Weberman, David - A new defense of Gademer´s Hermeneutics

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A New Defense of Gadamer's HermeneuticsAuthor(s): David WebermanReviewed work(s):Source: Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Vol. 60, No. 1 (Jan., 2000), pp. 45-65Published by: International Phenomenological SocietyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2653427 .

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Philosophy and Phenomenological Research Vol. LX, No. 1, January 2000

A New Defense of Gadamer' s Hermeneutics

DAVID WEBERMAN

Georgia State University

This paper re-examines the central thesis of Gadamer's hermeneutics that objectivity is not a suitable ideal for understanding a text, historical event, or cultural phenomenon because there exists no one correct interpretation of such phenomena. Because Gadamer fails to make clear the grounds for this claim, this paper considers three possible arguments. The first, predominant in the literature on Gadamer, is built on the premise that we cannot surpass our historically situated prejudgments. The paper rejects this argument as insufficient. Similarly, the paper rejects a second argument concerning the heuristics of understanding. The paper then articulates a third argument that the object of understanding changes according to the conditions in which it is grasped. The paper appeals to the notion of relational properties to make sense of this claim and to defend the position against two objections: i) that it conflates meaning and significance, and ii) that it is saddled with an indefensible relativism.

Gadamer's theory of philosophical hermeneutics amounts to a sustained argument for a view that one might call "anti-objectivism" or "interpretive pluralism."' This view holds that in understanding a text, historical event, cultural phenomenon or perhaps anything at all, objectivity is not a suitable ideal because there does not exist any one correct interpretation of the phenomenon under investigation.2 In Gadamer's words, "understanding is not merely a reproductive but always a productive activity as well" (G 280; E 296); it is a "fusion of horizons" of the past and present, objective and subjective (G 289; E 306). At the same time, Gadamer wants to steer clear of an "anything-goes" relativism. In other words, in Gadamer's view, understanding is a process that invites and even demands a plurality of interpretations, but not at the expense of giving up criteria that distinguish right ones from wrong ones.

1 Hans-Georg Gadamer, Wahrheit und Methode: Grundziige einer philosophischen Hermeneutik, 4th ed. (Tiibingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1975, originally 1960). Translated as Truth and Method, 2nd ed., by Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall (New York: Crossroad, 1990). "G" and "E" refer to the German and English editions respectively. I have modified some of the translated passages.

2 The sense of "objectivity" at issue here is roughly this: An interpretation is objective to the extent that it is not shaped by the historical situatedness of the interpreter.

A NEW DEFENSE OF GADAMER' S HERMENEUTICS 45



Intriguing as this view is, what exactly are Gadamer's grounds for denying the existence of a uniquely correct interpretation of a text, object, or event? And how can pluralism escape relativism? Because I believe that Gadamer's writings are ambiguous on both questions, I begin by looking at the rationale underlying Gadamer's anti-objectivism. Gadamer sometimes suggests that objectivity is not possible because an inquirer's prejudices or prejudgments (Vorurteile) are ultimately inescapable. I will show that this premise, though perhaps true, is simply too weak to establish Gadamer's conclusion. A second argument that prejudgments are necessary for any access to the historical object also fails to substantiate Gadamer's anti-objectivism. Finally, a third, more promising argument centers on the claim that objectivity is not possible because the object of understanding is not determinate, but rather constituted anew by each act of understanding.3 This is an ambitious premise, but one that Gadamer leaves vague and incomplete. My goal in this paper is to provide a fuller justification for the third argument and thereby defend Gadamer's position. I do so by reformulating this third argument in terms of relational properties so as to establish that the knower's situatedness plays, as Gadamer himself insists, a positive, constitutive role in the process of understanding. A major advantage of this account is that it offers an explanation of how pluralism can recognize criteria for determining correct interpretations and thereby avoid a pernicious relativism. I should mention at the outset that my intention here is not merely to defend Gadamer but also to support, gen- erally, the anti-objectivist, interpretive pluralist position. For this reason I will sometimes, especially later on, depart from Gadamer's own vocabulary and argumentative strategies.

I. The unsurpassability of prejudgments

Gadamer's theory concerns the nature of "understanding" (Verstehen)-a concept central to attempts in German philosophy since Dilthey to expand a narrow conception of knowledge based on the model of giving cause-effect explanations. Borrowing from Heidegger, Gadamer argues that understanding, essentially historical and grounded in human "facticity," is always a kind of "self-understanding." Furthermore, it is "the primordial ontological character of human life itself' (G 246; E 259f.), not so much a deviation from objective scientific knowledge as its necessary foundation. What defines the act or event of understanding for both Heidegger and Gadamer is that it has a fore- structure, i.e., that when we understand something, we do so in a way that is shaped by a set of prior commitments to a way of life, a linguistic/conceptual scheme and specific expectations about the object of understanding.4 It is

3 When I speak of the "object of understanding," I do not mean a physical object, but that toward which our understanding is directed, be it a text, artwork, historical event, etc.

4 See Heidegger's three-tiered fore-structure of understanding (Vorhabe, Vorsicht, Vor- griff), in Sein und Zeit, 15th ed. (Ttbingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1979), p. 150. For

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these background commitments that Gadamer has in mind when he talks about tradition, prejudgments (Vorurteile), and the "essential prejudgment- ladenness (Vorurteilshaftigkeit) of all understanding" (G 254; E 270).5 What Gadamer means by prejudgments is not so much a set of explicitly held beliefs that are in place prior to the act of understanding, but rather an often inexplicit set of practical and theoretical precommitments (Voreingenommen- heiten), shaped in large part by cultural traditions, that determine how we experience what we experience.

Why is all understanding laden with the prejudgments or historically specific precommitments of the knower? The idea here seems to be a simple one. Try as we might to leave behind these precommitments in order to follow the guidelines of reason sub specie aeternitatis, we cannot. Gadamer writes:

[T]he idea of an absolute reason is not a possibility for historical humanity. Reason exists for us only in concrete, historical terms-i.e., it is not its own master but always remains dependent on the given circumstances in which it participates.... In fact history does not belong to us; we belong to it.... The individual's self-reflection is only a flickering in the closed circuits of historical life. (G 260f.; E 276)

Gadamer's claim here is for the historicity of reason. Avoiding the looseness of the term "reason" we might reformulate his point in this way: Gadamer is insisting on the historicity of all acts of understanding and all knowledge- claims including both first-order beliefs about the world as well as second- order beliefs about epistemic principles governing what kinds of beliefs are acceptable or unacceptable.7 For Gadamer, first-order and second-order beliefs

explication, see Hubert Dreyfus, "Holism and Hermeneutics" in Hermeneutics and Praxis, ed. Robert Hollinger (Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press, 1985), pp. 227- 47.

