The 5 Types of Hermeneutics

As humans, we go through everyday life constantly interpreting anything that we may come into contact with. The science behind interpretation is what we call hermeneutics. Since we are interpreting constantly, we have broken down hermeneutics into five different types. The first type is natural hermeneutics. Natural is the everyday interpreting that all humans do sometimes without even realizing that they are doing it. For instance, if one person saw somebody wearing a blue shirt they might associate the color blue with sadness or depression. On the other hand, another person could see the same person and associate that color with the sky or the ocean. Secondly we have normative hermeneutics. Normative hermeneutics dives into text interpretation when it is done by a specialist. An example of this could be the bible, or any of the religious texts. Normative hermeneutics play a huge role in today's world. Thirdly, the next type is scientific hermeneutics. A more common way to describe scientific hermeneutics is what we know as the scientific method. This is the process of asking a question, doing background research to develop a hypothesis, and than testing that hypothesis so that you can communicate it to the world. Next comes philosophical hermeneutics, which is a philosophy of existence that suggests that interpreting something is not something we do, but something that we are. Since we interpret everything that we see in any given day, humans are a prime example of philosophical hermeneutics. This almost suggests that most of the time we have no idea that we are interpreting something, it just comes naturally. The last type of hermeneutics is depth hermeneutics. This type seeks to liberate people from modes of domination and oppression. This type normally lies beneath waking consciousness. An example of this would be psychoanalysis. This is a theory developed by Freud that talks about how different types of events effect every single person differently based on how they were raised. In conclusion, hermeneutics dives into a bunch of different areas that everyone can relate to in their own way.