A complete communication breakdown between two P-language communities due to lack of mutual understanding is a rare phenomenon. Within the same cultural or intellectual tradition, such a breakdown can only exist between two disparate P-languages separated by time and where one has undergone a radical conceptual shift; for example, the communication breakdown between the speakers of Aristotelian physics and Newtonian physics (as Kuhn experienced in 1947) or between the speakers of Paracelsan medical theory and contemporary Western medical theory. A complete communication breakdown can also happen between two P-language communities existing in two radically disparate intellectual traditions or cultures, for example, the complete communication breakdown experienced by Chinese medical and Western medical communities.
More significantly, complete communication breakdowns are not only rare, but also are contextual and temporary phenomena, which in principle can be overcome. We have found that mutual effective understanding, which is propositional understanding in character, between the speakers of two P-languages with disparate M-presuppositions is problematic and difficult, for it is hard for one side to identify and comprehend the M-presuppositions of the other’s language. Worse still, a complete communication breakdown between them occurs when the speakers of one language attempt to approach the other language by projecting the categories, beliefs, and mode of reasoning of their own language onto the other language. However, the failure of the projective approach to understanding in abnormal discourse by no means implies the impossibility of mutual understanding with one another. It certainly does not mean that mutual understanding between two P-language communities with incompatible M-presuppositions is unattainable in principle. It would be a mistake to think that one cannot understand an alien P-language per se. Any human-made P-language (thought, theory, ideology, conceptual scheme), no matter how remote it is from our own, is an open linguistic system, open to possible modification, expansion, and evolution (both syntactically and semantically), and open to human understanding. One can at least make an alien language intelligible, no matter how strange and remote it is, by language learning. ‘Shared neurology and overlapping environments make it extremely likely that any speaker of one human language can, with sufficient effort, always learn another’ (Kuhn, 1999, p. 34).
This conclusion is not just our sheer conviction, but it is actually implied by my truth-value conditional theory of cross-language understanding. Since understanding and intelligibility of any P-language is linguistic-context dependent, anything which can be said in one P-language1 can, with imagination and effort, be understood by the interpreter of another P-language as long as he or she is willing to immerge him or herself into the linguistic context. No matter how sedimented a language, culture, or tradition might become, it is never resistant to unfolding itself and disclosing something new. In fact, if we take understandability or interpretability (not translatability as Quine and Davidson do) as the standard of languagehood, then the idea of a language being categorically unintelligible or unlearnable in principle is incoherent.
The occurrence of a complete communication breakdown between two P-language communities indicates that cross-language understanding occurs in abnormal discourse. The failure of the projective approach in abnormal discourse only shows that the process of understanding is not yet finished, which needs to be completed by approaching the aliens in a different way. It reminds us that the kind of understanding involved in abnormal discourse—which is, as we will show, hermeneutic, not propositional in nature—is more subtle, more elusive, and more dialectic than that involved in normal discourse. We had better proceed with care.
I have suggested that the as-up-to-now complete communication breakdown due to lack of effective understanding in abnormal discourse can be overcome by somehow reaching understanding. The question faced by would-be communicators, when experiencing a complete communication breakdown, is this: How can we do justice to an unfamiliar P-language without falsifying or distorting it? To ask the same question with a Kantian twist: How is understanding in abnormal discourse possible! What kind of understanding is more effective in abnormal discourse? In the following sections, we will discuss three ways to achieve mutual understanding in abnormal discourse: the adoptive approach to understanding, language learning, and Gadamer’s hermeneutic understanding.
The failure of the projective approach tempts many into the opposite approach: ‘going native’ by putting themselves into the alien’s skin, or jumping into the stream of the other’s consciousness. Compared with the projective approach that is a third-person, objectivist approach to understanding, this is a first-person, phenomenological approach to understanding. This temptation is very strong in the field of anthropology, which is a wide-ranging discipline where many issues touched upon in discussions of incommensurability come into sharp focus. One general problem that has been exercised in methodological discussion in anthropology is this: How is anthropological knowledge of the way natives think, feel, and perceive possible? As many believe, anthropological understanding stems from some sort of extraordinary sensibility, an almost preternatural capacity to think, feel, and perceive like natives. It is believed that rather than attempt to place the experience of natives within the framework of our own, we must, if we are to achieve understanding, set our own framework aside and view their experiences within their own framework. For example, according to anthropologist B. Malinowski (1965, pp. 11-15, 21-2), the task of anthropological linguists is not to show the deficiencies of ‘primitive’ languages or to locate common roots, if any, between the alien language and their home language. Instead, the meanings of words and sentences must be understood and described within ‘contexts of cultural reality’ often radically different from interpreters’ home language. Practical and ritual activities, facial expressions and gestures, story telling and conversation, social interactions and ceremonial interchanges, all contribute to the social contexts in which the language must be understood.
Against Kantian and Enlightenment efforts to portray knowledge and understanding in universal terms, the romantic and historical hermeneutists of the nineteenth century contend that the task of understanding is to get beyond our own perspectives and to think in terms of the context of the author’s intention or ‘the true meaning’ of the text. For F. Schleiermacher, the understanding of unfamiliar texts is essentially a matter of psychological interpretation, a placing of oneself in the mind of the author, a recreation of the author’s creative act. Thus, the art of understanding becomes the reconstruction of the original production. While Schleiermacher emphasizes the subjective aspect of understanding, W. Dilthey focuses on the historical context of understanding. For Dilthey, the development of historical consciousness is its liberation from every dogmatic bias. Historical consciousness means understanding things in terms of the values and standards of their own time, putting the interpreter’s own values and standards out of action. Dilthey seeks to overcome the historical conditionedness of the interpreter and achieve objective knowledge of the historical conditioned. Historians must place themselves within the spirit of the age they are studying and think with its ideas and its thoughts, not with their own. In fact, historical understanding requires the self-extinguishing of the interpreter.
Perhaps the two most provocative versions of the adoptive approach to understanding are P. Winch’s social-cultural relativism and B. Whorf s linguistic-cultural relativism. Winch is occupied with the problem of determining what is the best way to understand and interpret different cultures and societies so that we can learn from them. He finds that many influential studies of primitive societies have gone astray because they are frequently insensitive to the different ‘points’ and ‘meaning’ of the other’s activities and beliefs that would reveal to us ‘different possibilities of making sense of human life’. Winch is protesting against the pervasive ethnocentricism at the time, whereby we measure and judge what is initially alien to us by our present standards of rationality, righteousness, and truth, as if those standards were the sole and exclusive measures of those ‘universal’ human values. To understand a society or culture is, for Winch, to make it intelligible. But the notion of intelligibility is context-dependent. Out of context, the notion is systematically ambiguous. ‘A single use of language does not stand alone; it is intelligible only within the general context in which the language is used’ (Winch, 1958, p. 39). Each society or culture has its own criterion of rationality and intelligibility. We cannot say which one is better. The criterion is formed and defined within a specific form of life. A form of life, as Wittgenstein defines and argues, is the given that we have to accept. Forms of life endorsed in different societies or cultures may be so radically different from each other that in order to understand alien or primitive societies we not only have to bracket our prejudices and biases, but also have to suspend our own standards and criteria of rationality and intelligibility. Therefore, to understand an alien or a primitive society it is necessary to understand it somehow from within, on its own terms and by its own standards (Winch, 1958, pp. 18, 35, 39, 40, 107).
