Hermeneutics

I don’t have much to say about that, except that one of us has the feeling that we still have the tools to understand the idea from the whole. We could even put this to an empirical test: take a text from a person living today and interpret it, and then check with him how much we missed. I suppose there will be misses, but it won’t be completely unrelated, as the deconstructionists (Derrida) claim. Gadamer and others juggle words to try and substantiate this intuitive thesis (merging horizons, etc.), but I found nothing useful in their words. The bottom line is that it is an empirical fact that we have such an ability and that is it. In principle, one could ask how we know that our senses reflect reality, after all, all we know about it is through the senses. This is also a hermeneutic circle, and even there, those who are not skeptics or philosophical idealists still trust the senses. There is also no good philosophical answer to the matter, but the fact is that we believe in the senses and that it works.