5 I translate "Vorurteil" as "prejudgment" rather than "prejudice"-a rectification of the translation as well as Gadamer's own word-choice since "Vorurteil," like "prejudice" has pejorative connotations at odds with Gadamer's argument. Gadamer's point really concerns "prejudgments" ("Vor-urteile," with hyphen), i.e., practical and theoretical precommitments (Voreingenommnenheiten, see note 6 below), not "prejudices," i.e., judgments involving unfair, one-sided or discriminatory types of thinking.

6 Thus: "-... prejudgments (Vorurteile), in the literal sense of the word, constitute the initial directedness (die vorgdngige Gerichtetheit) of our whole ability to experience. Prejudg- ments are precommitments (Voreingenommenheiten) of our openness to the world. They are precisely conditions for our experiencing anything-for the fact that what we encounter says something to us." See "Die Universalitit des hermeneutischen Problems" in Hans-Georg Gadamer, Kleine Schriften I (Tubingen: J. C. B Mohr, 1967), pp. 101-12, here p. 106. English translation: "The Universality of the Hermeneutical Problem" in Philosophical Hermeneutics, ed. David E. Linge (Berkeley: University of California, 1976), pp. 3-17, here p. 9.

7 On the relevance of the distinction between first-order and second-order beliefs to Gadamer's position, see Charles Larmore, "Tradition, Objectivity and Hermeneutics" in Hermeneutics and Modern Philosophy, ed. Brice R. Wachterhauser (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1986), pp. 147-67, here pp. 149-53.

A NEW DEFENSE OF GADAMER'S HERMENEUTICS 47



are historical because of the limitations of self-reflection. While knowers may be in a position, at least in principle, to examine and reject many of their prejudgments, they can never be in a position to critically examine, let alone reject, all of them. This is so for two reasons. First, as the American pragma- tists and thinkers such as Neurath have also argued, critical scrutinizing is always a piecemeal affair. We always hold certain beliefs constant while ques- tioning others. Second, and more important from Gadamer's point of view, many precommitments are such that we are not able to see them from an independent standpoint. As Gadamer says, tradition often "has" us, i.e., we belong to it and cannot divorce ourselves from (all of) it at will.8

In short, we cannot have an absolutely objective understanding of an object due to the truth of the following premise:

Premise 1: We cannot overcome the historical specificity and parochiality of (all) our epistemic and practical precommitments.

This premise is one that many philosophers would regard as true. It does not, however, entail Gadamer's conclusion that there does not exist any uniquely correct understanding and hence that objectivity is not a suitable ideal for human understanding. This is so for the simple reason that even if objectivity in the form of a total break with historically specific precommitments is an impossibility, one might still hold that it is a suitable regulative ideal for understanding, i.e., an ideal that permits not realization, but at least approxi- mation.9 It is quite true that the ineliminability of serious differences among interpreters' prejudgments may lead to irreconcilable, substantive differences about what ought to, in a given case, count as an objective interpretation. But even so, such differences about the actual realization of objectivity might well coexist with a consensus about objectivity as an appropriate meta- theoretical ideal.

One might recall here that Gadamer holds that his theory aims to describe what we "always already" do whenever we understand, not prescribe what we ought to do, and hence is not about ideals at all (G 483f.; E 512).1'' Still,

8 Larmore discusses the first reason, but fails to notice the second. See Larmore, "Tradition, Objectivity and Hermeneutics," pp. 149, 151. Larmore makes this point in "Tradition, Objectivity and Hermeneutics," p. 151: "Although we must recognize that the ideal that at least epistemologically we can completely neutralize the force of tradition by subjecting all of our beliefs to critical examination will not be realized, we do not thereby have reason to discard that ideal as one worth pursuing as far as possible."

1 Gadamer does not consistently abstain from making prescriptions since he puts forth ideals such as the anticipation of truth and completeness. For a convincing argument that Gadamer cannot abstain from prescriptions without making his own theory irrelevant or incoherent, see Lawrence Hinman, "Quid Facti or Quid Juris? The Fundamental Ambi- guity of Gadamer's Understanding of Hermeneutics," Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 40 (1980): 512-35.

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even if Gadamer's theory were regarded as having no prescriptive force whatever (which is not very plausible), this fact would still not disarm the criticism. For an objectivist could still maintain that what we are doing whenever we seek truly to understand something is trying to approximate an understanding of the object free of all prejudgments and precommitments. Striving for objectivity, one might argue, is a core feature or even a necessary and constitutive condition of any genuine act of understanding. I conclude then that the impossibility of overcoming historical situatedness does not itself entail that objectivity does not or cannot serve as an ideal. It fails to establish Gadamer's anti-objectivism.

II. Prejudgments as giving access

Objectivity can continue to serve as a suitable regulative ideal until it can be shown that prejudgments and tradition are not always obstacles to understanding, but that they have, as Gadamer says, a "positive" and "constructive" role in the accomplishment of understanding (G 251, 255, 267; E 266, 270, 283). In what sense or on what grounds could the precommitments one has prior to encountering a given object or phenomenon play a constructive role in one's understanding of that object? Gadamer must answer this question if his hermeneutics is to have any bite against objectivism. While his pathbreaking discussions of tradition, temporal distance and Wirkungsgeschichte are all intended to answer this question by showing the constructiveness of prejudgment, in the end they seem to come down to two basic premises. Here I will present and examine Premise 2 and explain why it is also too weak to support Gadamer's conclusion. The rest of the paper will be devoted to the crucial Premise 3.

There is evidence for the second premise at various points in Gadamer's work, most explicitly perhaps, in the following two passages:

The anticipation of meaning that governs our understanding of a text is not an act of subjectiv- ity, but proceeds from the commonality (Gerneinsamkeit) that binds us to the tradition. (G 277; E 293)

[T]he meaning of "belonging" (Zugehlirigkeit) [to tradition].. is embodied by the commonality of fundamental, enabling prejudgments. Hermeneutics must start from the position in which a person who seeks to understand something has a bond to (ist verbunden mit) the subject matter...and has, or comes to acquire, a connection (Anschluss) with the tradition from which the text speaks. (G 279; E 295)

The idea is that we can understand only that with which we can, in some measure, empathize and we can only empathize with that with which we share, to some extent, a common background of meaningfulness (consisting of practices, linguistic structures, concepts, beliefs, values, etc.). This is an




idea that owes much to Dilthey's concept of Verstehen."1 That is, despite Gadamer's criticisms of what he perceives to be Dilthey's methodological dualism (concerning the natural and the human sciences) and his objectivist goal of reconstructing meaning, Gadamer is very much committed to the Diltheyan view that understanding presupposes commonality. Let us call this the access thesis and formulate it as follows:

Premise 2: Our historically specific precommitments are a necessary condition for having access to any understanding of an object insofar as they share with the object a background of meaningfulness that makes the object intelligible in the first place.

