1. Introductory Remarks: Historically Effected Consciousness

For Hans-Georg Gadamer, prejudice is integral to our subjective experience of the world (Cf. Gadamer, Reference Gadamer and Linge1976, p. 9; Reference Gadamer, Weinsheimer and Marshall2004, p. 272ff.). If the perspectives that inform our experiences can change over time without losing this condition of prejudice, then we can infer some obvious consequences. First is that, if a change in perspectives over time entails a corresponding change in the content of the prejudices underlining them, then we would be greatly restricted in our capacity to recreate an original experience — this is what Joseph Cunningham (Reference Cunningham2017) hints at when discussing how “the temporality of experiences enforces this restriction” (p. 51). Second, even without this change in our prejudices, our perspectives would remain subjectively limited and partial. What I argue for in this article is that even with time's passage making it difficult to re-attain an original perspective, there is a more pressing issue of our partial subjectivity incapacitating us from ever ascertaining an authentic understanding of that perspective (Cf. Gadamer, Reference Gadamer and Mueller-Vollmer1985, pp. 281–282; Reference Gadamer, Weinsheimer and Marshall2004, p. 159), even if we happen to stumble upon it.Footnote ¹

The interpretive powers that capacitate understanding are therefore conditioned in a dual manner. First, they highlight the causal historicity of one's subjectivity, the latter's being caused by inherited tradition and culture. Second, these powers are also characterized by a present perspectival baggage (Leiviskä, Reference Leiviskä2015, p. 591), influenced in part from said tradition and culture and partially informing what one's understanding can viably be about. As such, despite a temporal distanciation from the past, one may still intelligibly mediate between the past and present to give us epistemically relevant, albeit uncertain, “ways back to the past” (Cunningham, Reference Cunningham2017, p. 35. Cf. Leiviskä, Reference Leiviskä2015, p. 589; Schuster, Reference Schuster2013, p. 198). In short, just because one is perspectivally limited by tradition and culture does not imply that one is epistemically impotent.

One way of coming to terms with this limited yet potent epistemic conditioning of our interpretive powers is through what Jürgen Habermas (Reference Habermas, Weber Nicholsen and Stark1988) regards as our partial knowledge of “the tradition with which we are confronted” in every instance of appropriating the tradition to engage in interpretation (p. 152. Cf. Gadamer, Reference Gadamer, Weinsheimer and Marshall2004, pp. 280–281). This knowledge both is partial and is itself traditionally informed, in that it allows us to be aware not only “of the ways in which we are effected by history,” but also “of our inability to be fully conscious of all the ways in which we are preconditioned” (Leiviskä, Reference Leiviskä2015, p. 591). More generally then, any knowledge ‘preconditioned’ by one's culture and ‘effected by history,’ whether it attends an awareness of its preconditioning/effectedness, is what Gadamer (Reference Gadamer, Weinsheimer and Marshall2004) would call a “historically effected consciousness,” or HEdC. Here, what may be ‘historically effected’ is a consciousness of “the human aspect of things, the system of man's needs and interests” (pp. 301, 433).Footnote ²

Furthermore, that the HEdC includes awareness of one's historical effectedness, and not just non-self-aware historically effected knowledge, is integral to understanding subjectivity's historicity. Chung-Ying Cheng (Reference Cheng2015) similarly corroborates:

One reading of Cheng's statement can be couched in terms of a moderated receptivity: I can understand that my prejudices are historically handed, but not what they and, mutatis mutandis, their originating pasts exactly are.

However, this historicity of subjectivity is only one factor capacitating interpretive accuracy in our understanding of other perspectives that share in a similar historical inheritance. Indeed, although Gadamer (Reference Gadamer, Weinsheimer and Marshall2004) initially notes that one can legitimately “see the past in its own terms” and “in its true dimensions” by “acquiring an appropriate historical horizon” (p. 302. Cf. Vessey, Reference Vessey2014, p. 372), he is weary of this being all that there is to genuine understanding. This is because endeavouring to fully recreate a historical horizon amounts to a denial of the temporally present bias of the HEdC, thereby rescinding meaningfulness in any such ‘re-creative’ understanding and ultimately making it irrelevant to one's own subjectivity (Cf. Gadamer, Reference Gadamer, Weinsheimer and Marshall2004, pp. 302–303). Thus, if the acquisition of an accurate understanding — of the past or any other perspective in general — cannot be but a subjectively meaningless one, then how the HEdC mediates between these demands of accuracy and meaningfully subjective relevance for our interpretations may be as follows: clarifying and understanding one's own horizon — i.e., the set of prejudices informing our perspective — aids in understanding the horizons of others. In other words, without knowledge of one's own perspective as it is presently situated, understanding that of another, although possibly ‘accurate’ in a superficially factual sense, becomes subjectively meaningless in some other sense.

However, the hermeneutic process goes the other direction as well: by coming to understand the horizon of, for instance, a past other, we inevitably allow for the “emancipation from our own” (Wang, Reference Wang2018, p. 569). Of course, such emancipation is not tantamount to attaining an objectified point of view, for in learning about another's perspective we are still informed by our own biases (Cf. Odenstedt, Reference Odenstedt2005, p. 46; Segev, Reference Segev2007, p. 324). Nevertheless, becoming aware of other points of view is edifyingly emancipatory since we thereby acquire potentially shareable knowledge of other valid ways of interpreting the world (Cf. Gadamer, Reference Gadamer, Weinsheimer and Marshall2004, p. 303; Lynch, Reference Lynch2014, p. 374) — ways that are derived from the horizons of contemporary and past interlocutors.Footnote ³ Therefore, although I may be unable to perfectly understand the perspective of another due to my own historically informed perspectival situatedness, in communication with another, I can come to a new epistemic stance regarding my own perspective.

