street of cognitive poetics.