Reparative reasoning

Peter Ochs' notion of ‘pragmatic reading’ and his wider project of articulating a ‘logic of scripture’ are described in the first part of this article. A distinction is made between Ochs' proposals for how to read scripture and his more technical claims about how scripture itself models a ‘logic of repair’. The term ‘thirdness’ is explained in the contexts of the relations and axioms, hypotheses and communities. His readings of Hans Frei and George Lindbeck are rehearsed briefly in the second section. Their attempts to show that there is nothing ‘behind’ scripture or doctrine, to which the latter supposedly refer, are presented by Ochs as ‘pragmatic’ attempts to repair the rules which generate false oppositions in discussions of scripture and doctrine.