Based on his extensive research on the language of the American Hopi, Whorf argues that the Hopi language is embedded with (or, simply is) a metaphysics and a cosmology radically different from those found in European languages. When a linguist ‘imposes his own ontology and linguistic pattern on the native’, he fails to understand the Hopi speaker. The Hopi grammar, with no verb tenses as we know them and with no reference to kinetic rather than dynamic motion, is not an alternative way to express Western Newtonian time and space. It is an alternative way of thinking of and understanding the basic elements of reality. Although pragmatically equivalent English expressions can be ‘recast’ in Hopi terms, this should not be confused with understanding. To truly understand Hopi, one has to try to think in the Hopi way, or at least to achieve relative consonance with the system underlying the Hopi view of the universe. In Whorf s notion of understanding, not-native expressions are mapped approximately onto the usage of a home language, but the concepts of the home language are reshaped to communicate a different and alien view of the world.
As a solution to the failure of understanding in abnormal discourse, the adoptive approach to understanding faces many problems. H.-G. Gadamer puts it best:
In reading a text, in wishing to understand it, what we always expect is that it will inform us of something. A consciousness formed by the authentic hermeneutic attitude will be receptive to the origin and entirely foreign features of that which comes to it from outside its own horizon. Yet this receptivity is not acquired with an objectivist ‘neutrality’: it is neither possible, necessary, nor desirable that we put ourselves within brackets. (1979, pp. 151-2; my italics)
Just how can one jump into the stream of the other’s experience? Gadamer reminds us that an interpreter always belongs to a certain tradition, culture, and language before a tradition, culture, or language belongs to the interpreter. One is ontologically grounded in one’s own tradition, culture, and language. It is impossible for one to leave behind one’s own tradition and to place oneself in other traditions. This is because one’s tradition, culture, and language are not contingent properties of an abstract self but are constitutive of one’s being (though one’s own tradition and horizon can evolve and be modified and expanded). One simply cannot place oneself in the other tradition without losing oneself. ‘We become fools of history if we think that by an act of will we can escape the prejudgments, practices, and traditions that are constitutive of what we are’ (R. Bernstein, 1983, p. 167). Anthropologist C. Geertz concurs:
The ethnographer does not, and in my opinion, largely cannot, perceive what his informants perceive. What he perceives—and that uncertainly enough—is what they perceive ‘with’, or ‘by means of, or ‘through’ or whatever word one may choose. (Geertz, 1979, p. 228)
No matter how accurate or half-accurate one can be about what one’s informants are ‘really like’, it comes from the ethnographer’s own experience, not from the informants’ experience. ‘In the country of the blind, who are not as unobservant as they appear, the one-eyed is not a king but spectator’ (Geertz, 1979, p. 228).
The champion of the adoptive approach could maintain that even if one accepts as an empirical fact that one cannot sufficiently attain the ideal of leaving oneself behind, this would still be a legitimate ideal that one should strive to reach as far as possible. For Gadamer, what is wrong with the adoptive approach to understanding is not just that it is impossible, but rather that it is undesirable, and even detrimental, for achieving cross-language understanding. As I will detail later, according to Gadamer’s hermeneutic understanding, not only do all understandings inevitably involve some prejudices, but also the understanding of the alien tradition, culture, and language is only possible based on prejudgments provided by one’s own tradition. The past can only be revealed to one in one’s present situation; the other can only speak to one in one’s own tradition. Therefore, to ‘try to escape from one’s own concepts in interpretation is not only impossible but manifestly absurd. To interpret means precisely to bring one’s own preconceptions into play so that the text’s meaning can really be made to speak for us’ (Gadamer, 1989, p. 397).
Moreover, the adoptive approach to understanding is founded on a monologue model of meaning, according to which the meaning of a text is inherent in the text to be understood, as it is given by the author and co-determined by his or her historical situation. The text is self-enclosed and its meaning is self-contained— simply there to be discovered—independent of the interpreter. The aim of understanding is to grasp the subjective intentions of the author or the original meaning of a text. The interpreter, therefore, has to purify him or herself of any prejudices and immerse himself or herself in the original context in order to understand the other. As we will see shortly, this model of meaning is challenged and rejected by Gadamer’s dialogue model of meaning of his philosophical hermeneutics.
Lastly, the adoptive approach is not necessary because ‘you do not have to be one to know one’ (Geertz, 1979, p. 227). For example, you do not have to blind yourself in order to understand the language of the blind. An ‘account of other people’s subjectivities can be built up without recourse to pretensions to more-than-normal capacities for ego-effacement and fellow feeling’ (Geertz, 1979, p. 240). There is actually a better way to achieve cross-language understanding without falling into the temptations of imprisoning oneself either within the alien’s mental horizon or within one’s own mental horizon. What I have in mind is the hermeneutic approach to understanding to be discussed below.
We have argued so far that one can fail to understand an alien P-language (tradition, culture, language, texts, the works of art) in two contrastive ways: by ‘going native’ through becoming one with members of the alien culture, or by maintaining an imperial distance and projecting one’s M-presuppositions onto the others. In either case, one cannot achieve the goal of effective cross-language understanding, learning of insights, and reaching agreement. If interpreters simply abandon whatever they think about the world, then they neither understand the alien P-language, nor are they capable of learning from others; ‘going native’ is imitation, not insight. Fortunately, Gadamer’s hermeneutic understanding seems to point a way out of such a dilemma.
Hermeneutics is concerned with all situations in which we encounter meanings that are not immediately understandable. The task of hermeneutics in general is to render intelligible a text that was previously considered alien and strange. The nineteenth century romanticist and historicist concept of hermeneutics, represented by F. Schleiermacher and W. Dilthey, was transformed by M. Heidegger and H.-G. Gadamer in the twentieth century. For Heidegger (1962), understanding is ontological in the sense that it is not one human faculty among others, but the primordial mode of being of Dasein. For Dasein, to be is to understand. Gadamer emphasizes further that understanding is universal: it underlies all human activities; nothing is, in principle, beyond understanding. Gadamer’s abiding concern has been to understand understanding itself, or to answer the question, ‘How is understanding possible?’ (Gadamer, 1989, p. xxx). To do so, he sets out to expose, in his philosophical hermeneutics, the fundamental conditions or presuppositions of human understanding.
In the following discussion, we will focus only on those aspects of Gadamer’s philosophic hermeneutics relevant to our topic, that is, how to reach cross-language understanding in abnormal discourse.
