Hermeneutics: From Textual Explication to Computer Understanding?
John C. Mallery, Roger A. Hurwitz, Gavan Duffy · 1986
Discussions of the theoretical foundations of artificial intelligence increasingly refer to hermeneutics, a branch of continental European philosophy concerned with human understanding and the interpretation of written texts. Dreyfus and Winograd draw heavily on hermeneutics to question the feasibility of AI and cognitive science. But, hermeneutics also offers insights that may contribute to the understanding of meaning, translation, architectures for natural language understanding, and even to the methods suitable for scientific inquiry in AI. After briefly reviewing the historical development of hermeneutics as a method of interpretation, from its classical use through the modern debates, this article examines the contributions of hermeneutics to the human sciences. This background provides perspective for a review of recent hermeneutically-oriented AI research. This includes the Alker, Lehnert and Schneider computer-assisted techniques for coding the affective structures of narrativ...