Without commonality there can be no true understanding. Imagine trying to understand a cultural or historical phenomenon, say, Chinese opera or the actions of Japanese soldiers in World War II, without having any sense of their aesthetic or ethical values. Only to the degree that a knower shares a tradition with the object of understanding or can "identify," in some sense, with the persons involved, will the knower be able to understand much of anything. Understanding requires translatability and translatability requires a shared background of meaningfulness (or in Gadamer's language: prejudgments and tradition).

I want to argue that while premise 2 is true (though its exact truth and full implications merit further examination), it is also too weak to establish Gadamer's conclusion. An objectivist could concede that a common background of meaningfulness may be necessary for making sense of an object of understanding, especially for grasping all its nuances. But the objectivist could go on to argue that this common background of meaningfulness is a heuristic device that must eventually be isolated and subjected to impartial scrutiny. In other words, the process of understanding human phenomena might be thought to have two stages. The first stage consists in sharing (or insofar as one does not share, in appropriating) a set of background (practical, conceptual, value-related) precommitments. The second stage consists in tak- ing distance or working oneself free from the operative precommitments and, in general, approximating the ideal of an unbiased, objective stance towards those very precommitments. It is the superimposition of distanced impartiality onto a shared background of meaningfulness that makes for a sensitive yet

See, e.g., Wilhelm Dilthey, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 7 (Leipzig/Berlin: Teubner, 1933), p. 191 and p. 230: "Diese Selbigkeit des Geistes...in der Totalitat des Geistes und der Universalgeschichte macht das Zusammenwirken der verschiedenen Leistungen in den Geisteswissenschaften moglich. Das Subjekt des Wissens ist hier eins mit seinem Gegenstand, und dieser ist auf allen Stufen seiner Objektivation derselbe....Die erste Bedingung fur die Moglichkeit der Geschichtswissenschaft liegt darin, dass ich selbst ein geschichtliches Wesen bin, dass der, der die Geschichte erforscht, derselbe ist, der die Geschichte macht."

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balanced understanding and that provides the ideal for the one correct interpretation for which inquirers strive. If this argument is correct, then Premise 2 is compatible with objectivism and the denial of interpretive pluralism. It also fails to give Gadamer what he wants.

III. The indeterminacy (underdeterminedness) of the object of understanding

Given the limitations of the access thesis, is there some further reason for thinking that the inquirer's precommitments play a constitutive role in the act of understanding? There is indeed, according to Gadamer, because without precommitments there would be no object to understand. This bold and seem- ingly counterintuitive idea is suggested by the following passages:

[I]n the human sciences.. .the theme and object of research are first constituted by the motivation of the inquiry. Historical research is thus carried along by the historical movement of life itself and cannot be understood teleologically in terms of the object of research. Such an "object in itself" clearly does not exist at all. While the object of the natural sciences can be ideally described as what would be known in a complete (vollendete) knowledge of nature, it is meaningless to speak of a complete knowledge of history, and precisely for this reason we cannot makes sense of talk of an "object in itself' toward which historical research is directed. (G 269: E 284f., emphasis added)

Truly historical thinking must take account of its own historicity. Only then will it cease to chase after the phantom of a historical object,...but rather learn to see the object as the counterpart of itself and thus to see both. The true historical object is not an object at all, but the unity of the one and the other. (G 283; E 299, emphasis in original)12

[T]he horizon of the present cannot be formed without the past. There is no more an isolated horizon of the present in itself than there are historical horizons which have to be acquired. Rather, understanding is always the.fusion of these horizons putatively existing by themselves. (G 289; E 306; emphasis in original, bold type-face added)'3

So, for Gadamer, the object of historical research, whether an event such as the Russian Revolution, a text or an artwork, is a kind of "phantom." By this, of course, he cannot mean that such events or objects are simply illusory. What he must mean is that they do not exist wholly or in themselves apart from the inquirer. This view is not a rehearsal of Kantian tran- scendental idealism. Gadamer's point is that the object does not exist

12 See also the reference in Gadamer's earlier "Wahrheit in den Geisteswissenschaften" (1953), Kleine Schriften I, p. 42, to the "phantom of a truth removed from the standpoint of the knower" ("das Phantom einer vom Standort des Erkennenden abgel~isten Wahrheit").

13 That the subject's horizon exists in itself only putatively is related to Gadamer's view that understanding is not really an act carried out by a subject. See G 274; 277; E 290, 293. I will not comment further on this claim except to say that the subject's belonging to a tradition does not, as Gadamer sometimes implies, obviate all talk of the subject.




independently of the specific, historically situated inquirer.14 This yields the indeterminacy (or underdeterminedness) thesis:

Premise 3: The object of understanding is indeterminate (or underdetermined); it is constituted in part by the horizon of the specific historically situated knower and changes according to what that horizon is.'5

It should be clear that, if true, premise 3, unlike premises 1 and 2, does in fact entail interpretive pluralism and secure Gadamer's conclusion since only premise 3 denies that there is one unchanging object to be understood. But is it true and on what possible grounds?

Gadamer does not lay out the steps supporting the claim contained in the above passages and re-formulated as premise 3. But there is a decisive clue in the first passage just quoted when he writes that the object of inquiry in the human or historical sciences does not, in principle, admit of complete knowledge. We find the reasoning behind this claim for incompleteness in Gadamer's discussion of "temporal distance."

The important thing is to recognize temporal distance as a positive and productive condition. It is not a yawning abyss but is filled with the continuity of custom and tradition, in the light of which everything handed down presents itself to us. Here it is not too much to speak of the genuine productivity of the course of events enabling understanding.... Temporal distance obviously means something other than the extinction of our interest in the object. It is what first lets the true meaning of the object fully emerge. The discovery of the true meaning of a text or a work of art is never finished; it is in fact an infinite process.. New sources of understanding are continually emerging that reveal unsuspected elements of meaning. (G 281f.; E 297f.)16

Gadamer is saying that the object of understanding (at least as concerns human phenomena) is incomplete because it, or its "meaning," is revealed differently as a result of subsequent events that brings about different points of view. Before offering some illustrations of this claim, let me briefly point to a theorist from a different philosophical tradition who makes a similar claim.

