Andreas van Cranenburgh

1. Heidegger views understanding as a continuous projecting of possibilities. The
possibilities that are projected before something is engaged (the so-called
fore-structures) can be viewed as presuppositions, because they are made before
the hermeneutical cycle has been started. Because humans are always already in
the world (situated), they can rely on certain background knowledge, which will
include presuppositions about that which is to be interpreted.

The insistence on presuppositions can be related to Davidson's appeal to charity
by viewing these presuppositions as the shared beliefs that the principle of charity
assumes. In other words, for interpretation to succeed, our presuppositions must overlap
with those of who we interpret to a sufficient degree, in order for incorrect
presuppositions to be detected and corrected, and to provide a fertile ground
for understandig new observations.


2. The `questioning of things' can be seen as the engine driving the
hermeneutical process, even more, Gadamer considers questions to be more
central to knowledge than answers.  One should not resign and stop
re-interpreting something, because each new look at something can reveal new
insights, hence one should always keep questioning the always provisional and
fallible understanding.

Knowledge gathered in this dialectic process is not objective but
intersubjective. The end result is path dependent, in that is the result of the
questions through which it was arrived at.

Any hermeneutical understanding is necessarily different from that what the author had
in mind, because the interpreter has his own particular horizon, with his own concerns and
interests, relative to which an interpretation is made. The understanding that can be
obtained is the result of a dialogue between the text and these concerns and interests,
and these horizons are fused in the case of successful understanding.

3. Different presuppositions are like different initial conditions for the process of
understanding, and they may lead to different understandings. Understanding is then
perhaps relative to the presuppositions that went along with it.
A possible way out I think is that meanings are not arbitrary, but always cohere. If we
misunderstand a word, this will affect the whole understanding of a text, which implies
it cannot go by unnoticed; consequently any conflicting presuppositions will
then have to be re-evaluated. In effect Gadamer seems to claim that the process of
understanding is convergent, so that people will converge on the same
understanding of things, in the limit. Perhaps in the end all our horizons can be fused.