Description:
AbstractArguments about the concept of adequacy (›Angemessenheit‹) of interpretation are as constitutive for many hermeneutic theories of meaning as they are for the interpretive praxis derived from these theories. This essay seeks to illustrate by way of exemplary approaches by Georg Friedrich Meier (1718–1777), Johann Martin Chladenius (1710–1759) and Friedrich Daniel Ernst Schleiermacher (1768–1834) that very different notions are prevalent within hermeneutics as to what counts as an adequate interpretation. For instance, the ascription ofThe goal of the following elaborations is not, however, a (linguistic) historical derivation of diverse forms of ›Angemessenheit‹. By means of a complex example for the interpretive deployment of (il-)legitimate anachronisms, the semantic conceptions of the three hermeneuticists mentioned above will be exemplified and analyzed with respect to the question of which bids for a specificallyUsing the scheme »a is suitable for b with respect to c«, we can with some clarity reconstruct the problem areas (among others, author, spatiotemporal contexts, reader, hypothetical reader models) associated with adequacy on the interpretive and theoretical levels. However, it will also be shown that a field of reference for arguments about adequacy which limits the scope of statements (»with reference to c«) is seldom explicated. It has to be deduced from precisely those premises which are axiomatic for a specific theory and its conception of meaning. If we compare the explicit arguments, the argumentative fields of reference, and the axiomatic premises of each hermeneutic with one another, we can very clearly prove that 1) there is noAgainst this background, a position can be taken with regard to the two arguments discussed repeatedly over the course of the essay: i) Arguments for adequacy are to be understood as hermeneutic topics and can in this way count as unproblematic aspects of theories of meaning. ii) Arguments for adequacy provide – contrary to i) – references to a previously insufficiently reflected type of argument in literary studies that hardly provides a solution to historically determined difficulties of understanding.The argumentative reference to specifically historical adequacy certainly invokes the central problems of a conception of meaning, but it does not explicate the strategies for solving them. The vagueness that results from such an attempt at reconstructive explication not only indicates the insufficient reflection of this type of argumentation (thesis ii). It also raises the question of whether adequacy – just like plausibility (cf. Winko 2015) – as a