Truth and the Hermeneutic Experience: A Phenome-nological Approach to the Theory of Interpretation

Abstract

In recent times, philosophy has undergone an “interpretative turn”. This is at least a judgment that is frequently passed, and echoed in numerous publications.¹ After the linguistic turn, whereby philosophical thought became aware of the inescapable linguistic mediation of reality, the interpretative turn now marks the awareness that our relation to the world is contextual, historical, and that all knowledge rests on an interpretative process. In Gianni Vattimo’s words, hermeneutics has become the koine of contemporary philosophy. Thinkers from the continental and the analytical tradition can now supposedly all agree, in a post-positivistic mood, about the necessary element of interpretation in all epistemic processes. Although the legend is perhaps still cultivated in isolated parts of the theorizing community that the natural sciences are engaged in a plain description of how it is, and although the humanities is somehow still searching for the proper method, many philosophers of science today seem to agree that in no area of knowledge do we escape contextuality and inscrutability of reference. As proclaimed by Nietzsche, and later by Heidegger, interpretation has eventually become the name for the basic epistemic comportment of “the rational animal”. This is also what Gadamer meant by the “universality of the hermeneutic problem”, that the epistemological lessons from hermeneutics and the theory of interpretation apply to all forms of knowledge.²