Hermeneutic Inquiry: Paying Heed to History and Hermes An Ancestral, Substantive, and Methodological Tale

Abstract

Hermeneutic or interpretive inquiry is a living tradition of interpretation with a rich legacy of theory, philosophy, and practice. This paper is not intended to be a treatise on the right way to view and practice this tradition, but an exploration of the legacies that inform the philosophy of practice as the author has taken it up. In this explication, the author examines the ancestral, philosophical, and methodological histories that inform a current practice of hermeneutic inquiry.

Ideological Meaning Making After the Loss of a Child: The Case of Israeli Bereaved Parents

“…Operationally, the analysis involved careful and detailed reading and rereading of all texts, moving from parts to the whole, back and forth again and again, to increase the depth of engagement with and the understanding of the participants' narratives (Annells, 1996;Polkinghorne, 1983). In each rereading of the texts, attempts were made to listen for familiarities, differences, newness, and echoes of something that might expand our possibilities of understanding (Moules, 2002).…”

Epistemology, African Scholarship in Human and Social Sciences and demands from African Societies

“…Also, participating in the interpretive efforts, these communities would have the first access to new forms of knowledge created using their empirical knowledge. Indeed, from this standpoint, anthropological hermeneutics is to include not only the collection, the indexing, the classification of pieces of knowledge and the structuring of disparate fragments of knowledge [46] but would also offer the capacity to see things anew and the power to change, to predict, and to solve puzzles [49]. In a sense, anthropological hermeneutics, as delineated here and in its search to see things anew, would be part of the general the grounded theory method [50] but, beyond minimizing preconceived ideas about the research problem and the data, using simultaneous data collection and analysis to inform each other, remaining open to varied explanations and understandings of the data, and focusing data analysis to construct middle-range theories [50], would add the space for studied societies to provide their own narratives of facts being depicted and for the researchers to continuously reflect on how the methods being used are capturing both facts and the narration from those communities.…”

Using Qualitative Research for Complex Interventions

“…Jardine (2006) and Moules (2002), for example, stated that the researcher's experience with the topic is what allows the topic to be understood in a certain manner and thus does not require the researcher to forget or bracket everything they know about the topic to conduct research. Gadamer did not consider these preunderstandings to be negative, but as something that is actually necessary and useful for understanding (Maggs-Rapport, 2001).…”

“…Hermeneutics is the philosophy and practice of interpretation (Moules, 2002;Palmer, 1969)-a "process of 'bringing to understanding'" (Palmer, 1969, p. 13). Research guided by Gadamer's (2004) philosophical hermeneutics is distinctive from other qualitative approaches in several ways.…”