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ened by the language in the text (Wuellner 1988: 286-87; cf. Robbins 1993a: 446). Wuellner's concern, then, is from the other side, warning that "rhetoric cannot be reduced to a social science, nor to linguistics, speech act theories, or a communication science" (Wuellner 1991: 180). J.D.H. Amador, extending Wuellner's approach, argues that in the dominant modes of rhetorical interpretation in New Testament studies "the understanding of the rhetorical effect of a discourse is directed by a hermeneutic which continues to locate textual 'meaning' in the original act/context/event of composition and performance." Thus, "the hermeneutical center [the authoritative touchstone] for further textual interpretation and application is a "reconstructed meaning-as-historical-meaning" (Amador 1996: 263). Here again is an attack on the historicist orientation of rhetorical criticism. But it differs decisively from Lawson and McCauley as it turns away from "scientific" models of explanation toward the rhetorical power of the text. Lawson and McCauley describe the way forward as "interactionism" rather than "exclusivism" or "inclusivism" (1990: 15-31). For them, exclusivism takes two forms. One emphasizes the centrality of explanation and only uses methods of the natural sciences [behavioral psychologists, sociobiologists, etc.]; the other considers all inquiry to be ultimately interpretive [such post-modernist philosophers as Rorty] (1990: 15). From this perspective, both Wuellner and Amador take a strong exclusivist approach. In their view, rhetorical interpretation should have nothing to do with science--the reductionist move which is foundational for every scientific approach corrupts rhetorical interpretation at the outset of its procedures. Inclusivism is a more moderate approach, since it includes both explanation and interpretation. In the view of Lawson and McCauley, inclusivist approaches could be "a two-way street," but in fact they subordinate explanation to interpretation (1990: 18). Current inclusivist approaches take one of three positions. Scholars asserting the first position claim that explanation in the context of human matters is simply unrealizable on a practical level. Scholars holding the second position argue that "understanding is not only the goal of inquiry in the human sciences but must also be the method of inquiry." Scholars taking the third position assert, in a context where they have no antagonism toward explanatory modes, "that all discussions of human interests and intentions are fundamentally interpretive and that, virtually by definition, human interests and intentions pervade all human activity" (Lawson and McCauley 1990: 18-20). In the face of this subordination of explanation in the context of study of human activity, Lawson and McCauley assert that new explanatory theories now exist that have "one foot in the hermeneutical circle but another outside it as well" (1990: 22). This development provides the possibility for "interactionism," which "ac- |