Mediating Between the Humanities and the Sciences

Book excerpt: Gadamer is alleged to have conflated knowledge with private languages, which in turn entails adopting anti-thetical attitudes toward inter-subjectively verifiable facts produced by the natural sciences. As a result of this influence, a cultural and institutional divide has developed between the humanities and the sciences at the university. In reply to this assessment of Gadamer's work, I argue that his philosophical hermeneutics includes a dialectical interplay between two modes of cognition and their corresponding dispositions; the auditory and visual that are typically employed in the humanities and sciences. There is on this basis justification in his hermeneutics for scientific explanations of phenomena. These explanations are undertaken with respect to that in which the universality of hermeneutics is said to consist by Gadamer, the inner word. Contrary to the belief that this "word" belongs to either a metaphysical or mental realm, I draw upon phenomenology and argue that it refers to an inner voice between speakers in the middle voice and is thus amenable to cognitive scientific and evolutionary explanations. While those explanations are developed in relation to contemporary fields of research, e.g., S. Mithen, M. Donald, E. Thompson, the relevance of Gadamer's dialectic of standpoints to natural science is argued for on the grounds that scientists either presuppose the said dialectic, or require it in order to resolve conundrums generated by their own systems, e.g., E. Wilson, E. Slingerland, B. Bergen, H. Helmholtz. The method employed in the dissertation to defend Gadamer's relevance to the question of mediating between the two departments of learning is thereby enacted in the interest of clarifying what the inner word is and how it functions to weave harmony between opposing sides of a question. Gadamer's hermeneutics is thus not responsible for a "post-modern" opposition to the natural sciences. In fact, hermeneutics includes a way of thinking about phenomena that relates different ways of understanding to one another insofar as the speakers are attuned to the inner voice in language.