To understand a text is to grasp its meaning. Presumably, a theory of understanding bears a close relation to a theory of meaning. As far as the determination of the meaning of a text is concerned, there are three crucial issues in the theory of meaning subject to contentious debate: (i) Who determines the meaning of a text? Is it the author’s intention alone? Does a reader’s participation in the process of understanding also play a role in the constitution of meaning? If it does, How much does a reader contribute to the meaning?2 (ii) Is apprehension of meaning essentially a private psychological state or a public linguistic activity? (iii) Is the meaning of a text—no matter what counts as the bearer of meaning, either the intention of the author or the propositional content expressed by the text—a fixed, self-contained mental or linguistic entity, or the product of a dynamic, open-ended process?
As we have mentioned, the adoptive approach to understanding is underwritten by what I refer to as the monologue model of meaning.3 According to this classical model, it is the author’s intention alone, along with the necessary linguistic conventions of the author’s language, that determines the meaning of a text. The meaning is a self-closed linguistic entity waiting to be discovered. Hence, to understand the text is to recapture the author’s intention through decoding the meaning of the text. In contrast, Gadamer’s notion of hermeneutic understanding subscribes to what I will call the dialogue model of meaning. According to this more recent model, neither meaning nor understanding should be identified with psychological states or processes of mind (whether the author’s or the reader’s). Meaning and understanding are for Gadamer an objective, nonnatural feature of the world, not private psychological data, but rather essentially and intrinsically linguistic entities that are publicly accessible and communicable. Meaning is not in the author’s head, but in the text itself. However, to say that the meaning is in the text itself does not mean, for Gadamer, that the text itself contains the complete meaning given by the author alone, independent of the interpreter’s participation.
To see what is wrong with the monological notion of meaning, Gadamer asks us to reflect upon our experience with the understanding of the works of performing art. Art is, for Gadamer, by nature presentational, which means that a work of art should not be thought of as a self-enclosed object or thing detached from and indifferent to a spectator. Instead, a work of art is a dynamic event or happening of being, which ‘is merely repeated each time in the mind of the viewer’ when the viewer interacts with and participates in it. ‘The ontological significance of representation lies in fact that “reproduction” is the original mode of being of the original art work itself. ... The specific mode of the work of art’s presence is the coming-to-presentation of being’ (Gadamer, 1989, p. 159). ‘The being of a work of art is play and it must be perceived by the spectator in order to be actualized’ or be made complete (Gadamer, 1989, p. 164). Therefore, the meaning of a work of art can only be determined and contextualized through a dynamic interaction and transaction between the work of art and the spectator who shares in it. Then, Gadamer asks, ‘Is this true also of the understanding of any text. Is the meaning of all texts actualized only when they are understood?’ (Gadamer, 1989, p. 164) Gadamer’s answer is a categorical ‘yes’.
Understanding must be conceived as a part of the process of the coming into being of meaning, in which the significance of all statements—those of art and those of everything else that has been transmitted—is formed and made complete. (Gadamer, 1975, p. 146, my italics)4
In fact, such a dynamic, procedural notion of understanding is best conveyed by the German term for ‘understanding’, Verstehen. To use ‘Verstehen’, Gadamer intends to stress its close affinity to Verstandigung, ‘coming-to-an-understanding’ or ‘reaching-an-understanding’ with someone about something. This tripartite model of understanding reminds us of K. Bühler’s tripartite schema of language functions introduced in chapter 12.
Since meaning is always coming into being through the ‘happening’ of understanding and understanding always happens within certain contexts, the hermeneutic understanding is an open-ended process, which can never (ontologically) achieve finality. It is always open and anticipatory. The meaning of a text is not simply there waiting to be discovered. It makes no sense to talk about the single correct interpretation. ‘We understand in a different way, if we understand at alV (Gadamer, 1989, p. 297; italics as original).
Gadamer’s dialogue model of meaning/understanding has a direct impact on the role of the interpreter’s own historical situation, prejudgments, or tradition in understanding. The adoptive approach to understanding is justified only under the assumption that a text to be understood has its own fixed meaning that can be isolated from the interpreter’s participation. If one’s participation in understanding is part of the making of the meaning, it is an illusion to think that one can eliminate one’s anticipatory prejudgments or prejudices, to somehow abstract oneself from one’s own historical context or cultural/intellectual tradition in order to enter ‘into’ the minds of the others that are to be understood.
But such an explication of the role of the interpreter’s prejudices and prejudgments in understanding appears to bring us back to either the projective approach to understanding or some form of more sophisticated relativism—similar to the relativist stand underlying the adoptive approach to understanding—which Gadamer’s hermeneutic understanding is supposed to refute. On the one hand, since one always takes oneself along whenever one understands and there is no way out of one’s own perspective, one seems to be justified to project one’s prejudgments into understanding others—a version of absolutism lurks in the background. On the other hand, if the meanings of what is to be understood are conditioned by the interpreter’s coming-to-understanding, and this subjective understanding is different for different interpreters within different historical contexts and cultural settings, then it seems that we lose the very target of understanding since there is no objective, integrated meaning to understand at all. If so, does it not mean that all understandings are equally good, or even that ‘anything goes’? To see Gadamer’s responses, we need to appreciate fully the basic functions of prejudices and prejudgments in understanding others.
Ontologically, our prejudices or fore-structures determine our being. ‘It is not so much our judgments as it is for our prejudices that constitute our being. ... They are simply conditions whereby we experience something—whereby what we encounter says something to us’ (Gadamer, 1976, p. 9). These prejudgments, prejudices, and fore-conceptions that determine who we are now, are not of our own making, are not an act of subjectivity, but are determined by what Gadamer calls the ‘commonality which binds us to the tradition’ (1989, p. 293). As Gadamer sees it, we belong to a tradition before it belongs to us. In one sense, a tradition is handed down to us, which we are thrown into without choice. In another sense, a tradition does not just stand over us; it is always part of us at the same time. Belonging to a tradition is standing in a happening of tradition. It is our tradition, through its sedimentations as prejudgments, that constitutes what we are in the process of becoming.
As a precondition of understanding, our prejudices and fore-understanding are what make our initial understanding possible. ‘All understanding inevitably involves some prejudice’ (Gadamer, 1989, p. 270). In fact, ‘a person who is trying to understand a text is always projecting’ (Gadamer, 1989, p. 267). Whatever is understood is understood on the basis of a pre-understanding or anticipation of meaning (fore-meaning). Since our prejudices are determined by our tradition, wherever there is understanding there is pre-understanding determined by the happening of tradition in which we stand. Then, what is the mechanism through which tradition informs understanding? It is through language. A tradition is sedimented in a language—in its lexicon, in its grammar, in its underlying presuppositions, and in its way of justification and reasoning—and is transmitted and handed down linguistically. Moreover, understanding is a linguistic activity and is discursive, and as such is subject to the traditions sedimented in language use. Since we are ‘thrown into’ a tradition, the projections of meaning that make understanding possible are ‘thrown’ projections. Furthermore, the projection of meaning is not so much the act of an individual interpreter but the act of a member of a historically conditioned language community. Thus, as determined by tradition through language, understanding is not and cannot be arbitrary. On the contrary, ‘understanding reaches its full potential only when the fore-meanings that it begins with are not arbitrary’ (Gadamer, 1989, p. 267). Therefore, ‘understanding is to be thought of less as subjective act than as participating in an event of tradition, a process transmission in which past and present are constantly mediated’ (Gadamer, 1989, p. 290; italics as original).
