Stephanie Theodorou

How do metaphors and symbols embedded in sacred texts and narratives refigure meaning in the worlds of texts and readers? This is one of the problems that drives Paul Ricoeur's hermeneutic theory, where symbolic language moves beyond the constraints of denotation to enable us to interpret human experience in a plurivocal, rather than univocal ways. In my essay I examine Ricoeur's adherence to a disclosive theory of language, borrowed from Heidegger, and argue that it does not provide an adequate theory of linguistic reference. Ricoeur does not give a structural explanation for how it is that the new meaning provided by metaphors actually impacts upon the cognitive dimensions of the interpretive process. I argue that Hegel's analysis of language is stronger in that it includes a discussion of the perceptual and cognitive stages of understanding, which include moments of hermeneutic "reversal"; here we see how it is that language simultaneously refers to and mediates experience. This might become the basis for developing a stronger explanatory model of the refiguring process which Ricoeur describes.

This dissertation will examine the relationship between epistemological questions and the testimonial or proclamatory nature of religious belief based in Paul Ricoeur's linking of metaphor to "the hermeneutics of imagination." My argument is built around the issue of sense and reference in religious language; we can say along hermeneutic lines that religious symbols and narratives have an internal structure which "reconfigures" the real, but we must also ask "what exactly is disclosed in this process?" In forming a potential answer to this question, I analyze the historical and thematic issues which have shaped our understanding of metaphor. This involves an examination of philosophical and epistemological arguments surrounding the relation of ontology to language, schema, and cognition in Aristotle, Kant, Heidegger, and Hegel as they correlate to Paul Ricoeur's thesis. I focus on how the representational and referential function of religious concepts can be developed in a way which avoids strict coherentism. In my view, we can say that there is a qualified need to allow for a form of linguistic reference which takes into account some epistemological considerations. ;Drawing from Hilary Putnam and Susan Haack, I describe this moderate view of reference as based on "internal realism." We are not entirely bound by natural description or ontological forms of disclosure, but we can locate ourselves somewhere between these kinds of experience. I develop this linking of two modes in terms of cognitive-psychological processes which occur through the acquisition of analogical and metaphoric schemes. ;This study concludes with a critique of Ricoeur's use of metaphor as the basis for religious reconfiguration. His analysis of the metaphoric function, in this context, eradicates the epistemic functions of language and leads to a position which is purely linguistic and contextual. I believe an analysis of lower-level analogies allows us to make a criticism of his view. We may then open a way to look at a different version of the representational aspects of religious discourse

How do metaphors and symbols embedded in sacred texts and narratives refigure meaning in the worlds of texts and readers? This is one of the problems that drives Paul Ricoeur's hermeneutic theory, where symbolic language moves beyond the constraints of denotation to enable us to interpret human experience in a plurivocal, rather than univocal ways. In my essay I examine Ricoeur's adherence to a disclosive theory of language, borrowed from Heidegger, and argue that it does not provide an adequate theory of linguistic reference. Ricoeur does not give a structural explanation for how it is that the new meaning provided by metaphors actually impacts upon the cognitive dimensions of the interpretive process. I argue that Hegel's analysis of language is stronger in that it includes a discussion of the perceptual and cognitive stages of understanding, which include moments of hermeneutic "reversal"; here we see how it is that language simultaneously refers to and mediates experience. This might become the basis for developing a stronger explanatory model of the refiguring process which Ricoeur describes