Naturalistic Hermeneutics // Reviews // Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews // University of Notre Dame https://ndpr.nd.edu/news/24966-naturalistic-hermeneutics/[12/23/15, 10:25:01 AM] C. MANTZAVINOS Naturalistic Hermeneutics C. Mantzavinos, Naturalistic Hermeneutics , Cambridge University Press, 2005, 198pp, $68.00 (hbk), ISBN 0521848121. What philosophically viable theoretical approaches exist with regard to providing a theory of meaning (for natural languages)? C. Mantzavinos proposes to sort approaches into two broad categories -- naturalistic and non-naturalistic -- and to examine what he takes to be methodological exemplars from each category -- the hypothetico-deductive method and hermeneutics, respectively. He argues that the hypothetico-deductive method offers a viable approach to a theory of meaning and that hermeneutic approaches do not. But how has Mantzavinos's favored methodology fared as a type of theory of meaning? What does philosophical history indicate about the method he favors? I return to these questions below. Although relatively brief, this book has large ambitions. Divided into two parts of three chapters each (a total of just 156 pages of text), the first part surveys, only to repudiate, the accounts of hermeneutics found in Dilthey, Heidegger, and Gadamer. In the second part, Mantzavinos develops an exposition of a naturalistic account of meaning and text interpretation founded on the hypothetic- deductive method. Here he takes himself to be pursuing an account of meaning which Popper and Hempel failed to see through to completion. "The protagonists of the hypothetico-deductive method, Popper and Hempel, originally viewed it as a method that is directed toward deductive causal explanations in the sciences. This seems to me to be the decisive weakness of their analysis… . I regard it as the main thrust of my argument to extend the range of application of the hypothetico- deductive method to what I call the 'reconstructions of meaning.'" (xi-xii) As this brief characterization suggests, Mantzavinos takes the notion of meaning to be explicable as part of the natural world and in roughly the (methodological) fashion in which the natural world comes to be theoretically comprehended. The methodological opposition between hermeneutics and natural science gives rise to two dualisms, both of which Mantzavinos looks to repudiate -- understanding v. explanation and (my terms, not his) idiographic v. nomothetic. Anti-naturalism, that is, enters into the debate because assessing meaning cannot be done causally (i.e., yield explanations), and it cannot be done by causal analysis because of the singularity of the events scrutinized (i.e., these events are historically specific and non-generalizable). In this regard, the second of the two dualisms mentioned proves decisive in giving the debate its 2006.02.14 Search NDPR Reviewed by Paul A. Roth, University of California-Santa Cruz Author Search NDPR