In Analytical Philosophy of History (1965), Arthur C. Danto writing specifically about the nature of historical knowledge also adopts the

14 Besides, Gadamer (like Heidegger) repudiates any Kantian noumenal realm. See G 423; E 447 where Gadamer asserts that although all that we have are specific, historically situated world-views, such world-views do not constitute a "relativization" of the "world" since the "world" "is not different from the views in which it presents itself."

15 In both premise 1 and premise 3 all understanding of objects is shaped by the inquirer's horizon. But in premise 1, this fact is due to an epistemic failing (our inability to leave our historical situatedness behind). In premise 3, it is due to an ontological incompleteness or underdeterminedness of the object of understanding.

16 See also G 355; E 373: "Historical tradition can be understood only as something always in the process of being defined by the course of events..-it is the course of events that brings out new aspects of meaning in historical material."

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incompleteness thesis: "Completely to describe an event is to locate it in all the right stories, and this we cannot do. We cannot do it because we are tem- porally provincial with regard to the future.""7 Danto's reasoning is as follows: Historians ineluctably make use of what Danto calls narrative sentences, i.e., sentences that describe one event by referring to one or more later events, e.g. the sentence "The Thirty Years War began in 1618." Danto cor- rectly infers that because of the indispensability of narrative sentences to historical understanding, historians can never, even in principle, give a complete description of past events since this would presuppose knowledge of all relevant later events. Danto's position is not quite as strong as Gadamer's. While Danto insists on the incompleteness of any possible description or account of historical objects or events, Gadamer is committed to the incompleteness of the objects and events themselves."8 In either case, that later events and later points of view always bring out new aspects of the object of understanding leads both thinkers to the idea of incompleteness. Incompleteness exists because the object of understanding constantly comes to have different relational properties from those that it formerly had.

Consider, an artwork such as a Cubist painting by Picasso or Braque, a text such as the American Constitution, or a historical event such as the Russian Revolution. Our understanding of these "objects" is quite different in virtue of the temporal distance that separates us from them. The importance of temporal distance here consists not in any alleged growth in impartiality, but in the way in which more recent events have brought out new aspects of or "retrodetermined" the earlier phenomena. In the case of cubism, there is, of course, the subsequent development of increasingly abstract painting. In the case of the American Constitution, there is the two-hundred year history of new issues and cases as well as a continuing tradition of judicial interpretation and precedent relating to the Constitution's original provisions. In the case of the Russian Revolution, there is the occurrence of Stalinist totalitari- anism, eventual economic stagnation and finally the collapse of Soviet Communism. The point is that the Cubist paintings, the Constitution and the Russian Revolution not only appear in a very different light, but have come to have different relational properties as a result. They have become phenomena that bear certain new (causal and non-causal) relations to objects and events that came after them. It is in this sense that the object of understanding can never be completely grasped. As Danto expresses it, the object

17 Arthur C. Danto, Analytical Philosophy of History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1965), p. 142. This book has been reissued with some new essays as Narration and Knowledge (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985). Jurgen Habermas was the one who first called attention to the partial convergence of Gadamer's hermeneutics and Danto's argument in Zur Logik der Sozialwissenschaften (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1970), pp. 267-74.

18 Yet see the discussion and extension of Danto's argument in my paper, "The Nonfixity of the Historical Past" in Review of Metaphysics vol. 50 (June 1997): 749-68.




can never (until the end of time) be located in all the right stories. In Gadamer's terms, the object itself is "constantly being formed" ("in bestdndiger Bildung begriffen") (G 277; E 293). Now if the object or event grows or changes over time, this means that there is no single, enduring correct or objective understanding of it. But to say that the object always changes over time and is, as a result, never determinate is not to say that everything about the object changes. Some of its properties are indeed fixed (see Part VI). For this reason, it might be less misleading to talk about underdeterminedness rather than full-blown indeterminacy.

IV. Relational properties as the ground for underdeterminedness

As mentioned earlier, there is a certain obscurity surrounding Gadamer's incompleteness thesis. I believe that this thesis can be better articulated and defended if we construe it as the thesis that the object of understanding is constituted, in part, by its relational properties. To this end, I turn now to three tasks. First, I will define the crucial notions of intrinsic and relational properties. Second, I will argue for the ontological status of relational properties. Third, I will explain why relational properties result not only from temporal distance, but from other nontemporal kinds of distance as well.

Objects, whether artworks, texts, artifacts or natural-kinds, have properties. So do events. We can divide such properties into two types: intrinsic and extrinsic or relational. Intrinsic properties are those properties that an object or event has "in virtue of the way that thing itself, and nothing else, is," such as shape, size, chemical composition or having red hair. Extrinsic or relational properties are those properties of an object or event that depend wholly or partly on something other than that thing, such as being an uncle, living next door to a judge, being loved by Joe or having a red-haired brother.'9 What are the implications of this distinction for Gadamer's anti- objectivism? To begin with, it allows us to formulate more precisely Gadamer's point about temporal distance: A given object or event changes as time passes because it comes to have new relational properties. Hence, temporal distance from past events enables (or obliges) us to recognize in those events what might be called their delayed relational properties. It is the existence of these ever-changing, ever-new delayed relational properties that provides (part of) the validation for Gadamer's claim for the positive contribu- tion made by the historical specificity of the knower. (I say "part of' because, as we will see, temporal or delayed relational properties are not the only kind of relational properties that underlie Gadamer's incompleteness thesis.)

19 See David Lewis, "Extrinsic Properties," Philosophical Studies 44 (1983): 197-200. Gadamer, of course, does not employ terms such as "relational properties." Yet there is a hint of this idea in Gadamer's writings, e.g., when he writes that "[i]n this in-betweenness (In diesern Zwischen) lies the true locus of hermeneutics" (G 279; E 295).