To claim that our being and our understanding are conditioned and shaped by our tradition in terms of our prejudices and fore-structures does not necessarily commit us to R. Carnap’s ‘Myth of Framework’—that we are enclosed within a wall of fixed prejudices which isolate us from others. For Gadamer, ‘prejudices are biases of openness to the world’ and to others from different traditions. They are by nature an open system—always anticipatory, always subject to transformation, and always future-oriented. To see how prejudices can evolve during understanding and how we can reach out to others in terms of our prejudices, we have to see what happens when we encounter others.
Understanding Others—the Hermeneutic Circle and Fusion of Horizons
Gadamer fully realizes that although fore-understanding and prejudices are indispensable for understanding, not all prejudices are conductive in fostering understanding. We have ‘to distinguish the true prejudices, by which we understand, from the false ones, by which we misunderstand’ (Gadamer, 1989, pp. 298-9; italics as original). Unfortunately, ‘he [the interpreter] cannot separate in advance the productive prejudices that enable understanding from the prejudices that hinder it and lead to misunderstanding’ (Gadamer, 1989, p. 295). Rather, this separation must take place in the very process of understanding, namely, through the dialogical encounter with the others who are apparently distinctly alien to us. ‘Only through others do we gain true knowledge of ourselves’. Self-knowledge—in this case, the knowledge of our false, unjustified prejudices—is achieved only with the dialectical interplay with the ‘other’.
When we initially approach the aliens or alien texts, we always (we ‘have to’, to be more precise) understand them through the lens of our fore-meanings and other prejudices conditioned by our tradition. But our projection of meanings often hinders our understanding. We all have ‘the experience of being pulled up short by the text. Either it does not yield any meaning at all or its meaning is not compatible with what we had expected’ (Gadamer, 1989, p. 268). This is especially the case when we attempt to understand texts belonging to other traditions that are significantly distinct from ours. The hermeneutic task is to find the necessary resources in our tradition to enable us to understand what initially sounds alien to us without distorting it. However, no matter how alien a text is to us, we should still be able to find some degree of affinity or familiarity between the alien text and our language and experience; otherwise, it would no longer be intelligible to talk about understanding. Such ‘a tension between alienness and familiarity’, using R. Bernstein’s phrase, indicates that our initial fore-meanings and prejudices are not justified.
We learn from the failure of initial understanding that:
We cannot stick blindly to our own fore-meaning about the thing if we want to understand the meaning of another. Of course this does not mean that when we listen to someone or read a book, we must forget all our fore-meanings concerning the content and all our own ideas. All that is asked is that we remain open to the meaning of the other person or text. But this openness always includes our situating the other meanings in relation to the whole of our own meanings or ourselves in relation to it. (Gadamer, 1989, p. 268)
It is here that Gadamer formulates his own version of the hermeneutic circle. The circle in the traditional sense, referring to the dialectic interaction between the understanding of part and whole of a text, does not take the fore-structures of the interpreter into account. For Gadamer (following Heidegger), hermeneutic understanding is the dialectical interplay between the interpreter’s fore-structures and the text to be understood, not just between part and whole of a text. On the one hand, although interpreters have to rely on their fore-structures and prejudices in any understanding, they must be ‘on guard against arbitrary fancies and the limitations imposed by imperceptible habits of thought’ which lead to misunderstanding (Gadamer, 1989, p. 266). Interpreters must be guided by the ‘things in themselves’ and keep their gaze fixed on them, i.e., the texts to be understood. Interpreters must be open minded, to listen to, to share, to participate with them so the texts can ‘speak to’ them; they must be receptive to the claims to truth that a text makes upon them. On the other hand, openness and receptiveness to the ‘things in themselves’ are possible only because of the fore-structures and prejudices that are constitutive of interpreters’ being and only in terms of ‘justified prejudices’ that open and guide them to other’s languages, experiences, and traditions. This requires that interpreters be able to identify unjustified prejudices, revise them, and replace them with ‘more suitable ones’. But such a separation of justified (‘true’ or ‘enabling’) prejudices from unjustified (‘false’ or ‘blind’) ones can be carried out only because of the interplay or clash between the unjustified prejudices and the ‘things in themselves’. Therefore, hermeneutic understanding involves constant movement from less suitable prejudices to more suitable ones. ‘This constant process of new projection constitutes the movement of understanding and interpretation’ (Gadamer, 1989, p. 267). The issue is not whether we need prejudices in order to understand, but what kind of prejudices we need. ‘The important thing is to be aware of one’s own bias, so that the text can present itself in all its otherness and thus assert its own truth against one’s own fore-meanings’ (Gadamer, 1989, p. 269).
The question left is how we can know whether we have reached a correct understanding (if any at all). Another closely related question is what exactly counts as true or legitimate prejudices that promote a correct understanding? Those two notions are obviously related: A correct understanding is the one that lets the true meaning reveal itself or lets the ‘things in themselves’ speak for themselves, while true prejudices are those to be confirmed by the ‘things in themselves’ (Gadamer, 1989, p. 267). Obviously, these two definitions do not help at all unless we are told what ‘true meaning’, ‘real meaning’, or the ‘things in themselves’ to be understood are. Gadamer is rather vague about these terms and uses them rather elusively. But we know what Gadamer does not mean by the terms. By ‘real meaning’, Gadamer certainly does not mean the self-contained unit inherent in the text, independent of the interpreter’s participation. Recall that, for Gadamer, meaning is always coming into being through the ‘happening’ of understanding. Similarly, he surely does not use the term, the ‘things in themselves’, in the Kantian sense, since what the ‘things themselves’ say could be different to interpreters situated in different traditions.
