Gadamer wanted to know how we come to understand artworks, texts, traditions, and other people.

Gadamer described understanding as an interpretive and linguistic process of "play" between human beings.

Gadamer's hermeneutics offers a unique philosophy of genuine human engagement, dialogue, and development.

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The German philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer, considered by many to be one of the most important philosophers of the 20th Century, set out in his magnum opus, Truth and Method, to understand how human understanding works. He wanted to know what happens, for instance, when we interpret a work of art, a text, a tradition in any of its forms, or what another person says to us in conversation. He wanted to know what happens when the communication of meaning occurs and insights are shared, and what conditions make such an understanding possible.

A Challenge to the Scientific Method

Gadamer saw that the experiences of understanding that we undergo in our encounters with art, texts, traditions, and others in conversation bring about genuine knowledge of genuine truth about our world — yet this understanding “happens” through a process that is quite different from the modern scientific method, which was commonly thought to be the only way to knowledge. The claim that modern science had a monopoly on knowledge (popular in Gadamer’s time and still in ours) was, thus, an illegitimate claim for Gadamer.

Gadamer saw that understanding, and the interpretation wrapped up with it, was such a primordial and pervasive activity for human beings that it “happened” long before we engaged in any methodological knowledge-seeking efforts. In fact, it formed the basic background or foundation upon which any methodologically derived knowledge made “sense” to us or was of any relevance. It also ran through the activities of science as well, even if scientists didn’t acknowledge it. Science misunderstood itself,........

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