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Now one might well wonder whether relational properties have the constitutive role I ascribe to them. A skeptic might contend that relational properties are not ontological properties of the object at all, but only episte- mological items that merely introduce changes in the ways we describe an ontologically determinate object. On this view, when a later historical event leads us to see an earlier historical event differently, it is only our description of the earlier event that changes, not the earlier event itself. In effect, this position denies the ontological reality of relational properties. It is mistaken for the following reason. It is true that our descriptions of earlier events change as a result of later events. Yet it is not just our descriptions that change. Relational properties are not features of our descriptive predilections, but of the events themselves. Consider that our descriptions sometimes change because we have changed and sometimes change because the object's relational properties have changed and there is an important difference between these two types of changes. For example, if a person describes the Russian Revolution differently because she has undergone a political conversion, this descriptive change is a result of a change in that person's epistemic or attitu- dinal makeup and not in the event itself. If, however, a person describes the Russian Revolution differently because the Revolution has come to bear new relations to new events, then it is not the person that has changed but the Revolution, insofar as it now has new relational properties (e.g., the property of having led to a 70-year failed alternative to capitalism). For this reason, relational properties must be regarded as ontologically real; though they may lead to new descriptions, they are not merely changes in the epistemic makeup or descriptive activities of persons.

This brings me to the third question: Are the only relational properties that account for the incompleteness of the object of understanding its delayed relational properties? Or might not the object of understanding be incomplete due to non-temporal relational properties as well? What I have in mind here are relational properties that derive from the distance between the object of understanding and the vantage point of the interpreter distinguished not by its temporal, but by its cultural specificity. This point certainly goes beyond Danto's specifically temporal argument as well as the main emphasis in Gadamer's presentation of his theory. Yet I think that it is implicit in Gadamer's theory nonetheless.

Truth and Method does indeed focus on the temporal axis. Thus, its pre- occupation with Uberlieferung (tradition or more literally "what it is handed down to us") and its formative role and with the temporal distance from which we look back upon it. Gadamer has little to say about the distance or separation operative in crosscultural or even interpersonal understanding. Why is this so? I would suggest that Gadamer's own interests and especially his cultural background accounts for this limitation. Gadamer is working from within a culturally unified German or European high culture (more unified




when Truth and Method appeared in 1960 than today) and one that is, for better or worse, strongly backward-looking or tradition-oriented. However, if the object of understanding were incomplete and multiply interpretable only in virtue of the temporal distance between interpreter and object, this would mean that at any one point in time, there would be just one correct interpretation. That is, once temporal differences are factored out, objectivity would still be a suitable regulative ideal. Yet Gadamer nowhere suggests anything like this sort of position. His interpretive pluralism does not regard the fact that we always understand differently to be a consequence of temporal differences or prejudgments of hindsight alone. Not only do substantial temporal differences always involve cultural differences, but the fundamental insight of the "fore-structure of understanding" borrowed by Gadamer from Heidegger, is not limited to or primarily concerned with the precommitments based solely on temporal perspectives and the delayed relational properties they reveal. Gadamer's theory (like Heidegger's) claims legitimacy and a constitutive role for precommitments in general, whether owing to temporal or cultural (and perhaps even biographical) factors.

What this means is that the object of understanding is underdetermined because its relational properties change according to the temporal and cultural vantage point of the knower. If it is true that King Lear is a different object for a 20th-century reader than for a 17th-century reader because of its delayed relational properties, it seems no less true that the same play is a different object for different readers at the same historical instant because of the different relational properties King Lear has as a result of its relation to different cultural points of view.2"1 The code of honor of a Japanese Samurai warrior, for example, will have different relational properties when understood in relation to a culture with a high sense of honor of its own than in relation to a more utilitarian culture. Or, as one historian has recently shown, the nature of the American Revolution takes on a very different shape (less egalitarian and, in certain respects, less emancipatory) when brought into relation not with the revolutions of France, China, or Russia, but with revolutions in the Caribbean and Latin America.2' There may be important theoretical differences between temporal or delayed relational properties, on the one hand, and relational properties that depend on cultural distance. Paying attention to certain of the object's culturally relational properties may be more optional than paying attention to its delayed relational properties since many of the delayed properties are causally related in a way that the culturally relational properties are not.22 But the important point here is that Gadamer's claim,

20 None of this, as I argue in Part VI below, entails an anything-goes relativism. 21 See Lester D. Langley, The Americas in the Age of Revolution, 1750-1850 (New Haven:

Yale University Press, 1996). 22 There is another importance difference. In crosscultural understanding, tradition or

Wirkungsgeschichte will not play the same role. In backward-looking understanding, the

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that the object of understanding is not complete or in itself but in a state of constantly being formed, should best be understood in terms of the object's changing relational properties, both temporal and nontemporal.

V. Meaning or significance?

I come now to an important objection to Gadamer's interpretive pluralism and to my reconstruction of that position. In an early, widely discussed response to Gadamer's work, E. D. Hirsch argues that Gadamer fails to pay attention to the difference between a work's meaning and its significance. While the significance of a work does indeed shift, its meaning remains entirely stable.23 Or to reformulate Hirsch's criticism in terms of my reconstruction of Gadamer, the changing relational properties of objects of understanding show only that the significance of the object is in flux, not its meaning.

Hirsch lays out his basic idea in this manner:

It is not the meaning of the text which changes, but its significance... .This distinction is too often ignored. Meaning is that which is represented by a text; it is what the author meant by his use of a particular sign sequence; it is what the signs represent. Significance, on the other hand, names a relationship between that meaning and a person, or a conception, or a situation, or indeed anything imaginable.... Significance always implies a relationship, and one constant, unchanging pole of that relationship is what the text means.... Significance always entails a relationship between what is in a man's verbal meaning and what is outside it....24

Hirsch goes on to say that the difference between meaning and significance brings with it a difference between two tasks or aims, interpretation and criticism: "Significance is the proper object of criticism, not of interpretation, whose exclusive object is verbal meaning."25

Two features of Hirsch's theory should be noted here. First, unlike Gadamer, Hirsch is concerned not with understanding in general, but only with our understanding of (literary) texts. What Hirsch would say about our

object we are trying to understand is part of the very tradition that has formed us-hence, the phenomenon of Wirkungsgeschichte. In crosscultural understanding, however, though we have been formed by our tradition, the object of understanding belongs to a different tradition. Thus, the double effect of Wirkungsgeschichte does not come into play.

23 E. D. Hirsch, Validity in Interpretation (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1967). Hirsch regards Gadamer's theory as an instance of what he calls "radical historicism" (pp. 42, 254ff.).