I think the real answer may be revealed by Gadamer’s notion of truth (one of his most elusive notions) used in ‘true meaning’. It is clear that Gadamer does not treat the truth as correspondence, nor the propositional truth either. Instead, he seems to adopt a mixture of holistic, coherent, and pragmatic notions of truth. R. Bernstein suggests that Gadamer is in fact appealing to a concept of discursive truth ‘that amounts to what can be argumentatively validated by the community of interpreters who open themselves to what tradition “says to us’” (Bernstein, 1983, p. 154). Such a reading seems to be confirmed by Gadamer’s formulation of his hermeneutic circle, which is similar to the traditional formulation of the circle as the movement between part and whole:
The anticipation of meaning in which the whole is envisaged becomes actual understanding when the part that is determined by the whole themselves also determines this whole. ... Thus the movement of understanding is constantly from the whole to the part and back to the whole. Our task is to expand the unity of the understood meaning centrifugally. The harmony of all the details with the whole is the criterion of correct understanding. The failure to achieve this harmony means that understanding has failed. (1989, p. 291)
Gadamer here speaks of what he calls the ‘anticipation of completeness’ through projection, according to which only what really constitutes a coherent unity of meanings is acceptable and should be our goal of understanding (Gadamer, 1989, pp. 293-4). In seeking to understand a text, we first project tentative fore-meanings for the text as a whole (the whole). But those fore-meanings have to be revised in light of attention to the details of the text (the part). Through constant negotiation and argumentation between our evolving fore-meanings (the whole) and the text itself (the part), we move toward ‘the harmony of all the details with the whole’. Our projected fore-meanings are confirmed by the ‘thing in itself of the text when a unity of meaning (the real, true meaning) is borne out. ‘The only “objectivity” here is the confirmation of a fore-meaning in its being worked out. Indeed, what characterizes the arbitrariness of inappropriate fore-meanings if not that they come to nothing in being worked out?’ (Gadamer, 1989, p. 267) A true or legitimate prejudice is one that leads to a coherent understanding of the text when we attend to the details of the text in light of it, or which survives engagement with the text by resulting in a coherent lifeworld—a coherent interconnection of meanings, beliefs, values, and norms. Accordingly, an understanding is correct or warranted when it reveals the true meaning of what is to be understood.
We have to be cautious here. For Gadamer, to say that an understanding is correct actually means that it is warranted under the current situation; it does not imply that there is one and only one correct understanding. This is because
[the] discovery of the true meaning of a text or a work of art is never finished; it is in fact an infinite process. Not only are fresh sources of error constantly excluded ... but new sources of understanding are continually emerging that reveal unsuspected elements of meaning. (Gadamer, 1989, p. 298)
Of course, this does not lead to the relativist position that all understandings are equally good. Many understandings are not warranted by appropriate forms of prejudices that can yield true meanings.
We have seen so far that coming-to-an-understanding is a dynamic process, involving the dialectical interaction between the prejudices conditioned by one’s tradition and what is to be understood. Such a hermeneutic circle applies to both the intra-tradition and inter-tradition understanding. What we are interested in here is primarily inter-tradition understanding. What happens to the two distinct traditions, cultures, and languages involved in cross-language, cross-tradition understanding: Are both intact, is one replaced by the other, or are both fused into one? To answer this, Gadamer introduces the notion of horizon.
Gadamer’s notion of horizon is an extension of the Husserlian notion from perception to understanding. He defines the horizon as ‘the range of vision that includes everything that can be seen from a particular vantage point’ (1989, p. 302). One’s particular horizon or viewpoint is formed by one’s particular tradition, culture, language, historical past, and situation, which embraces not just immediate context of fore-meanings that one is currently engaged with, but the broader context which conditions them. Ultimately it is a whole historical lifeworld—the world in which one lives out one’s life, a web of meanings, beliefs, values, and norms—the world from a particular historical standpoint or a form of life. In this sense, the notion of horizon is as broad as the notion of tradition.
A horizon is, by definition, limited and finite; but it also is essentially an open system, open to self-transformation and open to being understood. To have a horizon means not being limited to what is nearby but being able to see beyond it. ‘Tradition is not simply a permanent preconception; rather, we produce it ourselves inasmuch as we understand, participate in the evolution of tradition, and hence further determine it ourselves’ (Gadamer, 1989, p. 293). ‘So too the closed horizon that is supposed to enclose a culture is an abstraction. ... The horizon is, rather, something into which we move and that moves with us’ (Gadamer, 1989, p. 304).
When one tries to understand a horizon other than one’s own, especially an alien horizon from an alien tradition, one cannot simply replace one’s own horizon with the alien’s for the reasons we have given in the discussion of the adoptive approach to understanding. It is neither possible nor desirable. The placing of oneself in an alien horizon is not and cannot be a case of leaving one’s own horizon behind. One has to place oneself in the other horizon, and this self is an ontological being with its essence determined by its own tradition and horizon. One can experience the genuine otherness only by placing oneself situated within one’s horizon, as a filter to separate the oneness from the otherness, in the other’s horizon. Just as one can only gain knowledge of oneself through the eyes of the other, the genuine otherness can be revealed to one only against the background of one’s oneness. Therefore, for Gadamer, the understanding of the other can be achieved by a ‘fusion of horizons’, a fusion between the horizons of the interpreter’s and the interpreted, whereby the interpreter’s horizon is enlarged and enriched in terms of the engagement with the horizon of the interpreted. This fusion of horizons is not a technique to be employed in inter-tradition/culture understanding, but what happens whenever there is understanding, whether it is of something from the past, something from another culture, something in another language, or even another person within the same tradition and speaking the same language. We have more to say about a ‘fusion of horizons’ later in chapter 15.
If to understand an alien P-language is to grasp accurately its propositional contents within its linguistic context, can there be a better way to do so than through language learning by immersing ourselves in the context? We know that the most efficient way for the anthropologist to understand the native encountered is to learn the native’s language by living in the community. The same should be true for our would-be communicator who faces a complete communication breakdown due to lack of understanding of an alien P-language. Against the translational approach to understanding, Feyerabend remarks that ‘we can learn a language or a culture from scratch, as a child learns them, without detour through our native language’ (1987, p. 76). As Kuhn emphasizes repeatedly, although two scientific languages with unmatchable lexical taxonomies cannot be translated into one another, access to the other incommensurable linguistic grid is still possible by learning the other language together with its taxonomy.5 Although to understand some radically disparate P-language, one has to learn it in a wholesale manner (learn the language together with the underlying mode of reasoning, the cosmology, the categorical framework, and other factual commitments), it only makes understanding difficult, not impossible in principle. After learning, the would-be communicator could become a bilingual, a person who can effectively understand both P-languages in play. For example, for a Western physician (call her Ms Jones), after ‘whole-sale’ learning of Chinese medical theory, the pre-modern Chinese mode of reasoning and the yin-yang cosmology, its category system, and even the Chinese language, she can understand the language of the traditional Chinese medical theory very well.
As an extreme version of the adoptive approach, the language-learning approach of cross-language understanding faces many similar problems. For example, our adult language learner (for instance, Ms Jones) who tries to learn an alien P-language (the traditional Chinese medical language) is not a child with a mind of ‘blank slate’. When she approaches the alien language, she is already equipped with a set of incompatible M-presuppositions brought with her own home P-language (the contemporary Western medical language). Experience and observations are theory-laden. It is almost impossible for our language learner with a prejudged mind to enter into the others’ stream of experiences and truly ‘go native’. Like Geertz’s ethnographer, the adult language learner does not, and largely cannot, perceive what the native speaker of the P-language perceives.
