Hermeneutics

Abstract

Hermeneutics — as I use the term — assumes that texts result from an author’s intention to communicate, and that the intended communication is almost always largely interpretable with reasonable accuracy.¹ At this time in history any discussion of hermeneutics had best begin by addressing the extraordinary confusions over the concept of authorial intention that have darkened literary commentary for almost forty years.

[H]emmeneutics depends neither on uncritical analysis of our language…, nor on the incommensurable activity of language and forms of life, but on the assumption that cross-cultural understanding and self-reflexive critique are both possible and illuminating.

Mary Hesse, Revolutions and Reconstructions in the Philosophy of

Science,58.