There are thus two poles to the hermeneutic process involving the HEdC: on the one hand, in understanding my own historical effectedness, I come to better, albeit not fully, understand the other in a subjectively meaningful manner; on the other hand, in engaging with the other, I come to more accurately grasp how I am so effected. These two poles always concertedly function in the hermeneutic process, since understanding oneself cannot do without understanding other past/contemporary perspectives, and vice versa. This accords with Gadamer's fundamentally dialogical view of understanding (Cf. Section 6).Footnote ⁴

It is here where we can ask the guiding question of this article's main inquiry: ‘of what can hermeneutic goals viably consist?’ We obviously want to extricate ourselves from our own situatedness enough to recognize alternative discourses, but not in such a way that we become misguided on how our subjectivity's historicity informs our ways of understanding such discourses (Cf. Marshall, Reference Marshall and Krajewski2003, pp. 125–126). This corresponds to the previously discussed first pole of subjectively meaningfully understanding the other. Nevertheless, what about accurately understanding the other? While the second pole compels considerations of accuracy in one's self-understanding through engaging with the other, how would we then gauge accuracy in our interpretations of others when trying to see them from their own horizons, past or present?Footnote ⁵

2. Historically Effective Consciousness

Gadamer attempts to answer this through the idea of a historically effective consciousness, or HEvC, involved with the HEdC in more substantially informing the hermeneutic process. To set up the discussion, briefly, the HEvC is a state of being open to the possibility of different interpretations hinging on a shared subject matter undergirding the horizons of different interlocutors.

To be more precise, Gadamer does not outright state ‘historically effective consciousness’ in his discussion of the hermeneutic process. However, he does hint at an implicit notion thereof when noting that “[t]he general structure of understanding is concretized in historical understanding, in that the concrete bonds of custom and tradition and the corresponding possibilities of one's own future become effective in understanding itself” (Gadamer, Reference Gadamer, Weinsheimer and Marshall2004, p. 254). Therefore, understanding another's horizon hinges on both our effected biases as well as their effective capacity for intelligible speculation in our interpretations (Cf. Cheng, Reference Cheng2015, pp. 38–39; Wang, Reference Wang2018, p. 567).

We can concretize the idea further: in interpreting a past text or perspective, we project other possibilities of understanding it by engaging our own horizons with those of others as sources of novel meaning and interpretation; for contemporary perspectives, we can project other possible ways of understanding them by letting them speak about themselves and acknowledging that our reception of what they have to say is conditioned by our own biases. It is this possibilization of different understandings of an object of interpretation, whether situated in the past or present, that is the main function of the HEvC, but this possibilization is parameterized by the HEdC that is our own familiar horizon. Importantly, these functions of the HEdC and HEvC do not subsist within distinct phenomena but are essentially two sides of the same coin that is our interpretive horizon. Our horizons therefore exhibit a dual functionality of familiarity (HEdC) as well as expansion of said familiarity by the aforementioned possibilization (HEvC). In summary, the enterprise of interpretation necessitates a shared endeavour of self- and other-recognition that must not comprehend both the self and other as fundamentally separated phenomena.

In addressing Gadamer's attempt to rescue a capacity for gauging accuracy between different interpretations, we ought to begin by asking whether the same interpretive object is even involved in the endeavour. This is because, on the face of it, there would be less reason to regard an interpretation as accurately interpretive of an object the less it can be said to be about that object. To be concise, we will regard an object of interpretation — either a past text or even a contemporary horizon — as attaining a subject matter, something that can be interpreted and further understood about said object. Consequently, what makes the shared endeavour of self- and other-recognition for interpretive understanding worthwhile is a shared subject matter between different horizons (Cf. Leiviskä, Reference Leiviskä2015, pp. 589, 599–600; Segev, Reference Segev2007, p. 325). This common subject matter allows for a veritable community of horizons situated not only contemporarily-spatially but also historically-temporally. Therefore, there is more reason for both the historically connected, yet temporally distant, and contemporary horizons to be accurately interpretive of their objects when they are brought to bear on a shared subject matter.

For my purposes more specifically, it is the interrelation between the HEvC and HEdC (the HEdC-HEvC relation) and how it is meant to undergird a hermeneutic process that potentiates accuracy in understanding other interlocutors, past or present, on which I primarily focus in this article. I contend, however, that how Gadamer develops the HEdC-HEvC relation yields troubling confusions, in that if Gadamer's espousal of interpretive accuracy is meant to be a denial of a kind of hermeneutic relativism, then his construal of the HEdC-HEvC relation allows us to weaken the force of that denial. To substantiate this argument, I interpret Gadamer's HEdC-HEvC relation in terms of said and unsaid elements shared by both relata to highlight how the interrelation of the elements contributes to a conceptual uncertainty that resurfaces relativism's possibility. To my mind, this interpretation of Gadamerian thought is novel, so I motivate it by comparison with other interpretations in the literature and by its capacity to naturally analyze other Gadamerian concepts — e.g., ‘fore-conception of completeness’ and ‘logic of question and answer.’

The structure of the rest of this article is as follows: in Section 3, I discuss how Gadamer grounds the hermeneutic process on ‘a polarity of familiarity and strangeness’ that capacitates that very process's supposedly truthful communication to us regarding interpretive objects. In Section 4, I introduce the notion of said/unsaid elements as it pertains to the HEdC-HEvC relation to cash in on the idea of interpretive truth being conditioned by coherence in the hermeneutic disclosure of truth. For Gadamer, this disclosure, first, involves a ‘common language’ that meaningfully links together both interpretive act and object (Section 5), and second, is itself a disclosure of the very being of the interpretive object that is permitted by the ‘logic of question and answer’ undergirding the common language's involvement in the hermeneutic process (Section 6). In Section 7, I introduce my main contention with how Gadamer appropriates this logic to combat against hermeneutic relativism by first noting the logic's role in a never-ending hermeneutic process, and how this never-ending, ‘infinite dialogue’ potentiates incoherence between horizons meant to be interpretive of the same object. I then analyze how Gadamer's notion of an ‘infinite horizon’ may resolve this incoherence, and thereby avoid the problem of relativism (Section 8), before addressing a potential weakness of such a resolution: the concept of an infinite horizon is perfectly consistent with the mere possibility of a hermeneutic relativism (Section 9). I conclude in Section 10 by motivating this possibility of relativism as germane to what some interpreters of Gadamer take to be his acceptance of a kind of relativism-friendly ‘hermeneutic game.’

