Example Analysis - Gadamer's Wahrheit und Methode

Start HERE with a short page on the notion of "Bandwidth."

Continue HERE if you have never rally thought about interactive concordances - who has?

Click HERE if you would like to see some of the raw materials an interactive concordance could deliver.

Click HERE for the motion of a text map as a prelude to statistical analysis.

To move down to cases let me offer an example analysis of the first sentence of Gadamer's Wahrheit und Methode. We will explore the notion that the first few sentences, or at least the first few paragraphs of a text reach deeply into the fabric of that text, and, of course also dip deeply into the stream of the texts of the past. We will be able to show clearly the extent of the reach of the first sentence into the rest of the treatise.

Die logische Selbstbesinnung der Geisteswissenschaften, die im 19. Jahrhundert ihre tatsächliche Ausbildung begleitet, ist ganz von dem Vorbild der Naturwissenschaften beherrscht. Wahrheit und Methode, p. 9

Gadamer speaks of the "logische Selbstbesinnung der Geisteswissenschaften" in the opening of his treatise. A decoding organism, on a first scan or on a subsequent decoding session might ask one of two questions:

  1. What is a "logische Selbstbesinnung" anyway?
  2. What does Gadamer mean by "logische Selbstbesinnung" anyway?
To answer question 1, one might embark upon a treatment of Geisteswissenschaft and Geistesgeschichte and that well-known set of problems before moving on to the equally peculiarly German concept of Selbstbesinnung with the modifier logische and its tradition of use since Kant and Hegel. This question must be asked early in the scan, if only to integrate the opening of Wahrheit und Methode with other opening sentences, The Prolegomena, The Phenomenology etc. Failing to ask question 1. is equivalent to not completing a modem hand-shake protocol. Unless the question is asked and answered to the satisfaction of the "originator of the data," no data will be sent - or nonsense data will arrive. This of course is a problem all readers who have not been trained in the post-Kantian discussion will have.

Upon completion of this integrative interpretation we can move on to question 2. Given that I now appreciate Selbstbesinnung in terms of logic and something called Geisteswissenschaften, I return to the text and follow Gadamer's exposition. I learn further that the three concepts are operating under the hegemony of something called the Vorbild der Naturwissenschaften.

So clearly, five themes have been introduced as well as the instrumental relationship of Ausbildung and Beherrschung.

  • logische Selbstbesinnung
  • Geisteswissenschaften
  • Vorbild
  • Naturwissenschaften
  • ausbilden
  • beherrschen

Faced by these concepts and their relation several options are available to the decoding organism: 1. dive into the flow of Gadamer's language and trust that an architectonic structure will emerge. 2. stop and start taking some notes, get out the notecards if necessary.

A student approaching Gadamer for the first time or a scholar adding Gadamer to his or her repetoire may well approach the decoding task quite differently. It is quite possible that for certain decoding sessions a dictionary of the German language may also be required.

In both cases an interactive Gadamer concordance could be immediately helpful. In the case of the student, since the transfer rate will be infinitely slow, the buffer size will have to be infinitely large. All of the post-Kantian discussion will have to be sketched out before reliable decoding can begin. So really, we are searching for the prerequisite of data transfer.

The mature professor will have an extensive buffer system in place, labeling and categorizing often happens at a subconscious level - accuracy is only one factor of many. The professor will probably skip the opening about Geisteswissenschaften - label it as "oh that" and continue to follow Gadamer's exposition. One thing a savy contemporary critic might want to know, especially a contemporary American - just what does Gadamer have to say about science. If that fails, the rest may be uniteresting - label it a "dead branch" and forget.

In each case the scanning organism will quickly exhaust the codex' "random access function." The abbreviated index in the back of the book and a scan of the "Table of Contents" are the only tools available. A Gadamer concordance, however, would have a lot to say about the actual usage of terms, the page number references and even frequency graphs and "chi square" tables leading to statistical analysis.

