Handy Hermeneutical Hints

A central part of philosophy is the reading of books, and the attempt to understand these books. This can be tricky business. Often philosophical books are old, vague, odd, complicated, hung-up on by-gone issues, or not directly speaking to the question you are concerned with. In the work of contemporary philosopher Robert Brandom I have recently come across a handy two-fold method for understanding philosophical books and concepts: Brandom calls this the de dicto/ de re method. This method is basically two different sets of questions you can ask a text in an effort to understand it. I think this method could be helpful because it distinguishes two different questions which often get entangled with one another, but need not.

1. De Dicto (Latin: Of the word). We understand what a concept in a particular text means by seeing how it is used by an author, what moves it licenses and what it prescribes, and how it would be understood and deployed in the community at the time. When investigating this dimension of texts/concepts, ask questions like, ‘What did the author think he was illuminating by talking this way?’, ‘What does the author thinks follows from this?’, ‘How was this used in the practices of communities of the time?’ This is essentially a task of trying to understand the book as a whole and within its immediate landscape.
2. De Re (Latin: Of the thing). We try to understand how an original concept could be used in a later context, such as ours, being concerned with what really does follow from the author’s premises (according to our lights), not what the author took to follow from them. This method focuses on what the concept is about, and what the author must be committed to now, given what we now know or what logical resources we now have. When investigating this dimension of texts/concepts, ask questions like, ‘What do we now know about this concept?’ ‘Is this additional body of knowledge something which detracts from or supports the author’s original intentions?’ This is essentially trying to understand how any ideas could be extracted from the way the author thought she was using them and the way the community whom she wrote for deployed them.

Christians, being people of the book, have the dual concern of textual fidelity and textual relevance – of wanting to understand the Bible thoroughly and accurately, and of wanting to allow it to speak to contemporary people and issues. Could this two-fold method from Brandom be handy in reading and applying Scripture?