3. Encountering the Thou

Note that, given our inability to fully conceptually surmount our own historical preconditioning (Leiviskä, Reference Leiviskä2015, pp. 588–589, 596), we often must rely on an other-oriented approach to aid us in this task. For Gadamer (Reference Gadamer, Weinsheimer and Marshall2004),

This provocation is possible because tradition is both familiar when informing one's own horizon and strange when acting as the subject matter with which we interpretively grapple (Dybel, Reference Dybel and Wierciński2011, pp. 473–474). This encounter of the familiar with the strange and foreign is essentially the impetus for genuine interpretive understanding and is why Gadamer (Reference Gadamer, Weinsheimer and Marshall2004) considers “[h]ermeneutic work [to be] based on a polarity of familiarity and strangeness” (p. 295. Cf. Odenstedt, Reference Odenstedt2005, p. 42).

These foreign elements permit greater understanding through the HEvC's acknowledgement of them as both constitutive of and possibilizing different interpretations about a shared subject matter. On the one hand, horizons and subject matters, when registered as foreign elements, both function as objects of interpretation that, through the HEvC, provoke our biases and alternative understandings besides those apparent from our HEdC. On the other hand, how one understands a foreign horizon differs from that of a subject matter by virtue of how that initial provocation is actualized into a viable interpretation: for a horizon, interpretive actualization happens in part through a shared subject matter between the horizons involved, while for the subject matter itself, it happens through shared conceptual similarities between the horizon and the subject matter in question.Footnote ⁶ Stated differently, the subject matter is a direct object of interpretation while foreign horizons are only indirect objects of interpretation, in that we interpret subject matters by their own terms that are shared with our own horizons, but we interpret other horizons in terms of a shared subject matter.

It is this shared assertion of difference and strangeness that is integral to how foreign horizons and subject matters begin speaking to us hermeneutically, since by this assertion we are at once both distanciated from ourselves and made aware of foreign elements as different from us (Leiviskä, Reference Leiviskä2015, pp. 590, 597). Indeed, one's capacity to form validly insightful interpretations necessitates encountering the strange through the HEvC, for that is how one appropriates their own biases, situated within the HEdC-given horizon, to regard the strange as strange (valid appropriation) and not as familiar (misappropriation). Following Gadamer (Reference Gadamer, Weinsheimer and Marshall2004), we will collectively call whatever asserts such strangeness to our horizon the “Thou” (p. xxxii), whether as horizon or subject matter. In essence, the alterity of the Thou forces us to reconsider our own horizon as a guarantor of authoritative interpretations, to see our horizon's prejudices for what they really are, historically effected and subject to revaluation.Footnote ⁷ Michael Pickering (Reference Pickering1999) calls this a dialectical process of othering both ourselves and the Thou (pp. 184, 194) — i.e., along with the otherness of the Thou, our hitherto familiar horizons can be other than what we had previously regarded as authoritatively interpretive. The Thou thus validly asserts itself as another legitimate voice, one that addresses itself to us but nonetheless one that we cannot fully understand (Cf. Vilhauer, Reference Vilhauer2010, p. 84).

Importantly, how the Thou is revealed to us has been variedly understood in the literature — e.g., as an awareness of the Thou's “historical contexts” (Cheng, Reference Cheng2015, p. 35) or its “productivity” in possibilizing different interpretations to our own (Leiviskä, Reference Leiviskä2015, p. 597) — but generally what is agreed upon is that what is revealed is revealed as not immediately familiar. Indeed, even if I may “see the [Thou] from a point of view constituted by [my horizon]” (Fristedt, Reference Fristedt2010, p. 491 n 14), this horizonal constitution is exactly what potentiates my seeing the Thou as strange in the first place. We can therefore say, in terms of Gadamer's ‘polarity of familiarity and strangeness,’ the Thou occupies a position of strangeness that gives the HEvC its characteristic potentiating power, yet the position of familiarity, occupied by the familiar horizon as the HEdC, engages the Thou and interacts with it. This interaction gets us closer towards interpretive truth if by the Thou's assertion of strangeness we rescind whatever authoritative self-consciousness we possess (Cf. p. 491 n 14), which is how the Thou speaks of itself “as a potentially valid claim of truth made upon oneself and one's own world” (Leiviskä, Reference Leiviskä2015, p. 595. Cf. Barthold, Reference Barthold2020, p. 49ff.).

The Thou's revelation, however, does not necessarily remain wholly strange to us. According to David Vessey (Reference Vessey2014), our HEdC already “limits the alterity of the [Thou] and therefore what we have to learn from it” (p. 372). As such, the transition from the Thou's strangeness to a partial understanding thereof is limited by how one's historical conditioning, one's HEdC, constrains that strangeness to within one's horizon's perspectival jurisdiction. Effectively, the HEdC grants the HEvC an attenuated possibilizing capacity, regulating the range of applicable and non-authoritative interpretations concerning a shared subject matter between a familiar horizon and the Thou.

However, whether this regulative function backs up Gadamer's revocation of hermeneutic relativism is yet to be settled. After all, an attenuated possibilization of the Thou's meaningfulness by the HEvC does not by itself preclude one's HEdC constraining the Thou's interpretability in mutually contradictory ways — ways that can be licensed as true given a hermeneutic relativism. Part of how Gadamer famously resists this worry of relativist truth is by a structural restriction of coherence whereby interpretations become viable when, approximately, the interpretive act coheres with its object. In Section 4, I analyze this restriction according to an account of the said/unsaid elements in the HEdC-HEvC relation interpreted from Gadamer's own words. This account will greatly aid our ability to evaluate Gadamer's denial of hermeneutic relativism a la this structural restriction of coherence, which forms part of the basis of his more penetrating treatment of interpretive accuracy and hermeneutic progress. However, this account also offers a natural analysis of the other portion of said treatment: an additional methodological restriction on attaining interpretive truth by a logic of question and answer. This additional restriction, as will become clearer starting at the end of Section 6, manages to re-motivate the worry of relativism. To prepare for this discussion, as well as an adjudication on whether Gadamer's own solution to this latter worry succeeds, we must first go over the requisite conceptual groundwork.

