Journal of Philosophical Investigations (Nov 2023)
Linguisticality is not Merely Expressing the Experiences; the relationship between language and understanding according to Gadamer
Abstract
The focus of Gadamer's philosophical hermeneutics is the issue of understanding, and more precisely, the way understanding occurs in our encounter with the world as a "text". Gadamer tries to phenomenologizing the understanding, to express the conditions of the possibility of understanding and how it occurs. His provocative claim is that "any" encounter with the world, is mediated by language. The process of interpretation is the same our linguistic understanding of the world. The universality of this linguistic understanding of the world is to the extent that, even when language seems to be "suspended", we still have to take refuge in language itself to discuss this inadequacy. This is one of the "mysterious" aspects of human linguisticality. Another aspect comes back to the fact that language, like the world, never fully acquiesce to "objectification" and is not given to our consciousness as a unified whole, because language is preceding any understanding. The main questions of this article are as follows: By emphasizing the interconnectedness of language and understanding, Gadamer simply is trying to remind us the same long-standing claim about the relationship between language and thinking, or does he have a more fundamental claim? Does he, by focusing on the linguistic nature of human understanding, want to show us the limitlessness of the boundaries of language, or emphasize on its limitations? In this article, while clarifying the meaning of language and understanding and their relationship in Gadamer's thought, we have tried to answer the mentioned questions implicitly by emphasizing that the significance of language in Gadamer's hermeneutics is not simply limited to putting experiences into words, but this is the mere external and concrete manifestation of the linguisticality of our understanding.
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