A ‘hermeneutic objection': language and the inner view

Commentary on ‘The View from Within’, edited by Francisco Varela and Jonathan Shear (includes response from Jonathan Shear)

[opening paragraph]: In the worlds of philosophy, linguistics and communications theory, a view has developed which understands conscious experience as experience which is ‘reflected’ back upon itself through language. This indicates that the consciousness we experience is possible only because we have culturally invented language and subsequently evolved to accommodate it. This accords with the conclusions of Daniel Dennett (1991), but the ‘hermeneutic objection’ would go further and deny that the objective sciences themselves have escaped the hermeneutic circle.