4. Coherence of Horizons

Remember that the HEdC constitutes one's awareness of one's historical conditioning and how one cannot fully transcend it. Regarding the linguistic formation of our HEdC, Gadamer (Reference Gadamer, Weinsheimer and Marshall2004) has this to say:

The unsaid becomes what the HEdC is projected towards by the HEvC's possibilizing tendencies. Nonetheless, because the HEdC is never fully transcended, whatever is unsaid cannot be so significantly different from what has been said that the former, presumably, contradicts the latter. Why this must be the case is because the recognizability of the HEdC's said is conditioned by a mandate on logical coherence, expressed in Gadamer's sense of the “fore-conception of completeness” (Gadamer, Reference Gadamer, Weinsheimer and Marshall2004, p. 294. Cf. Vessey, Reference Vessey2014, p. 371). Here, anything logically bound to a coherently apparent horizon, such as a shared subject matter, must not at the very least contradict it lest we enter a state of incoherence in which interpretations start to lose their relevance for our understanding of a subject matter (Cf. Cheng, Reference Cheng2015, p. 16).Footnote ⁸

Moreover, this coherence between the unsaid and said is hermeneutically potent, in that it allows the said to take up the unsaid for the expansion of one's familiar horizon, thereby causing that horizon to reveal itself more to the one possessing it (Cf. Fristedt, Reference Fristedt2010, p. 476). More precisely, by this horizonal expansion, one translates the HEdC's own unsaid elements into a broader set of said elements, or, from elements yet to be brought into a formed interpretation into those so formed. This is how a hitherto unconceptualized subject matter, shared between the familiar horizon and the unfamiliar Thou, becomes revealed to one within one's horizon.

Indeed, the concept of horizonal expansion as revelation of subject matter in the HEdC's unsaid may be read from Gadamer's (Reference Gadamer, Weinsheimer and Marshall2004) claim that “everything that is language has a speculative unity: it contains a distinction, that between its being and its presentations of itself, but this is a distinction that is really not a distinction at all” (p. 470). Here, the ‘being’ of language can be interpreted as the unsaid of one's familiar horizon (HEdC) unearthed in subsequent ‘presentations’ via an encounter with the Thou. More precisely, we may regard the HEdC's unsaid as the conceptual potentiality in our HEdC that becomes actualized through interaction with the HEvC. This fusion between the HEdC and HEvC via their shared subject matter thus leads to a subsequent expansion in the HEdC's said (Cf. Vessey, Reference Vessey2009, p. 540). The ‘speculative unity’ in language therefore is one shared between all elements, actual and potential, of both our HEdC and HEvC, wherein what is potential in the HEdC is further actualized by interaction with the HEvC, specifically with the actual and potential features of the Thou.

I am not being needlessly pedantic in interpreting Gadamer's claim of speculative unity here, for this interpretation can illuminate how others have come to understand this very claim, and how, as is explored in Section 5, Gadamer comes to mean what he does in making statements elsewhere. For instance, Peter Fristedt (Reference Fristedt2010) argues that,

Here, actuality/potency is couched in terms of presentation/being. Consequently, the relation between an experience's being and presentation is differently construed depending on whether the familiar horizon or Thou is experienced. Let us be specific. The said of our HEdC presents a horizon to us as familiar, while the said of the HEvC presents the Thou to us as strange — the non-familiarity of what is being said perturbs the familiarity of what has already been said. The HEvC's unsaid corresponds to the being of the Thou, which, following Gadamer's disavowal of interpretive relativism, also corresponds to the as-of-yet unelucidated but applicable interpretations of the Thou's being that cohere with one's familiar horizon.Footnote ⁹ The hermeneutic process is therefore as follows: what is initially said by our HEdC's familiar presentation coherently expands into what is subsequently said, or hitherto unsaid in the HEdC's being, and this is done by engaging with what is left unsaid in the HEvC's being after the initially strange presentation of the Thou through the HEvC's said.

Simply, the speculative unity of interpretation is constitutive of a ‘distinction between being and presentation’ that is both made in the said of the HEdC-HEvC relation and superseded in the unsaid of that relation: the account of the HEdC's said is couched in terms of the identity of a familiar horizon while the said of the HEvC is in terms of the difference of the Thou. However, both accounts of the unsaid for the HEdC and HEvC deal in terms of a coherently enlarging horizon by which a subject matter is better understood, wherein the HEvC's unsaid contains conceptual resources from which we can meaningfully venture into the unsaid of our own HEdC. As such, this speculative unity establishes horizons as functioning both in a coherent and open-ended fashion (Cunningham, Reference Cunningham2017, p. 35; Cf. Fristedt, Reference Fristedt2010, p. 475), expressive more of a disclosure of subjectively insightful — perhaps, novel yet coherent — rather than objectively correspondent truths by our limited understandings of some subject matter (Vessey, Reference Vessey2014, p. 361 n 2. Cf. Weinsheimer, Reference Weinsheimer and Krajewski2003, pp. 159–160).Footnote ¹⁰

This discussion of speculative unity in the coherence of horizons situates us favourably to evaluate how Gadamer accounts for interpretive accuracy. This is integral for our purposes because how such an account plays out in detail will give us a better grasp on whether it succeeds in motivating Gadamer's disavowal of hermeneutic relativism — this disavowal requires a fuller analysis of how Gadamer treats accuracy and progress in interpretation, and so far we have only explored an initial explanation for why the disclosure of truth can preclude at the very least contradiction without forgoing an accuracy norm for hermeneutic insight. As I will discuss in the upcoming sections, how Gadamer understands our capacity to evaluate hermeneutic progress, and therefore to make good on said accuracy norm, is intrinsically involved with his idea of the speculative unity of language in dialogical understanding. Particularly, Gadamer comprehends this capacity as potentiated by a common language both informing and manifested by a process of question and answer unearthing the being of the Thou. What will hopefully become clear is that this question-and-answer process is the very methodological centre of the HEdC-HEvC relation, and consequently deserves space for explication thereof.

