Hermeneutics

Hermeneutics may be described as the theory of interpretation and understanding of the text through empirical means. It should not be confused with the concrete practice of interpretation called exegesis. Exegesis extracts the meaning of a passage of text and enlarges upon it and explicates it with explanatory glosses; hermeneutics addresses the ways in which a reader may come to the broadest understanding of the creator of text and his relation to his audiences, both local and over time, within the constraints of culture and history. Thus it is a branch of philosophy concerned with human understanding and the interpretation of texts. Recently the concept of texts has been extended beyond written documents to include, for example, speech, performances, works of art, and even events.

Misuse

While the word hermeneutics is meaningful, it is sometimes used in a pretentious way, to give an impression of profundity. A well-known example is the Sokal Affair: physicist Alan Sokal wrote a paper which was sentence-by-sentence complete gibberish, to see if a postmodern cultural studies journal would "publish an article liberally salted with nonsense if (a) it sounded good and (b) it flattered the editors' ideological preconceptions". The paper, entitled "Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity"

Related Topics:
Sokal Affair - Alan Sokal - Postmodern - Cultural studies

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http://www.physics.nyu.edu/~as2/transgress_v2/transgress_v2_singlefile.html , was accepted and published in the journal Social Text.

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