Both scanning organisms, the student and the professor, can get help at this initial stage of transmission. i.e. lacking a good answer to question 1. the student organism immediately skips to question 2. and searches the text as yet unread to see if Selbstbesinnung and specifically logische Selbestbesinnung occurs in other sentences that might be less ambiguous.

Let us follow some of the threads with graphical output: The graph below shows the themes sounded in the first sentence:

Let us shell out some of these lines so we can get specific juxtapositions.

For example, the graph below focuses on Selbstbesinnung and Geisteswissenschaften:

The graph below focuses on Geisteswissenschaften and Naturwissenschaften:

Thematically, the nwiss - gwiss juxtaposition will probably yield many (as yet undiscovered) patterns of statistical anomaly which will in turn yield pointers to (as yet undiscovered) thematic emphasis. For an immediate payoff we can take the surprisingly regular profile (beginning-middle-end) of the item Selbstbesinning. By checking all lexical items in 1.I-1 and in 3-1 we should be able to find any similar profiles. It is, of course obvious that other "first sentences" of other units will also be profiled.

Of course, these frequencies are "raw" - which means they are exactly the number of time the word Geisteswissenschaft occurs in a particular chapter - for example: zero times in II-1 and 65 times in I-1 of the Erster Teil. We have no way of knowing if zero or "65" is an unexpectedly high or low or just average for the text as a whole. In order to determine that we need to know what percentage of the text I-1 and II-2 represent: 8% and 6% respectively. Since we know that the chapters are roughly of similar size we would expect roughly equal distribution of lexical items - that is unless there is a thematic emphasis. So the question is: have we discovered a particular shift in the argument, abandoning completely a theme sounded in 1.II-1 which dies down only to resurface in the 2. Teil. And by the way - whats up with all of the Selbstbesinnung at the beginning of 2. Teil and at the end of 3. Teil? The graph is almost too neat.

Let us review: we must know the relative size of the individual sections of a text. The formula for calculating that is:

total of a particular chapter divided by total of the whole work

This fraction really represents the percentage of words in a particular chapter.

The calculation of "expected frequencies" is really of greatest interest. Take the total of a particulat lexical item and multiply by the "fraction" calculated above.

total_word times total_chapter divided by total_all_words

This is how expected frequencies are calculated - if you would like to quarrel with the formula above - I am afraid that this transmission has become too unstable to continue.

Those who have survived this leap into statistical abstraction are now ready to reap their rewards.

However, should we even be allowed to ask: Why does "Wahrheit" occur 28 times in a particular chapter? What sort of tool is it that makes it possible to ask such a question and what are its implication for the study of philosophy?

In connection with the study of philosophy, in contrast to producing a monograph, using a computer for more than simple manuscript preparation and its addenda is controversial. The fact is that in philosophy, the introduction of a "tool," is tantamount to the introduction of a "method of analysis." It is difficult to introduce new tools without engaging in polemic against existing tools and participating in a Darwinian process in which the rules are evolving and unpredictable. The discussion below is designed to seek an exemption for "electronic tools" from the usual scrutiny and skepticism that is lavished on new methodologies. For this purpose perhaps an additional distinction between "tool" and "method" would be helpful. We see the text processing computer as an ubiquitous presence - yes it will affect methodology - but no, one cannot filter out the perspective gained by electronic representation of text. If one were to posit a pure form of text or a pure form of interacting with text that would be corrupted by the introduction of an electronic representation, we would find ourselves in a difficult logical situation. We would have to hypostatize text in some form, for example, Hegel's Phenomenology of Spiritread in a leather-bound edition hand-crafted circa 1895; or, the Harper Torchbook edition of the same work as I read it and marked up in a seminar in 1967.

That would be tantamount to arguing one should ban the use of textual representations of medieval literature in analysis since much of it was exclusively oral and thus would be distorted by the written form. Indeed, I would not be surprised if this may not be a dangerous suggestion since there are enough anthropologists disguised as literary critics who may see that as a welcomed unburdening of literary studies from the tedious traditions of philology.

Let us consider a more controversial use of the same tool which crosses the line of advanced word processing routines towards the realm of "method."

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