5. A Common Language

Of significance here is Gadamer's (Reference Gadamer, Weinsheimer and Marshall2004) famous claim that “[e]very conversation presupposes a common language, or better, creates a common language” (p. 371), signifying that, during dialogue, one's engagement with the Thou furthers one's understanding insofar as a common language is involved. As such, a common language can in some way function as a barometer for evaluating progress in one's understanding. In this sense, there is commonality between a shared language and a shared subject matter, for both are unearthed in the process of dialogical understanding without necessarily being fully understood at any point therein. However, when already conceptualized, a common language acts more like a horizon in its familiarity. Therefore, a common language's function may be further specified in line with Gadamer's above claim: as a presupposed language, it functions as the shared subject matter, while as a created language, it functions as the coherently extended horizon that better understands the subject matter.Footnote ¹¹

The function of a common language concerning the HEdC-HEvC relation is now clearer as well: a common language undergirding both a familiar horizon and object of interpretation (the Thou as horizon and/or subject matter) is obfuscated from the perspective of the divergence between the said elements of the HEdC and HEvC, but is uncovered from the perspective of the convergence between their unsaid elements.Footnote ¹² Divergence of the said represents distinct languages conceptually conflicting with one another, while convergence of the unsaid represents an unearthing of the underlying linguistic ground shared between otherwise distinct languages from which an understanding of their subject matter develops (Cf. Fristedt, Reference Fristedt2010, p. 475). Therefore, why such linguistic unearthing functions as a way of evaluating interpretive accuracy concerning the Thou is because truth-as-disclosure expresses a movement from the potency of what is yet unsaid to the actuality of what can both be coherently said by the familiar horizon and the Thou. Interpretive accuracy becomes a function of whether the interpretive act says something that the disclosed language permits to be about the interpretive object. If the language does not permit this, then accuracy is denied because the interpretation is no longer about its supposed object.Footnote ¹³

How this ‘aboutness’ relation obtains between the interpretation and its object is in part conditioned by the abovementioned structural requirement of horizonal coherence. However, Gadamer proposes an additional methodological condition as to what constitutes a proper interpretation: coming to interpret a subject matter is not just informed by a ‘fore-conception of completeness,’ but also necessitates a shared logic of question and answer. This logic supposes a dialogical mode of appearance of meaning and is integral to Gadamer's sense of understanding in general, but more specifically, it clarifies what sharing a common language means in terms of presupposing and creating one as a function of said/unsaid elements in the HEdC-HEvC relation. Nonetheless, as will hopefully become clearer in Section 7, there are residual tensions between the logic of question and answer and the logic of horizonal coherence that bear negatively on Gadamer's denial of hermeneutic relativism. However, the details are nuanced and subtle, which is why we must spend some space analyzing the precise meaning of Gadamer's question and answer logic in the upcoming section.

6. The Logic of Question and Answer

For Gadamer (Reference Gadamer, Weinsheimer and Marshall2004), the Thou as subject matter is best known “only when we have understood the question to which it is an answer” (p. 363. Cf. Marshall, Reference Marshall and Krajewski2003, p. 123). The process of questioning helps one pick out relevant interpretations of a subject matter precisely because these interpretations amount to appropriate answers to whatever question we may be asking about it. Undeniably, the way in which Gadamer avoids interpretive relativism is by limiting interpretive applicability to within the context of posited questions. More importantly though, it is the subject matter, not the horizon, that provides answers to the questions asked of it,Footnote ¹⁴ meaning that questions about interpretive objects are provided by our horizons (Cf. Gadamer, Reference Gadamer, Weinsheimer and Marshall2004, p. 367).Footnote ¹⁵ Given this, and the ubiquity with which horizons inform our orientation to the world, it is thus no wonder that, for instance, Vessey (Reference Vessey2014) remarks that “[t]he way texts contribute to contemporary philosophizing rests more on the questions the text addresses than the answers it provides” (p. 362). Generalizing to the hermeneutic process more broadly, our processes of interpretation and understanding are characterized more extensively by the questions we can ask than by the answers we can receive (Cf. Cheng, Reference Cheng2015, p. 34).

Furthermore, Gadamer (Reference Gadamer, Weinsheimer and Marshall2004) regards “the real and fundamental nature of a question [as what makes] things indeterminate,” as what brings “out the undetermined possibilities of a thing” (pp. 367–368). One could thus understand a question as breaking “open the being of the thing in question — [the question] reveals the thing [i.e., subject matter] to be open to many possible interpretations or beliefs” (Fristedt, Reference Fristedt2010, p. 486; emphasis added. Cf. Gadamer, Reference Gadamer, Weinsheimer and Marshall2004, p. 356). Nonetheless, this opening-up is not done arbitrarily, as the origin of any process of questioning must begin with the horizons we already possess, meaning that the subject matter's provision of interpretive answers is constrained by the questions being asked of it.

Proper questions must therefore cohere with and be delimited by one's own biases and perspectives — they are what Gadamer (Reference Gadamer, Weinsheimer and Marshall2004) calls, “real question[s]” (p. 367), and it is to them that interpretive claims must be directed lest they become subjectively meaningless for us. Specifically, any claim not contextualized to a real question sourced from one's own horizon acts both as an interpretation without any rational association to an immediately accessible horizon and as an answer to a question we have yet to ask ourselves. As such, answers not question-contextualized in this way remain irrelevant, for us, to the subject matter the question is meant to probe. Nevertheless, these cannot persist as objectively irrelevant, for there remains an open possibility that the interpretation can be perpetually re-motivated as an answer to an as-of-yet unasked real question, partaking in what Gadamer calls an ‘infinite dialogue’ (Cf. Section 7).

Consequently, no one seemingly true interpretive answer can be safe from a process of questioning circumscribed by the biases we already possess and may possess in the future. This is how Gadamer means to resist hermeneutic relativism, based on denying not a substantial relation between horizons and one's capacity to make good on an accuracy-cum-relevance norm for hermeneutic insight, but an enduring settledness regarding the truth-value of any single instance of actualizing said capacity. Ascribing a function of questioning to horizons is simply to say that one either sources questions relevant to their biases and perspective or recontextualizes questions asked by others in ways that make them more intelligible to oneself in the context of the questions one asks. Yes, legitimate answers derive from subject matters, but we can only really understand an answer if we have its corresponding question. Indeed, letting a subject matter provide us with the answers to our questions is essentially how we properly and non-relativistically encounter it as the Thou.Footnote ¹⁶

It ought to be clearer now that a process of questioning, meant to disclose the being of the object of one's questioning in a way still intelligible to the one asking the question, presupposes a discoverable common language that grants this disclosure its intelligibility. The process of answering therefore crystallizes this intelligibility by filling/picking out that language's retinue of interpretive truths. When this occurs, a question/answer hermeneutic can effectively bring together different interlocutors under the banner of a common language, a shared linguistic horizon.Footnote ¹⁷

