"Method" in Gadamer, Wittgensetin and Cesar Milan

To expand upon this matter of “method” and perhaps think aloud about it, I once got into an argument with a graduate student about whether Hans Georg Gadamer had a “method.” I asserted that he did. The graduate student asserted that he didn’t because of his book Truth and Method. In it, she pointed out, Gadamer rails against “method,” therefore he could not have one.

She abandoned me before we pursued the matter as far as I would have liked, but what Gadamer was doing was opposing a certain sort of “method,” any set of principles that were intended to be all-encompassing or utterly prescriptive. Gadamer didn’t believe any set of philosophical principles were, ultimately, valid. He was very like Wittgenstein in that. And, I might add, like Cesar Milan as well. But that didn’t mean that Gadamer, Wittgenstein and Cesar Milan didn’t have a philosophy or method. We can examine what they said and did and discover what they believed in, what they taught, and how they proposed to proceed in regard to any matter they took up.

In Gadamer’s case, he believed that the approach to truth and understanding had been oversimplified by past philosophies. No one can write something and have it mean precisely what they think it means, because any “text” involves both the writer and the reader. When we come to a text as a reader, we come with preconceived ideas and prejudices; so our “understanding” of what the writer has written might be completely at odds with what the writer intended. That is just an example. He didn’t have a method to determine meanings, but he did have a “method” (I assert) to show that understanding is far more complicated that had hitherto been believed.

As to Wittgenstein, he simply denied that “philosophy” was a coherent body of writings and insisted that philosophy meant “doing philosophy,” that is, thinking and analyzing and drawing or not drawing conclusions depending upon what one found.

And I see Cesar Milan doing something like that. I think Gadamer and Wittgenstein would have approved of Cesar Milan. He explores the problem as he finds it and then proposes a solution. The solution may, in some cases, not work, so he proposes something else. Some dogs, he decides, must be taken back to his pack – in order to learn to be dogs in what Cesar believes approximates their natural environment.

Cesar is pragmatic rather than programmatic. He doesn’t have a program like Bill and Dick Koehler had. He works toward solving problems. But he does have certain things, part of his “method,” that he seems to almost always do. He takes a dog out on a walk to establish his relationship with the dog. And if a dog won’t submit to Cesar’s solution (red zone dogs), he takes the dog to his pack and lets the pack solve the dog’s problems. He emphasizes being a “pack leader” to everyone.

Consider Cesar’s book, “How to Raise the Perfect Dog: Through Puppyhood and Beyond.” http://www.amazon.com/How-Raise-Perfect-Dog-Puppyhood/dp/0307461297/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1256920471&sr=1-1 Surely any book that proposes to do that provides a “method” for its accomplishment.