Social Action and its Sense: Historical Hermeneutics after Ricoeur

Abstract

In the 1970s, particularly in his article “The Model of the Text: Meaningful Action Considered as a Text” (1971), Paul Ricœur proposed a hypothesis concerning the homology between the text and social action. That hypothesis is not reducible to the narrative logic prevailing in late Ricœur’s writings, and we are searching to elucidate its further implications in social sciences. A new hermeneutics of social meanings can be founded upon it, enriched by the methodological experience of structural semiotics and taking into account some special processes of sense-giving as “remote-model behavior” and “sense-suppressing action”.