Lastly, our analysis of the HEdC-HEvC relation in terms of its said/unsaid elements helps outline the finer details of this question-and-answer logic: the process of questioning is hermeneutically potent due to our HEvC's unsaid possibilizing how a subject matter is revealed to us meaningfully, while the task of picking out answers within this context of questioning is how our HEdC's said grows and expands in the horizons that make those answers intelligible to us. Specifically, we have three further considerations.Footnote ¹⁸ First, the engagement of the familiarity of the HEdC's said with the initial strangeness of the HEvC's said motivates the questioning process meant to unearth more of the HEvC's unsaid. Second, the capacity for this questioning to open up the being of what is being questioned for the bequeathal of possible answers relevant to all those party to the question/answer process is a proper power belonging to the relation between the HEdC's and HEvC's unsaid.Footnote ¹⁹ Third, the transition from mere possibilization of answers to answers judged as true interpretations of a subject matter expresses the taking-up of the HEvC's unsaid by the HEdC to actualize the latter's unsaid elements in the process of coherently expanding the said of the HEdC — i.e., expansion of one's horizon.Footnote ²⁰

7. Infinite Dialogue

Despite this horizonally constrained opening-up of a subject matter's being, or limited possibilization of its interpretability, do these processes still function to express new conceptual value (Cheng, Reference Cheng2015, p. 11; Leiviskä, Reference Leiviskä2015, p. 596)? Andrew Fuyarchuk (Reference Fuyarchuk2015) similarly considers that the possibilities of the Thou's presentation through the HEvC “announce themselves in language without being mistaken for anything actually said which in turn moves thinking forward” (p. 584). What we therefore have is a specific dialectic present throughout the question/answer process: the subject matter, through the HEvC's possibilized answers, conditions an interpreter's questions about it, thereby expanding the latter's horizon (HEdC) and permitting the interpreter's engagement with a further process of questioning that makes intelligible even more answers from the subject matter; hence, the process iterates continuously, in what Gadamer (Reference Gadamer and Linge1976) calls an infinite dialogue (Cf. pp. 15–16). This is why, in addition to Gadamer's structural condition on coherence within horizons and between subject matter and horizons — his ‘fore-conception of completeness’ — we have a further methodological condition of coherence for the question/answer process itself.Footnote ²¹

Nonetheless, the immediate issue that arises from this is an unsettledness about the truth-value of answers possibilized through the act of questioning. If answers are only intelligible when contextualized within questions, and the logic of question and answer constitutes a dialectically interminable process, then it is entirely possible for two interpreters to come up with contradictory interpretations about a subject matter even if they are both equally internally coherent in doing so. Does Gadamer just simply presuppose that no two such interpretations will remain mutually contradictory? In other words, if contradictions can arise between interlocutors’ interpretations due to an interminable dialogue, would it then be more rational to judge that further coherence-imbuing clarification of their interpretations will obtain, or rather, that any subsequent coherence will just devolve into further incoherence? Are these concerns indicative of a deep-seeded conceptual uncertainty, if not relativism, in Gadamer's logic of question and answer?

Indeed, despite the structural and methodological dimensions of attaining hermeneutic truth about a shared subject matter, the potential for subsequent incoherence is worrying. Cheng (Reference Cheng2015) acknowledges this worry in his discussion of a tension in the dialectic between theory as disclosive of truth and theory as presupposing a method:

This perennial questioning of truth as discovered and truth of the process of discovery constitutes an infinite dialogue between these modes of truth, such that the possibility of incoherence between them is always open due to the interminable questioning thereof. Incoherence thus features in linguistic understanding more generally since its dialogical nature places modes of understanding in a similar inter-questioning process: in one sense, we understand the meaning of both sentences through dialogue and dialogue through its constitutive sentences (Cf. Cheng, Reference Cheng2015, p. 19), while in another sense we understand both another's language by first clarifying our own and our own by engaging with that of the other (Cf. Wang, Reference Wang2018, p. 567).Footnote ²² As such, in terms of the fusion and expansion of horizons, if this questioning process becomes interminable, then it would manifest a perpetual possibility of incoherence by the production of “a difference of horizons rather than their fusion” (Cheng, Reference Cheng2015, p. 28. Cf. Marshall, Reference Marshall and Krajewski2003, p. 138; Vessey, Reference Vessey2009, p. 532).

8. Infinite Horizons

Gadamer's solution to this potential for interpretive incoherence, and thus the relativism inherent when two contradictory interpretations are taken to both be true of the same subject matter, is intriguing. For him, coherence is eventually safeguarded when horizons are placed within a broader, coherently infinite horizon that fully understands the subject matter at hand. By virtue of this infinite horizon, all apparent contradictions in ostensibly distinct horizons are to be overcome (Gadamer, Reference Gadamer, Weinsheimer and Marshall2004, pp. 467, 535), to pass into “a single historical horizon” that contains all of “historical consciousness” (p. 303) and expresses an infinite totality of meaning (pp. 464, 469).Footnote ²³ Fristedt (Reference Fristedt2010) similarly notes that “a subject matter can appear in potentially endless ways to those who understand it,” such that “everything that could possibly be said about the subject matter … is just what the subject matter is” (p. 478). In short, “all interpretations of a thing determine the thing together” (p. 487).Footnote ²⁴

In practice, this can only remain an ideal task, for an infinite horizon expresses an impossibly comprehendible interpretation of a subject matter for those with limited cognitions (Cf. Beiner, Reference Beiner and Krajewski2003, p. 152; Fristedt, Reference Fristedt2010, pp. 491–492 n 22). Still, the notion of an infinite horizon perfectly corresponding to a subject matter allows Gadamer a convenient out, because the possibility for further horizonal coherence trumps that of horizonal incoherence since the horizon itself is presupposed as ultimately coherent. We could thus gauge progress in our understanding of a subject matter and be confident in our ability to make good on the accuracy norm for hermeneutic insight by tending to the infinite horizon as an interpretive telos — i.e., the coherence of the infinite horizon acts as a guiding principle whereby any ostensible contradictions between interpretations will eventually be dialogically processed to unearth a common linguistic ground and ultimately transcend that incoherence (Cf. Fuyarchuk, Reference Fuyarchuk2015, p. 580). Therefore, any ultimately contradictory interpretations would both subsist within mutually incoherent and ultimately distinct horizons and be interpretive of different subject matters altogether. This would therefore motivate Gadamer's resistance to relativism since the latter permits the association of contradictory interpretations with the same subject matter.

