Hermeneutics

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Introduction

Hermeneutics is the other side of epistemics:

• aiming to articulate and convey knowledge, epistemics focuses on the known;
• hermeneutics, instead, focuses on the receiver of knowledge.

As such, hermeneutics does not properly belong within grammar. We should, however, deal with it briefly here, for two main reasons:

1. the ultimate reason for developing an epistemic system is not only to make the data “known,” but also to make sure that there is a viable interaction with the receiver of knowledge;
2. conversely, this interactional appropriation process must be rooted in epistemics, consciously and deeply.

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Presuppositions

This section will address briefly this issue. Anyone has an immediate relationship to the archaeological data in what we may call their raw state. We see an inscribed clay tablet and we know it contains a message, even if do not know what the message is.

There is then a mediated relationship, mediated, that is, through a process that requires an expertise that goes beyond the immediacy of this site or this object.

Particularly relevant in this regard is the notion of referentiality, and the way in which referentiality is in turn inscribed in semiotics. We aim to identify with the native carriers of a given cultural tradition.. For this reason semiotics is especially relevant: it attributes meaning by identifying the referential dimension inherent in an object, and this process, rooted in grammar, is the proper springboard to hermeneutics.

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Approaches

Seeking to identify how the material record may have a deeper meaning that points to values is the proper task of hermeneutics, a task which we may consider under four aspects.

1. Heritage. –When we say that we inherit the past we mean something more than knowing about things (through epistemics). We claim that we can make them ours. That is what heritage means: to absorb as ours a reality that might otherwise remain just theirs, the ancients’.
2. Appropriation. – But heritage does not come automatically. It has to be earned. That happens through a process of osmosis, whereby we identify with values that motivated human experience, so as to “appropriate” that past experience.
3. Grammar. – we can only appropriate what comes to be known. Epistemics provides the key, and for this reason the grammar is the first step in any hermeneutic process.
4. Maieutics. – Once the archaeological data have been “grammaticalized,” there is room for other methods to address the specific needa of the audience and facilitate the interactional approach.