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34 Beyond Obiectivism and Relativism discover still another rationality debate. And here, too, the central issues bear on the Cartesian Anxiety and can themselves be interpreted as further evidence of the movement beyond objectivism and relativism. PHILOSOPHIC HERMENEUTICS: A PRIMORDIAL MODE OF BEING In 1960 (at approximately the same time that Kuhn's and Winch's monographs appeared), Hans-Georg Gadamer published Wahrheit und Methode. (The English translation, Truth and Method, was published in 1975.) Gadamer was sixty years old then, and the book, his magnum opus, represents a life's work of philosophic and hermeneutical reflection. Building on the work of Heidegger, or rather drawing on themes that are implicit in Heidegger and developing them in novel ways, Gadamer's book is one of the most comprehensive and subtle statements of the meaning and scope of hermeneutics to appear in our time. Hermeneutics, for Gadamer, is no longer restricted to the problem of Method in the Geisteswissenschaften; it moves to the very center of philosophy and is given an ontological turn; understanding , for Gadamer, is a primordial mode of our being in the world. Acknowledging his debt to Heidegger, Gadamer tells us: On the basis of Heidegger's existential analysis of Dasein, with the many new perspectives that it implies for metaphysics, the function of hermeneutics in the human sciences also appears in a totally new light. While Heidegger resurrects the problem of Being in a form which goes far beyond all traditional metaphysics-he secures at the same time a radically new possibility in the face of the classical [aporias] of historicism: his concept of understanding carries an ontological weight. Moreover, understanding is no longer an operation antithetic and subsequent to the operations of the constitutive life, but a primordial mode of being of human life itself.52 At first sight it may appear as if Gadamer's primary concerns are foreign to those that have been dominant in the postempiricist philosophy and history of natural science and to the rationality debate that followed Winch's controversial claims about the social sciences. Natural science is not explicitly analyzed in Truth and Method but enters only obliquely as a manifestation of "Method" that is contrasted with Gadamer's probing of the "hermeneutical phenomenon." In Truth and Method Gadamer does not discuss such social sciences as 35 An Overview economics, political science, sociology, or anthropology. He concentrates primarily on the experience of works of art, the understanding and interpretation of literary texts, and the study of history. Nevertheless the claims that Gadamer makes for the ontological primacy and universality of hermeneutics have important consequences for our understanding of the natural and social sciences. When I turn later to a detailed examination of Gadamer's contribution , we will see that there is a basis for a dialogue between hermeneutics and our current understanding of the natural and social sciences. Despite the contrasts that Gadamer wants to draw between modern science and the type of knowledge and truth that we can achieve through hermeneutics, his own understanding of hermeneutics helps to deepen our understanding of the natural and social sciences. At the same time we can also use insights gained from recent investigations of the natural and social sciences to test the limits of Gadamer's conception of philosophic hermeneutics. Here we touch upon a crucial ambiguity caused by the disparity between the Anglo-American and the German understanding of the nature of the social sciences. In the Anglo-American tradition, intellectual disciplines fall into the trichotomy of the natural sciences, social sciences, and humanities, but on the Continent they are categorized according to the dichotomy between the Naturwissenschaften and the Geisteswissenschaften (the expression that was introduced into German as a translation for what Mill called the "moral sciences"). In the main tradition of Anglo-American thought-at least until recently-the overwhelming bias has been to think of the social sciences as natural sciences concerning individuals in their social relations. The assumption has been that the social sciences differ in the degree and not in kind from the natural sciences and that ideally the methods and standards appropriate to the natural sciences can be extended by analogy to the social sciences. But in the German tradition there has been a much greater tendency to think of the social disciplines as forms of Geisteswissenschaften sharing essential characteristics with the humanistic disciplines. One of the reasons why Gadamer's work has received so much attention is because it appeared at a time when...

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