24 Hirsch, Validity in Interpretation, pp. 8, 63. 25 Hirsch, Validity in Interpretation, p. 57. As Hirsch notes (p. 210) Philip August Boeckh

makes this same distinction in his Enzyklopddie und Methodologie der philologischen Wissenschaften (1877): "[W]e distinguish interpretation and criticism as separate but essential elements... [C]riticism is.. that philological performance through which an object becomes understood not by itself nor for its own sake, but for the establishment of a relation and a reference to something else, so that the recognition of this relation is itself the end in view." In The Hermeneutics Reader, ed. Kurt Mueller-Vollmer (New York: Continuum, 1994), pp. 133, 142.




understanding of historical events is unclear. Perhaps, he would maintain that the meaning of a historical event is fixed by its intrinsic properties, while its significance shifts with its relations to other events. For present purposes, I will assume that this would be a natural extension of Hirsch's objection. Second, Hirsch interprets the stable meaning of a text to consist in the author's intention. It is important to point out that the stable meaning of a text might be construed differently: not in terms of authorial intention, but in terms of the intrinsic properties of the text. This is a view that is sometimes called formalism.26 So the idea that a text's meaning is stable and separate from its relational properties might be defended in at least two ways: either by thinking of the stability of its meaning as fixed by the author's intention or by its formal, intrinsic properties, whatever exactly these may be. In either case, however, if Hirsch is right about the basic distinction, then Gadamer's anti-objectivist, interpretive pluralism goes down with its conflation of the interpretation of fixed meaning and criticism's interest in shifting significance.

Now, how can I defend Gadamer against Hirsch's point about the difference between meaning and significance, when my reconstruction of Gadamer relies on the distinction between relational properties and something fixed (intrinsic properties or authorial intent) that Hirsch makes the basis of his attack? I will argue that although the distinction between relational and intrinsic is correct and essential to making sense of Gadamer, Hirsch is wrong to think that the object of understanding-the object that we seek to understand and eventually do understand (when our efforts are successful)-is the object shorn of all its relational properties. In other words, significance or relational properties are always operative in and constitutive of our encounter with that which we seek to understand.27

What, then, is the object of understanding or interpretation? Is it, should it or can it ever be stripped of its relational properties? Or are these relational properties integral to it? I begin with the case of a (single-authored) text and the two views of the text that see its meaning as fixed non-relationally by i) the author's intention (Hirsch's view) and ii) its intrinsic properties.

26 Hirsch refers to this view, which he rejects, as "semantic autonomism." It says that "It does not matter what an author means-only what his text says." See Hirsch, Validity in Interpretation, p. 10ff.

27 One might answer Hirsch differently by showing that the distinction between meaning and significance collapses in the face of interpreters' epistemic inability to keep the object's relational properties from affecting their understanding of the object's meaning (whether author's intention or intrinsic properties). But this argument fails for the same reason that Premise 1 failed. Although it may be that interpreters' historical situatedness prevents them from working free from significance so as to construe an object's pure meaning, one might still try to approximate, as far as possible, the ideal of meaning free of significance.

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The question of authorial intention has been much discussed. Part of the debate turns on what is meant by intention, whether something like an inner mental event or, as Hirsch regards it, an item that is objective and shareable (following Husserl's argument about the ideality of meaning in Logical Investigations). Particular difficulties attach to either conception of authorial intention, but both are susceptible to the following criticisms. First, anti- individualist theories of mind have shown that the identification of something like an intention will depend on certain facts about the environmental context in which that intention is situated. So intentions already involve context. Second, and more important, it seems altogether odd to think that the meaning and uniqueness of a work is identical with and exhausted by the author's intention. There are (at least) two reasons for thinking that there is more to the text than what the author intends. First, as Gadamer writes,

What expression expresses is not merely what is supposed to be expressed in it-what is meant by it-but primarily what is also expressed by the words without its being intended-i.e., what the expression, as it were, "betrays". (G 318; E 335f.)

One need not be a Freudian or Marxist to believe that there can be much more in an utterance or expression than what a person had in mind. Individuals are not always the best judges of their own expressive and verbal behavior. The second reason has to do not with the author's activity, but with the reader's activity and motivation. Why do we try to understand what we try to understand? Why do we read Shakespeare or Max Weber? Is it really in order to reconstruct their psychology, their thought or their will? Or is it not much more a matter of trying to understand the subject-matter that they address, i.e., "the Whips and Scornes of Time" (Hamlet) or the influence of religion on social structures? In most cases a wish to reconstruct intention remains ancillary to understanding the subject-matter. When I read and teach Foucault, I am interested in what he intended to say (and what the text says) in order to understand better the subject-matter addressed. Gadamer makes this point repeatedly. He states that understanding is always a matter of "coming to an understanding about something" (G 168; E 180; emphasis added) and that "the hermeneutic task automatically turns into a problematic about the subject- matter (eine sachliche Fragestellung)" (G 253; E 269).28

28 Gadamer puts the point in this way (G 280; E 296): "Every age has to understand a transmitted text in its own way, for the text belongs to the whole tradition in which it takes a subject-matter oriented (sachliche) interest." When Georgia Warnke, in Gadamler: Hermeneutics, Tradition and Reason (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1987) p. 25, writes that: "Gadamer's criticism of a historical intentionalism is.. .that we remain historically situated even where we are concerned with an agent's intentions, and our description of those intentions will therefore represent no more than one perspective on them," she misses the deeper reasons for Gadamer's rejection of authorial intentionalism: it is not our ineluctable prejudgments that make intentionalism wrong but our abiding interest in the subject-matter ("die verbindliche Allgemeinheit") (G 281: E 297).




This point is especially evident in the case of legal texts. Consider the debate concerning the interpretation of the U. S. Constitution. Recent "original intent" theorists such as former Attorney General Edwin Meese and Judge Robert Bork have argued that the provisions of the Constitution mean only what the authors of the Constitution intended. On this view, later interpretations of the Constitution and later events in history (though they may stand in obvious relation to the Constitution) should have no bearing on the way we now interpret the Constitution. Many prominent legal scholars have criticized this position. For one thing, it is not clear that the framers of the Constitution intended their intention to be the sole determinant of its meaning. For another, it is often impossible to determine what the framers had in mind, either for practical reasons (they are gone and documentation is lacking) or in principle (where new technologies require interpretations never envisioned by the framers).29 My argument for the centrality of relational properties presents an argument against "original intent" that is even more crucial: The theory of original intent fails to see that the meaning of a text (especially a legal document) is not a thing apart from its relation to things outside of it (and its author's mind). A similar view was once expressed by former Justice William J. Brennan, Jr.:

We current Justices read the Constitution in the only way that we can: as Twentieth-Century Americans. We look to the history of the time of framing and to the intervening history of interpretation. But the ultimate question must be, what do the words of the text mean in our time? For the genius of the Constitution rests not in any static meaning it might have had in a world that is dead and gone, but in the adaptability of its great principles to cope with current problems and current needs. What the constitutional fundamentals meant to the wisdom of other times cannot be their measure to the vision of our time. 30

While it may be interesting and possible, to some extent, to reconstruct an author's intention, the object of understanding is not limited to antiquarian interests. The text always exceeds the author's designs.31

29 See H. Jefferson Powell, "The Original Understanding of Original Intent," pp. 53-115 and Paul Brest, "The Misconceived Quest for the Original Understanding," pp. 227-62 in Interpreting the Constitution: The Debate over Original Intent, ed. Jack N. Rakove (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1990).