Before moving on, let us first substantiate the argument that mutually incoherent horizons really do deal with distinct subject matters. Fristedt (Reference Fristedt2010) for example argues that if

Donald Davidson (Reference Davidson2001a) makes a similar comment when discussing the coherence within sets of beliefs:

We could interpret the point of Davidson's comment to be that, because subject matters are infinite, an endless number of true beliefs (interpretive answers to questions) can apply to them, in which case a false belief would be incommensurable with the set of true beliefs constituting a horizon of accurate interpretation. Having false beliefs be part of a set of otherwise true beliefs would therefore simply prevent ideal identification of that set with its subject matter, for the false belief may instead cohere with and thus be included in a different set of true beliefs identified with a different subject matter.

We can couch this discussion in terms of the HEdC-HEvC relation to clarify matters further. For instance, why mutually incoherent horizons deal with different subject matters has to do with how interpretations of a subject matter are intelligible to those who ask about it. Remember that, according to Gadamer, interpretive answers can only be understood in relation to a corresponding questioning process that expands one's horizon to conceptually incorporate these answers. Horizonal expansion translates facets of the HEdC's unsaid into an expanded set of said elements by coherently incorporating elements of the HEvC's unsaid into the now expanded horizon, wherein such incorporation is brought on through an elucidation of the shared subject matter between the HEdC and HEvC. As such, any answer not comprehendible within a particular question-context will not be about what that particular question is about — both the answer and question will pertain to different subject matters. This is because the (subject matter)-sharing between the HEdC and HEvC, which conditions the intelligibility of an answer to a question, would thus not obtain. This would be the case at least until that answer becomes recontextualized by a new questioning process whereby it is understood that the answer can be possibilized through that initial HEvC's unsaid, and not through some other one dealing with a different subject matter altogether.Footnote ²⁵

Lastly, if this recontextualizing process goes on indefinitely to produce an infinitely structured coherent horizon, then the possibilizing capacity of the HEvC's unsaid, which functions to motivate this question-recontextualizing, becomes fully actualized. In this case, the distinction between the familiar and strange elements of, respectively, the HEdC's and HEvC's said essentially dissolves. However, if this recontextualization fails to make answers to our questions comprehendible, then these answers must ultimately be about subject matters distinct from that undergirding one's own horizon. This occurs when the above distinction persists, when the HEvC's said resists incorporation within the HEdC's expanding set of said elements. Nevertheless, such a failed recontextualization can even involve an already infinitely structured horizon, one wherein a questioning process fully comprehends all answers possibilized by an HEvC whose unsaid elements become indistinct from our HEdC's said elements. This is because any persistently incomprehensible answer can only be possibilized by a different HEvC, one whose unsaid elements remain distinct from our HEdC's said elements.

9. Incommensurable Horizons

However, this attempt to avoid relativism by positing horizonal infinity for the resolution of horizonal incoherence does not actually revoke relativism completely; Gadamer may not be able to avoid a conceptual uncertainty in his hermeneutics, one that precludes principledly ascertaining whether interpretive truth is relativist or not. The issue is: how could one ever know if one's supposedly true beliefs about a subject matter are settled? If beliefs can themselves involve subject matters that are up for interpretation — after all, beliefs are intelligible within the context of horizons that can act as objects of interpretation — then could these beliefs be interminably interpretable as well? An unhelpfully easy response, based on the prior discussion, would be as follows: the way one rescues an interminably interpretable belief's truth from being conceptually uncertain is by identifying truth with coherence and arguing that, first, interpretation always ideally progresses in the direction of coherently expanding horizons, and second, subject matters are ultimately comprehended by a coherently infinite horizon. This would then guarantee that any genuine interpretation of a belief would entail the belief's transformation into a coherently expanded belief located within an expanded horizon, thereby retaining the truth value of the initial belief by its coherent incorporation within said horizon.

However, this answer fails because there is a fundamental limitation caused by our restricted interpretive capacities, i.e., that of an uncertainty as to whether true facets of a subject matter can ever conclusively enter the coherent purview of even an infinitely structured horizon. To motivate this concern, notice that once we require that distinct subject matters do exist, we must also necessitate the existence of horizons that are both distinct and infinite. As such, from this, we infer the possibility that different infinite horizons are ideally attainable. However, because they are practically unobtainable, two limited interlocutors can never ascertain whether seemingly contradictory interpretations can be coherently resolved within a more grounded common language or if they do truly belong to incommensurable horizons dealing with distinct subject matters comprehendible by distinct languages.

This worry applies even when seemingly contradictory interpretations are actually non-contradictory. Greg Lynch (Reference Lynch2014) explains this through an example that, although targeted towards Davidson's account of interpretation, is nonetheless germane to Gadamer's thought:

Approximately, the empirical adequacy between T and T’ represents two horizons engaging with the same phenomenal data. In terms of the HEdC (familiar horizon), this implies that the horizons of Alice and Brian both engage with the same unsaid between their respective HEdCs — a shared implicit language —while difference obtains between the said elements within their HEdCs —distinct explicit languages. Here, both T and T’ could theoretically be subsumed within a larger coherent semantic system without either T or T’ losing their identities, given that Φ, as used by Brian, and Φ, as used by Alice, express different, although non-contradictory, predicates that just happen to nominally share the same symbol.Footnote ²⁶ Nonetheless, practically speaking, the lack of horizonal fusion between T and T’, which would expand them into a coherently extended horizon thereby allowing Brian to conceptually distinguish between T and T’, explains Brian's current inability to make such a distinction. Additionally, ceteris paribus, if T and T’ instead were empirically distinct theories, which we take here as dealing with distinct subject matters, then theoretically and practically, Brian would be unable to tell them apart conceptually.

