Part 1: The question of truth...

So, I'm doing a directed reading of Gadamer's major work 'Truth and Method' this semester. I thought, to keep me honest, as well as to help me understand the material better I might attempt to blog through it. If you want an overview of the text, the Wikipedia summary is pretty good.

I'm hoping to make this summary as accessible as possible, unlike a lot of feedback I got on stuff I wrote a few years back. Gadamer's work is terribly important for pretty much everything. In the past, it certainly woke me up from my dogmatic slumber. Hopefully it will be helpful for you, too. This is my first attempt to read it cover to cover. I can't promise I'll be able to blog the whole thing, but I'll do my best.



(a) The problem of method

The problem as it stands is that for most of the 19th century, as onward, the human sciences are governed by employing the model of the natural sciences (3). In other words, the inductive method – basic to all experimental science – is the only method which yields valid results. Attached to this is the assumption that the inductive method is also free from all metaphysical assumptions and remains independent of how one conceives of the phenomena one is observing (4).

The specific problem, as it relates to the human sciences is that one has not actually grasped their nature if on measures them by the ‘yardstick’ of the inductive method. “The experience of the sociohistorical world cannot be raised to a science by the inductive procedure of the natural sciences” (4). The reason for this is that historical research doesn’t attempt to grasp a concrete phenomenon as an instance of a universal law. In other words, the individual case doesn’t serve only to confirm a law from which practical predictions can be made. It’s ideal is rather to understand the phenomenon itself in its unique and historical concreteness.

Yet, this leads to a deeper problem: even if we acknowledge that the human sciences are fundamentally different from natural sciences, we are still tempted to describe the human sciences in a negative way – as ‘inexact’ sciences.

There have been multiple approaches of dealing with this problem. Gadamer outlines several: Hemholtz, Droysen, Dilthey, Kant.

Perhaps the greatest of those dealing with the problem was Herder who “transcended the perfectionism of the Enlightenment with his new ideal of ‘cultivating the human’ and thus prepared the ground for the growth of the historical sciences of the 19th century. “The concept of self-formation, education or cultivation (Bildung), which became supremely important at the time, was perhaps the greatest idea of the 18th century, and it is this concept which is the atmosphere breathed by the human sciences of the 19th century, even if they are unable to offer any epistemological justification for it” (8).