Some comments on Allan Bell’s proposed turn to hermeneutics

Abstract

I offer some comments from the perspective of someone familiar with the work of Paul Ricoeur on Allan Bell’s proposal that discourse studies take a hermeneutic turn drawing on Ricoeur’s idea of an arc of interpretation. I suggest that such a hermeneutic turn would need to be more radical than Bell proposes in that he limits it largely to questions of method, without really addressing how it might affect our understanding of either the object of discourse studies or the goal of such studies. This does raise the question, however, whether discourse studies should be considered a subdiscipline of hermeneutical philosophy.