Hermeneutics

Hermeneutic Traditions

Hermeneutics originally focused on the interpretation of sacred and legal texts and has developed into an influential school of thought in continental philosophy as well as in applied social research. Immanuel Kant's (1724–1804) insight that there is no access to an uninterpreted or atheoretical world of knowledge but rather that the mind actively makes sense of the world based on prior conceptual frameworks paved the way for hermeneutics as it is known today.

Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768–1834) was one of the first philosophers to theorize that hermeneutic thinking is a universal and natural part of being human in a social world rather than simply an application of strategies for interpreting texts. Schleiermacher distinguished between two forms of interpretation: acts of interpretation that happen all the time as people encounter texts or the world around them and on which they act without much thought and those that deal with ambiguous, complex texts or situations where understanding is not immediately available or clear and for which a doctrine of interpretation—hermeneutics—is needed.

The door Schleiermacher opened up—that understanding and interpreting are naturally occurring, innate human abilities, as well as human inabilities—is at the core of modern hermeneutics. If people always understood correctly or readily, then bureaucrats, teachers, therapists, researchers, and other social interpreters would not be needed to assist with obscure texts or unfamiliar points of view. It is because understanding can be manipulated, mistaken, and misguided that hermeneutic theories of understanding take into account the social, cultural, and political contexts, past and present, in which understanding and misunderstanding take shape. It is also because humans continue to make sense of the world around them and act on those interpretations regardless of their familiarity, interests, or knowledge that understanding the process of understanding is a core issue in social research. Contemporary hermeneutic approaches are, therefore, concerned with the processes through which understanding and interpretation occur, the truthfulness of interpretative statements, and the conditions for new understanding. They differ, however, in their focus and purpose.

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