30 See William J. Brennan, Jr. "The Constitution of the United States: Contemporary Ratification" in Interpreting the Constitution, pp. 23-34, here p. 27. For more on this debate, see Cass Sunstein, The Partial Constitution (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993), Chapter 4.

31 In a later article, Hirsch comes somewhat closer to the Gadamerian view. In "Meaning and Significance Reinterpreted," Critical Inquiry 11 (1984), pp. 202-25, he writes that: "If we adhere to the principle that meaning is the aspect of interpretation which remains the same, while significance is what changes, we now find that we must take a more gen- erous and capacious view of what remains the same. We cannot limit meaning to what was within an original event.... So the first amendment I must make in my original explanation of the distinction between meaning and significance is to reject my earlier claim that future applications of meaning, each being different, must belong to the domain of

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Consider now the formalist (or semantic autonomist view) that the meaning and uniqueness of a text consists in its intrinsic properties. Here too similar problems arise. In order to identify a text's properties (e.g. the mean- ings of the words and their interrelations) social and linguistic context must be brought in. Intrinsic properties are never really wholly intrinsic in the first place. Second, our interests typically concern more than just a text's intrinsic properties. Even if it is possible, to some extent, to perform a kind of phenomenological reduction in which we bracket out the ways in which the text bears relations to things outside itself in order to focus exclusively on a text's intrinsic properties, to do so is to engage in an activity quite different from the more common and more natural ways in which we understand. What we usually understand (or strive to understand) when we understand the meaning and uniqueness of a text is not the text divorced from but illuminated by its relations to what lies outside of it.

Let me turn now from texts to historical events. Here the opponent of Gadamer's view might argue that the historical event consists solely in its intrinsic properties, i.e., the properties it has in virtue of its being what it is and not in virtue of the relations it bears to events outside of it (especially, pace Gadamer, events that come after it). But the anti-relationalist position seems even weaker here. Restricting our understanding of events (and actions) to intrinsic properties would make it impossible to refer to events in many of the ways that we typically do. Consider the following examples. We could not understand a shooting as a killing if the victim were to die some time after the shooting because the killing involves a relation between the shooting and another event, the subsequent death of the victim. Nor would we be able to understand the bombing of Pearl Harbor as the immediate cause of U.S. military involvement in World War II because this understanding of the bombing involves relating it to later events.32

If my argument is correct, what we understand when we understand (texts, events, etc.) are objects in terms of their intrinsic and relational properties. To stay with Hirsch's vocabulary, the meaning and uniqueness of the phenomenon of interpretation is always (notwithstanding certain specialized efforts at grasping intentions and supposedly formal properties) bound up with its significance. And because relational properties vary for the reasons discussed above, the object of understanding is never once and for all determined.

significance. This was wrong, because different applications do not necessarily lie outside the boundaries of meaning. If you think of your beloved in reading Shakespeare's sonnet, while I think of mine, that does not make the meaning of the sonnet different for us, assuming that both understand (as of course we do) that the text's meaning is not limited to any particular exemplification but rather embraces many, many exemplifications." (p. 210) Still Hirsch's concession here is restricted to the relevance of different applications only insofar as they are in accordance with the author's intentions.

32 For a fuller version of this argument, see my "The Nonfixity of the Historical Past."




VI. Circumventing pernicious relativism

Does anti-objectivism or interpretive pluralism entail an anarchic relativism unable to distinguish right from wrong or better from worse interpretations? One might think that if the object of understanding is unstable then it can no longer serve as a standard for validity in interpretation. If so, then perhaps everything is up for grabs. Following this line of reasoning, several com- mentators have concluded that, whether he admits it or not, Gadamer is squarely in the camp of thorough-going relativists.33 Yet Gadamer clearly does want to distinguish better from worse and right from wrong interpretations and thus avoid a pernicious relativism.34 But can he do so or does interpretive pluralism preclude the availability of criteria for validity in interpretation? Many of Gadamer's anti-relativist critics assume that pluralism entails pernicious relativism. I will argue that their reasoning on this point is falla- cious. On the other hand, certain of Gadamer's defenders hold that there is a viable middle position between objectivism and relativism but fail to specify the nature of the criteria for validity available to such a middle position. I will argue that what makes this middle position viable is the constraints pro- vided by the fixed intrinsic and shifting, though not arbitrary, relational properties of the object at issue.

First, let me expose the fallacy in the argument that pluralism entails anarchic relativism. Consider the following passage from E. D. Hirsch as representative of this argument:

If a meaning can change its identity and in fact does, then we have no norm for judging whether we are encountering the real meaning in a changed form or some spurious meaning that is pretending to be the one we seek. Once it is admitted that a meaning can change its characteristics, then there is no way of finding the true Cinderella among all the contenders. There is no dependable glass slipper we can use as a test, since the old slipper will no longer fit the new Cinderella.35

33 See Larmore pp. 148, 154, where he speaks of the "historical relativism that Gadamer in fact embraces" and that "for Gadamer the only alternative to objectivism, or the pursuit of objectivity, is relativism." See also Hirsch pp. 42, 249. On a point closely related to the worry about relativism, see Habermas's argument that Gadamer's hermeneutics is bound to tradition in a way that makes critical distance unlikely if not impossible in his essays in Hermeneutik and Ideologiekritik, Karl-Otto Apel et. al., eds. (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1977).

34 For Gadamer's insistence on distinguishing legitimate from illegitimate prejudgments and interpretations see G 252, 279, 282, 336; E 267, 295, 298f., 353. For his rejection of anarchic relativism see "Wahrheit in den Geisteswissenschaften" in Hans-Georg Gadamer, Kleine Schriften I: Philosophie Hermeneutik (Tfibingen: J.C.B. Mohr, 1967), p. 42: "But what takes the place [of objectivity] is not a vapid relativism. It is not at all ran- dom or arbitrary what we ourselves are and what we are able to hear from the past." See also G 90; E 95, where Gadamer rejects as an "untenable hermeneutic nihilism" Valery's assertion "Mes vers ont le sens qu'on leur prete."

