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131 From Hermeneutics to Praxis Even where life changes violently, as in ages of revolution, far more of the old is preserved in the supposed transformation of everything than anyone knows, and combines with the new to create a new value. At any rate, preservation is as much a freely·chosen action as revolution and renew· al. This is why both the enlightenment's critique of tradition and its roman· tic rehabilitation are less than their true historical being. (TM, p. 250; WM, p. 265) Gadamer pursues the analysis of prejudice, authority, and tradi· tion in the context of probing what is distinctive about hermeneuti· cal understanding, but one cannot help being struck by his rapprochement with insights gleaned from the postempiricist philosophy and history of science, where the importance of tradition has also been recognized. As we have traced the stages of development in recent philosophy of science, we have seen the importance of the concept of research traditions in the practice of science. This was anticipated by the Kuhn's emphasis on the historical dimension of what he called "normal science," was refined by Lakatos' analysis of research programs, and was further elaborated by Laudan's analysis of research traditions. In these analyses of science, the concept of tradition is employed to give us a better grasp of the way in which scientific rationality must be situated within living traditions. It is important to be sensitive to differences among various types of tradition and to the ways in which they are reconstituted, criticized, and even overthrown. But any attempt to distinguish scientific practice from other forms of human conduct by employing the opposition between reason and tradition is inadequate and misleading. But we want to know how Gadamer's reflections on prejudice, authority, and tradition enable us to increase our comprehension of what understanding is, and how they help to clarify the central thesis that "understanding must be conceived as part of the process of coming into being of meaning." We can see how Gadamer weaves these themes together by turning to his discussion and transforma· tion of the hermeneutical circle. THE HERMENEUTICAL CIRCLE At several earlier stages of our inquiry we have anticipated the discussion of the hermeneutical circle, witnessing how thinkers working in different contexts have discovered for themselves its centrality. Kuhn even records "a decisive episode in the summer of 1947" when he made this discovery in his struggle to make sense of 132 Beyond Objectivism and Relativism Aristotle's physics. He reports that he was deeply perplexed about how Aristotle, who had been "an acute and naturalistic observer" and who "in such fields as biology or political behavior" had given penetrating interpretations, could have said so many absurd things about motion. "How could his characteristic talents have failed him so when applied to motion? ... And, above all, why had his views been taken so seriously for so long a time by so many of his successors ?" The more Kuhn read, the more perplexed he became. But "one memorable (and very hot) summer day those perplexities suddenly vanished." Kuhn discovered the rudiments of an alternative way of reading the texts with which I had been struggling. For the first time I gave due weight to the fact that Aristotle's subject was change-of-quality in general, including both the fall of a stone and the growth of a child to adulthood. In his physics, the subject that was to become mechanics was at best a still-not-quite-isolable special case. More consequential was my recognition that the permanent ingredients of Aristotle 's universe, its ontologically primary and indestructible elements, were not material bodies but rather the qualities which, when imposed on some portion of omnipresent neutral matter, constituted an individual material body or substance.'" In Gadamerian terms, we can say that Kuhn's initial perplexity was the result of his approaching Aristotle's physics through the prejudices of modern mechanics. Aristotle's claims seemed not only false but absurd. In effect, Kuhn was asking the wrong sorts of questions , and what he had to learn was to ask the right questions-and to come to understand the questions that Aristotle was seeking to answer. Kuhn tells us that this episode changed his intellectual career and became "central to my historical research." In trying to transmit the lesson he learned to his students, he, in effect, formulates his own version of the hermeneutical circle, in a passage that I quoted in part I: When...

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