The above case motivates the worry of whether true facets of a subject matter can ever coherently and conclusively factor within an infinitely structured horizon by illustrating the possibility that two interlocutors may possess concepts that always seem alien to each other. According to Lynch (Reference Lynch2014), “if an interpreter cannot tell ahead of time whether a given utterance expresses an alien concept, neither can he tell whether a given speaker possesses any alien concepts” (p. 381). However, the worry can be motivated even if both interlocutors possess equivalent concepts, for not only does Brian not know that T misinterprets Alice's use of Φ, but Brian could also not know that T’ correctly interprets Alice's use of Φ even if he uses T’. This is true iff T’ = (F v G) = Φ, and Brian knows that T’ = Φ but not that T’ = (F v G) nor that Φ = (F v G).Footnote ²⁷ In other words, despite the properties of Fs and Gs not being identical, their disjunction determines T’ as Φ, and Alice knows of this fact while Brian does not. Here, both Alice and Brian use equivalent concepts of Φ, although they differ in how they may be epistemically accessing this equivalency. In any case, regardless of the type of concepts employed by Brian and Alice, whether alien or equivalent, the mere fact that Brian is none the wiser regarding which type is instantiated means that, generally, no interpreter can fully ascertain what concept is being employed by another (Cf. Beiner, Reference Beiner and Krajewski2003, p. 156 n 21).Footnote ²⁸

10. The Hermeneutic Game and Concluding Remarks

The prior considerations are damaging for Gadamer's denial of hermeneutic relativism, given that the above-discussed worry of conceptual uncertainty prevents ideal identification of interpretive truth being relativist or not. In fact, even if the appropriate horizon is infinitely structured, one's ability to gauge interpretive progress towards the truth would still be contravened in two respects: first, granted persistently apparent interpretive contradictions claimed to be about the same subject matter, one would be unable to distinguish between these interpretations necessarily cohering within a more general linguistic framework or the subject matters of these interpretations being necessarily distinct; and second, granted the absence of such persistently apparent contradictions, one would still be unable to ascertain the impossibility of eventual contradiction within an interminable hermeneutic process. Thus, whether we discuss infinitely structured horizons or not, there is always the open possibility for even contradictory truths about the same thing, and within an internally incoherent horizon, to exist.

That this is a feature of Gadamer's question/answer logic of hermeneutic understanding in general may be a contentious outcome, especially when contrasted with Gadamer's notion of the fore-conception of completeness and the methodological constraint of coherence circumscribing horizonal structure and the dialogical process of horizonal expansion. However, this is a natural outcome of the account of the said/unsaid elements in the HEdC-HEvC relation given above.Footnote ²⁹ Notwithstanding, Gadamer has even described understanding in other terms besides that of coherence. For example, in discussing the relation between the values of rhetoric and logical coherence, Thorsten Botz-Bornstein (Reference Botz-Bornstein2013) understands Gadamer to be assuaging us that

This throws into question the relative importance that Gadamer ascribes to logical coherence in one's interpretations over and above their mere rhetorical suggestions. This is relevant here, as the implementation of rhetorical rules, or just practical rules for understanding in general, is not necessarily a theoretical safeguard against interpretive relativism.

Furthermore, the aforementioned conceptual uncertainty even features within Gadamer's discussions on both the theoretical and practical rules of hermeneutic understanding itself, such as when he claims that “[t]here are no rules governing the reasonable use of rules” (Gadamer, Reference Gadamer and Palmer2007, p. 253). This would imply there being no principled way of choosing between different rule-sets utilized for interpretive purposes, a somewhat meta-hermeneutical position that Botz-Bornstein (Reference Botz-Bornstein2013) ascribes to Gadamer, in that, for Gadamer, “[t]he process of understanding is deprived of its (theoretical or methodological) ground and … can look like a game” (p. 253). This hermeneutic game would still attain rules for interpretation, expressing the semantic/linguistic rules informing an interpreter's horizon, but these cannot be determined anywhere but within the game itself (p. 261). In short, how one interprets some subject matter cannot be meaningfully operationalized unless one is already engaged in the act of interpretation itself; so, only within the act can the rules of engagement in principle be adjudicated on, for outside the act the rules make no sense.

This brings relativism back into the picture since, theoretically, different rule-sets can validly inform the same interpretive act from which contradictory interpretations become licensed. Since contradiction implies incoherence, we have the following ramification: whether a particular interpretive act is the accurate one for a subject matter can never be a decision that is in practice conclusively settled. This is the case whether the interpretive rules conditioning the act forbid contradictory interpretations or just merely incoherent ones — i.e., whether the rules can already comprehend a subject matter as to truthfully license from the outset the impossibility of contradictory interpretations, or they are such that the mere uncertainty of whether an interpretation can be identified with some shared subject matter or a different one entirely is forbidden.

Gadamer may be content with the fact that interpretive acts can never be practically conclusively settled, but this finding is exactly what allows for relativism's possibility, by expressing a conceptual uncertainty regarding the prospect of interpretive relativism within the hermeneutic process. This leads, according to Botz-Bornstein (Reference Botz-Bornstein2013), to the truth of the subject matter always hiding “behind itself … in a circular gesture” (p. 257), one which forecloses upon any recognition of a genuine correspondence between a horizon and the subject matter it interprets (Cf. p. 250). Consequently, we are denied any principled adjudication on whether subject matters can or cannot be legitimately comprehended incoherently via contradictory interpretations thereof, unless we just analytically stipulate that they cannot from the outset.Footnote ³⁰ As such, Gadamer's avoidance of hermeneutic relativism without revoking conceptual uncertainty in interpretive progress simply brings relativism back into to the foreground of possibility.

The worry is not just that one cannot tell when one has adopted an authentically representative understanding of a subject matter, but that even the very idea of evaluating one's progress towards that understanding becomes suspect. It seems then that we can point to a minimal condition on horizonal self-coherence as constitutive of Gadamer's sense of interpretive truth: attend to what is being said by some object of interpretation via asking questions that are relevant to your own perspective and render what is being said intelligible for you. This, however, suggests a controversial implication that Gadamer may be unable to rationally avoid: the act of questioning and answering, the functional HEdC-HEvC dynamic, amounts to a practical trajectory towards an interpretive truth that must express one's subjectivity while also permitting the possibility of irreconcilable incoherence, perhaps even contradiction, with others’ subjectivities. Relativism may be avoided stipulatively, but whether interpretive truth is indeed non-relativist cannot ever be practically certified.