The language-learning approach of cross-language understanding still faces some other unique difficulties. Language learning is not universally accessible for the interpreter. Many language communities and their linguistic contexts that the interpreter tries to understand no longer exist, for example, the Paracelsian medical language. All that the interpreter has access to are the written texts and historical background through the eyes of historians and anthropologists. It is simply impossible for us to learn them as a child does. Besides, some researchers— historians of science, for example, such as our Ms Jones—can, by suitably immersing themselves in some living alien tradition to learn its language (such as the Chinese medical language), come to understand the language well. But it does not mean that this particular specialist’s understanding is what underwrites the communicative capacities of the overwhelming number of participants in the tradition (such as the Western medical community as a whole).
I have to admit that the above two concerns are only pragmatic and do not touch the root of language learning. Here is the real problem of language learning. To learn a second language, one cannot simply leave one’s own language behind. Instead, one has to approach the language from the horizon of one’s own language, or let the language speak to one who is already grounded within one’s own linguistic tradition. Seeing from the perspective of Gadamer’s hermeneutics, language learning in general, and the language acquisition of an alien P-language in particular, is actually a process of hermeneutic interpretation. As Gadamer puts it:
It is impossible to understand what the work has to say if it does not speak into a familiar world that can be found a point of contact with what the text said. Thus to learn a language is to increase the extent of what one can learn. ... To have learned a foreign language and be able to understand it means nothing else than to be in a position to accept what is said in it as said to oneself. The exercise of this capacity for understanding always means that what is said has a claim over one, and this is impossible if one’s own ‘worldview and language-view’ is not also involved. (1989, p. 442; italics as original).
Kuhn seems to realize this also. For the same reason, Kuhn prefers to call the understanding acquired by language learning ‘interpretation’.
It [referring to interpretation] is an enterprise practiced by historians and anthropologists, among others. Unlike the translator, the interpreter may initially command only a single language. At the start, the text on which he or she works consists in whole or in part of unintelligible noises or inscriptions. ... If the interpreter succeeds, what he or she has in the first instance done is learn a new language. (Kuhn, 1983b, pp. 672-3)
Anything which can be said in one language can, with imagination and effort, be understood by a speaker of another. What is prerequisite to such understanding, however, is not translation but language learning. Quine’s radical translator is, in fact, a language learner. (Kuhn, 1988, p. 11)
Here Kuhn associates understanding with language learning, and further treats the language learning process as the process of Quine’s radical translation. By doing this, Kuhn reveals one central feature of his notion of understanding through language learning, namely, its openness and indeterminacy. In general, the process of learning an alien language may well involve a complex process of reinterpretative reconstruction that is not just purely reproductive, but also a productive activity. This is especially true when the language to be learnt embodies a set of M-presuppositions incompatible with those of the interpreter’s own language.
Kuhn actually has the notion of hermeneutic understanding in mind when he talks about interpretation and language learning. The language-learning approach is different from both the adoptive approach (which is usually attributed to Kuhn’s relativism) and the projective approach to understanding (which Kuhn is supposed to argue against). While both the projective and the adoptive approaches are propositional in nature (both are based on the notion of propositional understanding), understanding through language learning is hermeneutic in character, which necessarily involves the hermeneutic circle between the interpreter’s language and the alien language. In fact, Kuhn explicitly formulates his own version of the hermeneutic circle in a very sketchy way in the following passage:
When reading the works of an important thinker, look first for the apparent absurdities in the text and ask yourself how a sensitive person could have written them. When you find an answer, I continue, when those passages make sense, then you may find that more central passages ones you previously thought you understood, have changed their meaning. (Kuhn, 1977a, p. xiii)
Moreover, to be able to understand a P-language is different from being able to use the language effectively. Recall that, according to Kuhn’s projectibility principle, kind-terms of a scientific theory are clothed with expectations about their referents. These expectations are projectible so that they enable members of the language community to project the use of these terms to other unexamined situations. Although the interpreter can learn and understand the kind-terms in an alien language, it does not mean that he or she can use them projectibly in different situations. The same problem faces our language learner Ms Jones. She can understand Chinese medical theory through the learning process. But it does not ensure that she is able to use productively the kind-terms, such as ‘the yin’ and ‘the yang’, employed by the theory (to extrapolate the terms to new cases).
The relevance of Gadamer’s discussion of hermeneutic understanding to our question at hand is palpable, namely, how cross-language understanding is possible in abnormal discourse,. In fact, as I see it, Gadamer’s philosophic hermeneutics provides a further support for our presuppositional interpretation of incommensurability as cross-language communication breakdown. Let me be more specific.
For Gadamer, our basic ‘hermeneutic experience is verbal in nature’, that is, both our being-in-the-world and the-world-for-human-beings (the lifeworld or the world we live in) are primordially linguistic in nature. Human language is not simply one of the distinctively human capacities that enable us to deal with the world, ‘language was human from its very beginning’. As we have seen, for Gadamer, understanding is both ontological and universal: it is the primordial mode of human existence (our being-in-the-world) and underlies all human activities. Besides, understanding is essentially linguistic and discursive. Thus, ‘language is originally human means at the same time that man’s being-in-the-world is primordially linguistic’ (Gadamer, 1989, p. 443). In addition, ‘language is not just one of man’s possessions in the world, rather, on it depends the fact that man has a world at all. ... But this world is verbal in nature’. It is not as though, on the one hand, there is language, and, on the other hand, the world. ‘Not only is the world world only insofar as it comes into language, but language, too, has its real being only in the fact that the world is presented in it’ (Gadamer, 1989, p. 443). Following M. Scheler, Gadamer contrasts the concept of world with that of environment. All living creatures have their environment, but only humans have a world. ‘Man’s relationship to the world is characterized by freedom from the environment. This freedom implies that linguistic constitution of the world. Both belong together. To rise above the pressure of what impinges on us from the world means to have language and to have “world”‘ (Gadamer, 1989, p. 444).
Gadamer contends that the thesis of the integration between language and world or the linguistic constitution of the world is the real thrust of W.V. Humboldt’s idea that ‘languages are worldviews’ or ‘a language-view is a worldview’. However, Humboldt’s concept of language is the linguist’s notion of language, namely, particular types of natural languages as lexicon or grammar. For Gadamer, it is not by virtue of its form that a language is a worldview, but rather by virtue of what is embodied in it. ‘If every language is a view of the world, it is so not primarily because it is a particular type of language (in the way that linguists view language) but because of what is said or handed down in this language’ (Gadamer, 1989, p. 441). ‘What constitutes the hermeneutical event proper is not language as language, whether as grammar or as lexicon; it consists in the coming into language of what has been said in the tradition’ (Gadamer, 1989, p. 463). For example, it is not Chinese language per se, as a natural language with its unique grammatical structure and lexicon, but rather the Chinese cultural tradition embodied in it, as handed down linguistically by the Chinese language, that constitutes the worldview of the Chinese. In other words, it is as embodying the happening of tradition that a language is a worldview. Moreover, for Gadamer, ‘tradition is essentially verbal in character’ (Gadamer, 1989, p. 389). Tradition is embodied or sedimented in language, transmitted and handed down linguistically.
