Abstract

Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 3(1):11-19, 1993 Loyal Opposition and the Clarity of Dissent Commentary on Donald P. Spence's "The Hermeneutic Turn". Jerome Bruner, Ph.D. HAVE NO COMPLAINTS about Don Spence's hermeneuticism. My sole complaint, rather, is that he gets homesick for the old positivism he Ihas left behind even before it disappears over the horizon. But I have great sympathy for that kind of agoraphobia, for I know all too well how lonely it can get once one leaves the ancestral mansion of positivist science with its familiar furnishings—its scientific explanations, its objec- tivity, its error-proof methods, and the ornate, if lapsed, ritual letter of credit that goes with it all. To put it bluntly, I do not like the stance of "loyal opposition" that he proposes: indeed, I find it a self-defeating stance in general, particularly so in a debate that seems to me to be more a prelude to revolution than an attempt to write a compromise budget. For these are revolutionary times in the human sciences, part of a revolution, I think, that extends well beyond the decorous limits of learned debate. And besides, to make the matter more local, compro- mises seem rarely to work well in