Summary
A unifying picture to the hermeneutical approach to schizophrenia is given by combining the philosophical and the experimental/computational approaches. Computational models of associative learning and recall in the corticohippocampal system helps to understand the circuits of normal and pathological behavior.
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The Schizophrenic Brain: A Broken Hermeneutic Circle
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1. IntroductionHermeneutics is a branch of continental philosophy which treats the understanding and interpretation of texts. Philosophical hermeneutics emphasizes existential understanding instead of interpretation. Critical hermeneutics offers a methodologically self-reflective reconstruction of the social foundations of discourse and inter-subjective understanding. Finally, phenomenological hermeneutics is an attempt to synthesize the various hermeneutic currents. For an introduction for nonphilosophers please refer to [1]. One of the most important concepts in hermeneutics is the hermeneutic circle. This notion means that the definition or understanding of something employs attributes which already presuppose a definition or understanding of that thing. The method is in strong opposition to the classical methods of science, which do not allow such circular explanations.Motivated by Ichiro Tsuda [2, 3] who applied the principles of hermeneutics to the brain by using chaos as a mechanism of interpretation, one of us (PE) played with the idea [4] of how, if at all, two extreme approaches, the "device approach" and the "philosophical approach" , could be reconciled. It was cautiously suggested by turning to the philosophical tradition that hermeneutics, ...See the full content of this document
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