Hermeneutics as Critique: Science, Politics, Race, and Culture (New Directions in Critical Theory, 72)

Hermeneutics has frequently been dismissed as useful only for literary and textual analysis. Some consider it to be Eurocentric or inherently relativistic and thus unsuited to social critique. Lorenzo C. Simpson offers a persuasive and powerful argument that hermeneutics is a valuable tool not only for critical theory but also for robustly addressing many of the urgent issues of today. Simpson demonstrates that hermeneutics exhibits significant interpretive advantages compared to competing explanatory modalities. While it shares with pragmatism a suspicion of essentialism, an understanding that disagreements are situated, and an insistence on the dialogical nature of understanding, it nevertheless resolutely rejects the relativistic accounts of rationality that are often associated with pragmatism. In the tradition of Gadamer, Simpson firmly establishes hermeneutics as a resource for both philosophy and the social sciences. He shows its utility for unpacking intractable issues in the philosophy of science, multiculturalism, social epistemology, and racial and social justice in the global arena. Simpson addresses fraught questions such as why recent claims that “race” has a biological basis lack grounding, whether female genital excision can be critically addressed without invidious ethnocentrism, and how to lay the foundations for meaningful cross-cultural dialogue and reparative justice. This book reveals how hermeneutics can be a worthy partner with critical theory in achieving emancipatory aims. "This book aims to develop the tradition of philosophical hermeneutics, the theoretical account of interpretive (as opposed to explanatory) understanding--the account of meanings and contexts rather than causes and predictions--usually restricted to the domain of literary and textual analysis, in new directions by exploiting its potential as an instrument of critique. It refutes commonly held claims that hermeneutic analyses are necessarily relativistic, Eurocentric, or critically impotent and demonstrates how hermeneutic procedures can inform analyses of urgent current and cross-cultural issues such as the biology of race, female genital excision, and the so-called "culture of poverty" thesis. Lorenzo Simpson demonstrates that a robust methodology of philosophical hermeneutics is well positioned to intervene in critical political and social issues in global ethics and justice in concert with critical theory's emancipatory aims"-- Provided by publisher Table of Contents 8 Preface and Acknowledgments 10 Introduction 18 1. Twin Earth and Its Horizons: On Hermeneutics, Reference, and Scientific Theory Choice 41 2. Critical Fusions: Toward a Genuine “Hermeneutics of Suspicion” 71 3. Agency, the “Politics of Memory,” and Reparative Justice: Hermeneutics and the Politics of Development 98 4. Toward a Hermeneutics of Race: Biology, Race, Ethnicity, and Culture 120 5. Concluding Reflections: Toward a New Reconciliation of Hermeneutics and Critical Theory, or Notes Toward a Hermeneutic Democracy 159 Appendix: Toward a Hermeneutics of the Ethical Response 172 Notes 182 Bibliography 224 Index 236 Lorenzo C. Simpson offers a persuasive and powerful argument that hermeneutics is a valuable tool not only for critical theory but also for addressing many of the urgent issues of today. He shows its utility for unpacking intractable debates in the philosophy of science, multiculturalism, social epistemology, and racial and social justice.