hermeneutical
About textual interpretation
Hermeneutical means relating to interpretation, especially of texts.
The term comes from scholarship on biblical and literary interpretation but now applies broadly to any interpretive framework: a hermeneutical approach to law, hermeneutical principles in reading historical documents.
The related noun is hermeneutics—the theory or methodology of interpretation.
Study of subjective experience
- epistemologyTheory of knowledge
- ontologyStudy of existence's nature
- dialecticsReasoning through contradiction
- GadamerHermeneutics philosopher, twentieth-century German
Heidegger · Schleiermacher · horizon · prejudice · historicity · being · existential
What something signifies
- understandingMental comprehension of something
- sense-makingCreating coherent understanding
- contextualizationPlacing something within circumstances
- significanceQuality of mattering
nuance · inference · subtext · connotation · implication · elucidate · explicate · decipher
Expressing disapproval or importance
- structuralismAnalysis through underlying systems
- poststructuralismPhilosophy questioning stable meaning
- deconstructionAnalysis exposing self-contradiction
- semioticsStudy of signs, symbols
reader-response · historicism · formalism · narrative · intertextuality · circle · spiral · suspicion
phenomenology
Study of subjective experience
- epistemologyTheory of knowledge
- ontologyStudy of existence's nature
- dialecticsReasoning through contradiction
Gadamer · Heidegger · Schleiermacher · horizon · prejudice · historicity · being · existential
meaning
What something signifies
- understandingMental comprehension of something
- sense-makingCreating coherent understanding
- contextualizationPlacing something within circumstances
significance · nuance · inference · subtext · connotation · implication · elucidate · explicate · decipher · clarify
critical
Expressing disapproval or importance
- structuralismAnalysis through underlying systems
- poststructuralismPhilosophy questioning stable meaning
- deconstructionAnalysis exposing self-contradiction
semiotics · reader-response · historicism · formalism · narrative · intertextuality · circle · spiral · suspicion · retrieval
scripture
Sacred religious writings
patristic · homiletics · philology · canonical · allegory · typology · literal · figurative · Torah · Quran
hermeneuticalliteral
Meaning exactly what's said
face-value · surface-level · literalist · literalistic · textualist
hermeneuticalpositivist
One trusting only observable facts
empiricist · empirical · scientistic · objectivist · quantitative
hermeneuticalempirical
Based on observation, not theory
positivist · scientific · quantitative · objective · mechanistic
- hermeneutic circleUnderstanding through recursive interpretation