The contact point between Gadamer’s linguistically formulated and transmitted tradition as worldview and our concept of P-language has become evident. It would not be too much of an exaggeration to claim that our concept of P-language is, roughly, a linguistic counterpart of Gadamer’s notion of tradition, which itself is linguistically formed and transmitted. Just as there are multiple P-languages, there exist different traditions, each of which corresponds to a linguistically constituted world or worldview and has its own unique path of development. A language community situated in a particular cultural or linguistic tradition sees the world differently from another language community belonging to a different tradition. Distinct traditions or language-worlds might be in conflict with one another, which puts mutual understanding between them at risk. The comparison between P-language and tradition becomes more striking if we consider the similar roles of the M-presuppositions of a P-language and the prejudices of a tradition. Pre-judices and pre-judgments conditioned by a tradition are actually pre-suppositions of a P-language. Of course, Gadamer’s notion of prejudice is a broader notion than that of M-presupposition. But I think Gadamer would agree that the three major types of M-presuppositions I have identified are clearly prejudices that shape one’s worldview and are preconditions for cross-tradition/cross-language understanding.
Now, let us see what happens when we try to understand an alien P-language or language-world from the perspective of Gadamerian hermeneutics. To begin with, we are always ontologically situated in a history, a culture, a form of life, or a tradition articulated in our own home P-language. From this given situation—the existential state of the language community—the language community forms a specific mode of reasoning, a unique categorical framework, and universal principles about the world surrounding it. When confronting an unfamiliar alien P-language or language-world, it is natural for us to project these prejudgments or M-presuppositions from our home P-language onto the other. The projection is not in the first place a matter of choice. Rather, we are ‘thrown’ into it. All understanding is projective. Contrary to the adoptive approach to understanding,
[t]he fact that our experience of the world is bound to language does not imply an exclusiveness of perspectives. If, by entering foreign language-worlds, we overcome the prejudices and limitations of our previous experience of the world, this does not mean that we leave and negate our own world. Like travelers, we return home with new experiences. Even if we emigrate and never return, we still can never wholly forget. (Gadamer, 1989, p. 448)
Instead, the prejudgments or presuppositions from our own P-language should be considered almost like transcendental ‘conditions’ or the springboard of understanding from which we can reach out to the other language. In this sense, our own language is not a restriction but the very principle of understanding. Therefore, we do not need to (and cannot either) bracket or forget our own language in order to understand the others.
However, this by no means restricts us to the absolutistic projective understanding. On the one hand, we cannot rely blindly on the prejudgments or M-presuppositions of our own P-language by taking the projective approach from our own P-language as the proper one. In order to understand an alien P-language, we must make our own situation (here, the M-presuppositions of our own home P-language) transparent so that we can appreciate precisely the otherness without concealing the proper meaning of the other language by allowing our unelucidated prejudices to distort it. To reveal self-reflectively the M-presuppositions of our own P-language, it is necessary to allow otherness of an alien language to be disclosed. Only after we are conscious of the M-presuppositions embedded within our own P-language, can we allow the other language to speak for itself, to reveal its proper meaning (the speaker-language meaning). On the other hand, only in confrontation with an alien P-language and its M-presuppositions, can we hope to get beyond the limits of our present horizon. It is precisely in and through the understanding of an alien P-language (culture, tradition, or form of life) and a realization of how different others are from our own that we can come to a more sensitive and critical understanding of our own P-language (culture, tradition, or form of life) and of those M-presuppositions or prejudices that may lie hidden from us. Self-consciousness is always relative to consciousness of otherness and alienness. To understand an alien P-language, we must participate or share in it, listen to it, open ourselves to what the language is saying, and allow it to speak to us.
The above dialectical interplay between understanding our own P-language and understanding an alien P-language is Gadamer’s hermeneutic circle of understanding. Whilst we must not allow ourselves to be blinded by the prejudgments or M-presuppositions coming with our own language; otherwise we will be unable to open ourselves to the other and allow the other to speak to us. Neither should we bracket all the prejudgments or M-presuppositions of our own P-language or jump into the stream of the other’s experience. It is only the play of these M-presuppositions that allows us to engage in the process of understanding, to reach out to the other, and to capture the speaker-language meaning. Therefore, mutual understanding in abnormal discourse necessarily involves a constant movement back and forth between our own language and the other language. The speaker-language meaning can only be grasped through this circle of understanding.
In fact, both Kuhn and Feyerabend have somehow experienced hermeneutic understanding in their encounter with incommensurable texts. As we have discussed at the very beginning of the book, Kuhn was extremely perplexed by Aristotle’s assertions about motion, which, for Kuhn, are not even false, but senseless, absurd, and having no truth-value. Even so, Kuhn was able to comprehend the basic subject matter that Aristotle discussed, i.e., mechanics. What really perplexes Kuhn is not the total incomprehension of the texts, but rather the tension he felt between alienness and familiarity of the text to him. Such a tension indicates Kuhn’s initial failure of understanding of Aristotle’s mechanics. In Gadamerian terms, Kuhn’s failure of understanding was the result of his initial projecting of the prejudices (M-presuppositions) of Newtonian mechanics onto Aristotelian mechanics. But Kuhn did not blindly stick to his own fore-meanings and prejudgments. More careful attention to the details of the text made Kuhn suspect that the fault might be his own approach of reading Aristotle. He revised and readjusted his assumptions and continued to puzzle over the details of the text by approaching Aristotle from a different horizon. The effort paid off and his perplexities suddenly vanished in that memorable hot summer day when ‘suddenly the fragments in my head sorted themselves out in a new way, and fell into place together’ (Kuhn, 1987, p. 9).
What Kuhn has described here is actually his personal encounter with Gadamer’s hermeneutic circle, the dialectical interplay between his own fore-structures, fore-meanings (the M-presuppositions of Newtonian mechanics) and the text (Aristotelian mechanics) to be understood. Kuhn was trained in the research tradition of modern physics with Newtonian mechanics as one paradigm. In seeking to understand Aristotle, Kuhn did not leave his prejudices behind. He carried his prejudices from the Newtonian tradition along when he first approached Aristotle. He tried to project his tentative fore-meanings for the text as a whole (the whole). But those fore-meanings were revised in light of attention to the details of the text (the part). Through constant negotiation and argumentation between his evolving fore-meanings (the whole) and the text itself (the part), Kuhn eventually moved towards ‘the harmony of all the details with the whole’. At last, his projected fore-meanings were confirmed by the text when the unity of meaning was borne out. The text started to speak its own truth to him.
Feyerabend touches on the hermeneutic circle when he discusses the application of the anthropological method in his classical case study on the shift from ‘the archaic style’ to ‘the classical style’ in ancient Greek art, which we discussed at length in chapter 10. Recall that Feyerabend finds out that every formal feature of a style (a theory or a language) corresponds to assumptions (hidden or explicit) inherent in its underlying cosmology. To understand the shift between the two incommensurable art styles, Feyerabend needs to identify and understand the cosmology behind the archaic style, i.e., the cosmology of the archaic Greeks. In contrast with the method of logical reconstruction, which he takes to be the misguided obsession of many philosophers of science of the time, Feyerabend has a great appreciation of the anthropological method used by social anthropologists, such as Evans-Pritchard, who attempt to understand the worldview or cosmology of an alien tribe. For Feyerabend, ‘the anthropological method is the correct method for studying the structure of science (and, for that matter, of any other form of life)’ (Feyerabend, 1978, p. 252).
