Rational reconstruction as elucidation? Carnap in the early protocol sentence debate

Synthese ◽  
1992 ◽  
Vol 93 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 107-140 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas E. Uebel
Keyword(s):  
Rational Reconstruction ◽  
Protocol Sentence Debate

Justifying Anachronism

2020 ◽  
pp. 108-139
Author(s):  
Patrick Fessenbecker
Keyword(s):  
Historical Analysis ◽  
Rational Reconstruction ◽  
The Past ◽  
Aesthetic Practice ◽  
The Relationship

Perhaps the most influential contemporary versions of formalism are those that justify formal interpretation as a form of historical analysis. A defense of reading for the content, which often involves bringing writers from the past into an anachronistic conversation with contemporary issues, thus requires understanding and responding to the arguments in favor of historicist reading. Richard Rorty’s distinction between “historical” and “rational” reconstructions, where the former renders a view in a thinker’s own words while the latter sympathetically translates it into contemporary terms, clarifies the relationship between the competing impulses to bring texts into conversation with current issues and to understand them in their own terms. Far from betraying the literary text’s artistic nature, moreover, a parsing of the language of appreciation philosophers use in justifying rational reconstruction, suggests that it is at least in part an aesthetic practice.

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