Discourse and Construction: Kant, Schleiermacher, and the Articulation of Epistemology's Language Problem

Abstract

This dissertation establishes a theoretical framework for a critique of “textualist” interpretation, particularly as textualism occurs in theological and jurisprudential contexts. Textualists tend to use deductive reasoning, applying conditional logic to text in order to infer text’s “literal” signification, and in doing so routinely making language depend on logic for meaning. This dissertation presents a long intellectual tradition supporting the opposite view: that logic depends on language. I use close readings of primary texts from Plato to Kant and beyond, analyzing passages in the original Greek, Latin, German, and English, to uncover instances where authors use inductive reasoning to establish laws of conditional logic on the basis of phenomenological observations of how linguistic signification works. The culmination of this analysis is a rhetorical reading of Kant’s Kritik der reinen Vernunft in light of principles from Friedrich Schleiermacher’s hermeneutic lectures. I show that the unique interplay, in Kant, of two concepts – discourse and construction – is emblematic of the recurring trope in textualist interpretation whereby conditional logic is surreptitiously and solipsistically derived from and also applied to language. I conclude that, if it is true that logic can only be justified inductively on the basis of language, it is untenable to use it deductively to establish a text's "literal" meaning.