To begin with, the anthropologist tries to discover the way in which the cosmology is mirrored in the tribe’s language, arts, and daily life. To do so, he has to learn the language and the basic social activities, and to identify key ideas. Whether some ideas are key ideas not only depends upon the roles that the ideas play in the native’s cosmology, but also can only be identified against the interpreter’s belief system. ‘His attention to minutiae is not the result of a misguided urge for completeness but of the realization that what looks insignificant to one way of thinking (and perceiving) may play a most important role in another’ (Feyerabend, 1978, p. 250). To understand those key ideas, the anthropologist cannot simply bracket his own knowledge and assumptions and leave them behind to ‘go native’. ‘The anthropologist carries within himself both the native society and his own background’ (Feyerabend, 1978, p. 250). But more importantly, on no account must he attempt a ‘logical reconstruction’, i.e., to project his own fore-meanings and prejudices into the native, which is the method used by many philosophers of science in their understanding of past scientific practices. ‘Such a procedure would tie him to the known, or to what is preferred by certain groups, and would forever prevent him from grasping the unknown ideology he is examining’ (Feyerabend, 1978, p. 250).
Clearly, Feyerabend’s anthropological method is hermeneutic in character. In fact, he actually presents a version of the hermeneutic circle in the following passage:
The examination of key ideas passes through various stages, none of which leads to a complete clarification. Here the researcher must exercise firm control over his urge for instant clarity and logical perfection. ... Each item of information is a building block of understanding, which means that it is to be clarified by the discovery of further blocks from the language and ideology of the tribe rather than by premature definitions. ... They [referring to the fore-meanings projected] are preliminary attempts to anticipate the arrangement of the totality of all blocks. They are then to be tested and elucidated by the discovery of further blocks rather than by logical clarification. (Feyerabend, 1978, pp. 251-2)
The parallel between Feyerabend’s version of the hermeneutic circle and Gadamerian hermeneutic circle is evident. Both presuppose that what is to be understood (for Gadamer, the alien texts defying our initial comprehension while for Feyerabend, incommensurable scientific research traditions or paradigms), no matter how distant and alien it is to the interpreter, can be understood. Both Feyerabend’s and Gadamer’s hermeneutic circles are characterized by the constant movement back and forth between ‘parts’, the detail of the text to be understood, and ‘whole’, the harmony of all the details as a whole. Both provide us with a way of avoiding two extremes, the adoptive and the projective approaches to understanding.
It is time to summarize what we have learnt from our discussion of the hermeneutic experience of understanding an alien P-language in abnormal discourse, that is, openness of the incommensurables. Gadamer, Kuhn, and Feyerabend all believe that ‘everything that is intelligible must be accessible to understanding and to interpretation’ (Gadamer, 1989, p. 404). It is true that those who are brought up in a particular P-language or a particular linguistic and cultural tradition see the world in a different way from those who belong to other P-languages or traditions. It is true that two P-languages or two historical ‘worlds’ that succeed one another in the course of the same cultural or linguistic tradition are different from one another; but in whatever P-language or tradition we consider it, it is always a human (i.e., verbally constituted) language-world that presents itself to us. As verbally constituted, every such P-language or language-world is of itself always open to every possible insight and hence to every expansion of its own world picture, and is accordingly open to being understood by others (Gadamer, 1989. p. 447).
As such, we have reached the same conclusion as does R. Bernstein:
The core of the incommensurability thesis, as we have seen, is not closure and being encapsulated in self-contained frameworks but the openness of experience, language, and understanding. (Bernstein, 1983, p. 108)
This conclusion is the opposite of a prevailing interpretation of the incommensurability thesis: The thesis leads to some form of extreme relativism, either Carnap’s Myth of the Framework—what is incommensurable is enclosed within the walls of its own prison house built up by its unique tradition, language, and form of life—or Davidson’s Myth of Unintelligibility—an alien conceptual scheme could be extremely remote from ours to the extent of being ‘mutually unintelligible’ or ‘forever beyond our grasp’. On the contrary, if we follow Heidegger to give understanding an ontological orientation by interpreting it as an existential mode of existence of Dasein (human existence), we start ‘to recognize temporal distance as a positive and productive condition enabling understanding’ (Gadamer, 1989, p. 297). Similarly, although the conceptual distance between two incommensurables (P-language, cultural or research traditions, paradigms, forms of life) does cause some difficulty in mutual understanding, it by no means sets insurmountable barriers between both sides. Instead, we should take this challenge as an invitation to genuine understanding, both understanding others and understanding ourselves. We can only truly understand ourselves by comparison with others and by testing our own prejudices during the process of understanding others.
However, we have to end such an optimistic, spirit-lifting journey along the hermeneutic path with a cautious note about mutual understanding in abnormal discourse. Be aware that what we have concluded so far is that it is possible to achieve a better, more effective mutual understanding if we follow Gadamer’s suggestions. To put the point more precisely, mutual hermeneutic understanding is possible in abnormal discourse. Another’s horizon is open for us to understand. But this does not entail that a complete, full (hermeneutic) understanding between two incompatible P-languages is feasible. Remember that Gadamer’s hermeneutic understanding is a process in which a speaker is coming-to-an-understanding and reaching-an-agreement with someone or with a text about something. It is an open-ended process that can never achieve finality. We will see later in chapter 15 when we discuss Gadamer’s conversation model of communication that such an understanding can only be achieved through conversation, which is in essence a process of communication. I will argue that an undistorted full cross-language communication between two incompatible P-languages cannot be achieved.
1 What we are concerned with here is the intelligibility of human linguistic systems (or ideas, thoughts, theories, conceptual schemes), not animal languages or the languages of extraterrestrial aliens, should they exist.
2 A primary contrast is between those who hold that it is the author’s intention alone that determines the meaning of a text (literary theorists as E. Hirsch, P. Juhl and historians Q. Skinner and J. Pocock) and those who acknowledge the reader’s participation in the constitution of the meaning. For the latter view, there is wide divergence as to how much the reader can contribute to the meaning of a text. Some (such as W. Iser) believe that the author imposes definite limits on the meaning although it still leaves ample room within those limits for competent readers to form different interpretations. At one extreme stands S. Fish, for whom a text’s meaning is so radically indeterminate that readers can create a variety of meanings at will.
3 The monologue mode of meaning identified here roughly corresponds to what M. Dummett calls the code theory of meaning.
4 As my bibliography indicates, I refer to two different translations of Gadamer’s Truth and Method for more accuracy with the original text.
5 Kuhn, 1983b, pp. 672-3; 1988, p. 11; 1991, p. 5.
6 The basic idea presented below is essentially R. Bernstein’s. See his 1983.