Paul Ricoeur

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Sense

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the “internal predicative structure” of a sign, symbol, or text

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Reference

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its claim to reach an extra-linguistic reality, hence its claim to say something true

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Indirect reference

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the capacity of a text to remake reality

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Sign

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the linguistic element that mediates an understanding of experience

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Symbol

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the kind of sign that involves ambivalent significations, one of which is manifest and the other of which may be concealed

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Hermeneutics of intention

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the kind of hermeneutics that approaches texts from the point of view of their original authors. It asks, what message did the authors intend to communicate here?

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Hermeneutics of suspicion

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meaning the process of exposing the often repressed and hidden layers of significance underlying the surface of a text

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direct reference

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the straightforward kind of reference that points to unambiguous states-of-affairs in the publicly verifiable world of experience

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indirect reference

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involves the imaginative, transformative, and creative dimension of human experience. In this connection, Ricoeur mentions “the truth claim related to the transfiguring action of fiction” that “needs to be taken into account”. Thus, for example, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s influential novel, Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), simultaneously represented the horror of slavery while also evoking the — as yet unrealized — possibility of treating all races as human beings. The idea of an emancipated African-American people was thus an “indirect reference” to a world that did not yet exist, but which had the possibility of becoming actual at some future point in time.

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Verstehen

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empathetic understanding

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Nomological explanations

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“covering laws” drawn from such fields as economics, linguistic, sociology, etc. They serve the purpose of subsuming the events of history to lawfully generalized patterns. (E.g., one model might hypothesize that “After a period of prolonged economic depression, an industrialized society will either experience revolutionary changes in government or it will make war on some other country or countries.”)

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Narrative plots

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sed on empathetic understanding (Verstehen). Ricoeur’s point is that historical studies need a base-line understanding of events that enable one to identify with the historical figures and to participate vicariously in the events of their time. In other words, one needs to feel the inner meaning of the unfolding events, almost as if one were participating in them directly.

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Ricoeur

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Paul Ricoeur
1913 - 2005
French

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Indirect Reference

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The capacity of a text to remake reality