The Contest of the Longish Now SpecGram Vol CLVI, No 3 Contents Things You Didn’t Know You Didn’t Know—Madalena Cruz-Ferreira

A very short comparison between UH and UG

Johannes Damascenus nach Campenhausen
Seminar für Philosophie, Philologie und Philotechnie

Trends in joining the epitheton ‘universal’ to a hitherto perfectly self-sufficient and widely well-received noun are not an apanage of today’s1 theorists, but have a long history in academic philosophising.

This shall be illustrated by a short comparison between Universal Hermeneutics (Schleiermacher 1826) (henceforth UH) and Universal Grammar (Chomsky from 1955 onwards) (better known as UG).

UH UG
1) The psychological difference between people who are in turn authors of texts is only relative, hence they can be compared (a principle which later came to be known as the Uniformitarian Principle). 1) The genetically encoded psychological difference between people who are in turn speakers of languages is only relative, hence they can be compared.
2) Since there is no absolute difference between the hermeneut and the author of the text one studies, as stated above, it is methodologically fine to compare the author to oneself and draw conclusions as to the interpretation of the text from this comparison. 2) Since there is no absolute difference between one’s own mother tongue and the language one studies, as stated above, it is methodologically fine to draw inferences from one’s own language to the language under analysis, no matter how inexistent common elements may seem at first glance. Reliable conclusions may be drawn from this comparison and submitted to journal editors and conference organisers.
3) The part of the text imputable to individuality and inaccessible to rule-governed theorising must be understood by divination, which is an art.

Art is something aesthetic that is at the same time related to the notion of genius, which was enough to serve as an entrance to one of the hippest salons of the time. 		3) The part of the language that is apparently completely idiosyncratic and completely different from anything else one has seen in the twenty or so grammars one has consulted must be analysed by apt divination.2

Divination, following no rules by definition, is, by definition, beyond the reach of criticism, since it can only properly be performed by geniuses (who are hard to define, again by definition). Whether or not your divinatory guesses resulted in explanatory adequacy is impossible to retrace, as rules were not followed (still by definition). It then hinges on your ability to present yourself as a genius to the gullible who didn’t understand your paper anyway.

References

There are no references given, because 1. Schleiermacher didn’t bother to publish his papers himself, but left the task to his great-great-grand-students, who had to struggle with his handwriting, and 2. if you want to know what Chomsky has written since 1955, it is much more reliable to consult his website. Alternatively, you could join the Academia.edu social network and ‘add Noam as a friend’. Unfortunately, this option is no longer available for Friedrich Daniel Ernst.

1 I understand ‘today’ in a somewhat broad temporal sense, of course, as englobing not the last 24 hours (which would vary according to the moment you read these lines) but, say, a rather loosely defined time-span of a couple of academic generations of scientists.1.1

1.1 I am not willing to commit myself to a definition of ‘academic generations of scientists’, but would rather like to leave this question to the socioanthropoepistemologists.1.1.1

1.1.1 Who should more coherently be called the koinonioanthropoepistemologists.

2 Some have analysed this two-word phrase as a euphemism. It all depends on how universal you are.

The Contest of the Longish Now
Things You Didn’t Know You Didn’t Know—Madalena Cruz-Ferreira
SpecGram Vol CLVI, No 3 Contents