35 Hirsch, Validity in Interpretation, p. 46.

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Hirsch is right that once we acknowledge that something changes its characteristics, then there is no way to find the true Cinderella, i.e., the one true and unchanging Cinderella. But why should we assume that there is an unchanging Cinderella to begin with? Perhaps Cinderella changes, but this hardly means, as Hirsch claims, that we no longer have a means for judging whether we have found Cinderella. The mistake in this argument is in the following inference:

Premise: X (or the meaning of X) changes, i.e., is not the same at different times, places and when presented from different perspectives.

Conclusion: There can be no standard or norm for deciding whether a given representation or interpretation of X is correct or not.

The problem is that the conclusion itself is ambiguous. If the conclusion says there can be no standard for judging the correctness of the interpretation of X without specifying the time, place and circumstances under which X is presented, then the conclusion follows. However, once we specify the time, place and/or conditions in which X appears, then there is a standard for judging the correctness of an interpretation, namely, whether the interpretation of X conforms to X presented under the conditions specified. Thus, the sound and loudness of a piano changes according to the conditions under which the piano is heard but this, of course, does not mean that once the conditions are specified, there is no standard or norm for judging its sound or loudness. The same goes for texts, historical events, etc.

This compatibility of change and standards for correctness brings us to the pluralist middle position between objectivism and relativism. David Couzens Hoy has described this Gadamerian position as contextualist. In contrast to subjectivistic relativism in which interpretation is made valid by the happen- stance of an interpreter' s preferences, contextualism is the view that

interpretation is dependent upon, or "relative to" the circumstances in which it occurs-that is, to its context (particular frameworks or sets of interpretive concepts including methods). For contextualism, rational reflection and dispute do no stop with the interpreter's personal preferences. On the contrary, although the choice of the context.. is underdetermined by the evidence, justifying reasons for the appropriateness of that context rather than alternative ones can and should be given. ...Gadamer's version of contextualism thus holds that the interpretive understanding is conditioned by preunderstandings (Vorverstdndnisse) arising out of the situation of the interpreter.36

The conclusion that Hoy wants to reach is, I believe, the right one. Yet his account does not make sufficiently precise just what it is that keeps contextu-

36 David Couzens Hoy, The Critical Circle: Literature, History and Philosophical Hermeneutics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), p. 69f.




alism from being just a respectable disguise for subjectivistic relativism. Is it just the fact that interpreters can appeal to the prior existence of a background framework, method or set of preunderstandings? Why is the choice of these or those frameworks, methods or sets of preunderstandings any different from a personal preference? Is it because one could offer "justifying reasons" for them? But couldn't one offer justifying reasons for one's preferences? In any case, there must be something to the reasons used to justify one's framework or preunderstandings. What is the nature of such reasons? Without further argument, these circumstances and preunderstandings might well appear every bit as subjective or conventional as an interpreter's casual preferences.37

This is why we need the idea of relational (and intrinsic) properties. The existence of intrinsic properties ensures that those interpretations that get these properties wrong will be incorrect interpretations. Though we may be unable to reconstruct these properties in a manner uninfluenced by our own historicity, we can at least endeavor to approximate such a reconstruction. The fixed intrinsic properties constitute one central source for rational constraints on validity in interpretation.3 Yet, as I have argued, the object of understanding is more than just the sum-total of its fixed intrinsic properties; to it belong, like its secondary properties, its relational properties as well. And even though they depend on the specific conditions under which an object is presented, they are not at the whim of the interpreter, but inter- subjectively verifiable. The fact that the Russian Revolution of 1917 eventually led to the collapse of the Soviet state is a relational property that is there for all to see, not a matter of subjective preference or whim. The same goes for other relational properties. Whether they obtain (or are known to obtain) is relative to the interpreter's position, but not simply up to the interpreter. So, contrary to the views of Hirsch and other objectivists, we should see that historicism need not be anarchic. Although relational properties make for multiple interpretations, both intrinsic and relational properties constrain the possible range of such multiplicity and account for the indispensability of the ideals of a certain impartiality and fidelity to the act of interpretation, hermeneutically understood.

37 This decisionism about the background set of beliefs is the weakness in the interpretive pluralism espoused by Stanley Fish in his famous "Is There a Text in This Class?" in Is There a Text in This Class? (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1980).

38 The fixity of intrinsic properties explains how Gadamer can maintain that "it is equally possible that an interpreter misses the point entirely." See Hans-Georg Gadamer, "Reply to Stanley Rosen," in The Philosophy of Hans-Georg Gadarner, Lewis Edwin Hahn, ed. (Chicago: Open Court, 1997), p. 221. It also explains how he can hold that there is something self-same that underlies multiple interpretations. See G 375; E 398 "[T]o understand a text always means to apply it to ourselves and to know that, even if it must always be understood in different ways, it is still the same text presenting itself to us in these different ways."

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VII. Conclusion

I have argued that Gadamer's anti-objectivistic interpretive pluralism provides a solid account of the historicity of understanding as long as we understand it to rest on a thesis about the underdeterminedness of the object of understanding. Interestingly enough, Gadamer's contention that understanding is a "fusion of horizons" and that the object is a sort of phantom converges in certain respects with the view made famous by Wilfrid Sellars that the percep- tually Given is a sort of myth. Both hermeneuticists and followers of Sellars hold that the knower plays an ineluctable and constitutive role in the forma- tion of the object. Both camps also hold that abandoning belief in the Given or the phantom object does not entail a relativism (or idealism) that denies the existence of an extra-mental reality.39 In this new defense of Gadamer's hermeneutics, the category of relational properties of the object of understanding both explains the non-fixed nature of the object and its multiple interpretations and helps to underwrite the criteria governing the validity and nonarbitrariness of such interpretations.*

39 See John McDowell, Mind and World (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1994) for someone who explicitly recognizes the convergence of Gadamer's "fusion of horizons" with his own post-Sellarsian way of thinking. For discussion and comments on an earlier draft, I would like to thank Claudia Card, Charles Guignon, Eric Idsvoog, Sabina Knight, Francis Schrag, Marcus Singer and an anonymous referee of Philosophy and Phenomenological Research.




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Weberman, David - A new defense of Gademer´s Hermeneutics