Hermeneutic Ontology

Hermeneutic Ontology is the branch of Normative Ontology concerned with the being of interpretations — that is, with the question of what an interpretation is once it has been separated from the floor that occasioned it. It is distinguished from Hermeneutic Cartography by direction of inquiry: the cartographer asks what meanings a visitor takes from a floor, while the hermeneutic ontologist asks what has come into existence when those meanings are taken. The field has been recognised as a discrete study since the Meta-Concordance on Hermeneutic Plurality assigned it to Annex 7.2.C, subsection (iii), and it is administered on the Tower's behalf by the Office of Hermeneutic Arbitration.

Definition and scope

Hermeneutic Ontology holds that an interpretation is not an act performed on a subject, nor a subject acted upon, but a third thing sustained by the procedure of its own recording. The canonical formulation appears in the Memorandum on Procedural Ontology, where Algernon writes that "an interpretation is admitted to the Tower not when it is believed, but when it is filed." The Memorandum is chiefly a work on procedural material, but the sentence is cited more often in the hermeneutic literature than in its own.

The scope of the field is bounded, in practice, by the question of admissibility. An interpretation of Floor 408's winter readings, for instance, is a hermeneutic object; the readings themselves are not. The distinction matters because the two are catalogued before the floor is catalogued, and where the floor is later found not to have a name, the reading remains in force and the floor is entered in the register as unnamed (Floor 408, names withdrawn, vide Section 4: Provisional Ontology).

The Provisional Reading and the doctrine of retained interpretation

The first standing recension of Hermeneutic Ontology was compiled by the Sub-Librarian Merauld Venn, who spent eleven years at a desk on the Hermeneutic Stack and left, at his death, a single consequence attached to his induction: that the reading of a floor is never withdrawn, only superseded, and that superseded readings remain present as the floor's memory. "A reading, once entered, does not leave the Tower, and may not be made to leave" — Venn, Provisional Readings, Second Recension, folio 88.

The consequence was applied in 3.114 (Tower reckoning) and has not since been challenged. Two readings of the same floor at once are not a contradiction in the doctrine; they are two entries, and the workspace lies between them. The School of Jurisprudential Ontology has argued, with some success, that the retained readings are the proper source of the field's ordering, and the First Vault of Procedural Ontology holds an estimated twelve thousand of them.

Relation to the schools

The School of Static Ontology has long accepted the field as a subsidiary chapter of its own programme. The position is contested: the School of Jurisprudential Ontology maintains that a reading taken from a floor is subject to procedural time and figure of a court, and that a reading's retention and subsequent revision occupy the same domain as the Commentaries on Procedural Ontology. The Subcommittee on Procedural Ontology held in a closed sitting (record not published) that both schools had mistaken the object of the field.

The counter-suggestion, advanced by the Bureau of Provisional Ontology in 3.286, was that Hermeneutic Ontology should be discharged under the heading Ephemeral Ontology — an arrangement that would require the readings to be retired on the closing of their workspace. The proposal failed, though the Bureau has never withdrawn it, and its publication has been the field's most productive small scandal. The objection was recorded in the Bureau's own schedules as follows: "Each of the interpretive holdings remains a second-class holding on the unnumbered shelf where an airing is allowed; it is not entered in the Registry of Floors."

Contradiction with the Annex

Annex 7.2.C(3) provides that the reading "shall not outlast the thing read." Against this, the working canon of the field (the retained reading of the Provisional Readings) holds that the reading survives the floor. The Concordance of Retained Sentiments and the Concordance of Procedures have each been cited, and the field has not settled. Substantially, the two positions are equal weight of record: a reader may expect either, and no adjudication is pending.

Contradiction with the Meta-Concordance's operational clause

The Meta-Concordance on Hermeneutic Plurality, at Annex 7.2.C(3), limits its own application to cases where "reading and record are both in order." It has been read as excluding the readings of floors whose names are withdrawn, yet it was itself applied to Floor 402 A by the field's clerk, and the reading of Floor 402 A is retained. The exact point on which the text was applied is, by custom, left to Office of Hermeneutic Arbitration.

The Office of Hermeneutic Arbitration and the Doctrine of the Closed Dividers

The Office of Hermeneutic Arbitration has run the field's administration since the 3.101 decision, and the governing case is the one which arose from the private map compiled by a visitor of Floor 28 using closed dividers (the map's proportions, not the floor's, being the thing laid out). The Office's finding was that a map so produced is a map of the cartographer, not of the floor, and is accordingly itself an object in the field of hermeneutic ontology. The Department of Records has since called for the general surrender of the field's working papers to the Office at the end of each year, in the bi-annual Form 44(d). The current public summary of the doctrine is kept in the Hermeneutic Ontology (reading), filed under the same Annex.

Not all output of the field is admitted. In the case of the Winter of 3.99, a tenant's readings of Floors 108 and 136 were found to be identical (character for character) in the section on the family staircase, and the Office was asked to remove one. The reading of Floor 108 was retained; the reading of Floor 136 was treated as a compounded copy without its reader. The tenant was asked not to do it again. The reading is still in the archive.

See also

• Normative Ontology
• Hermeneutic Cartography
• Office of Hermeneutic Arbitration
• Treatise on Bureaucratic Ontology

For those who take the matter further, the field's own index of terms is maintained by Venn and has not been recopied since 3.74. The reading of the unnumbered shelf has been requested; it is not on the shelf.