Abstract

This dissertation explores the significance of the work of Hans-Georg Gadamer for the current discussion of the methodology of the human sciences. Its purpose is to demonstrate the radical reorientation of this discussion that Gadamer's perspective suggests and to examine the consequences to which this leads. My thesis is that while Gadamer is successful in elucidating the historicity underlying social and historical understanding, he confuses two different dimensions of the argument: that history prejudices all social and historical thought, and that such thought aims at consensus or fusion with its history. Because of this confusion, he is unable to specify criteria for choosing between different developments in social and historical self-understanding. Understanding in the human sciences becomes a form of reaching agreement with a historical process that cannot be controlled. ;The dissertation is composed of four chapters. The first examines the Anglo-American discussion of the logic of the social sciences, tracing the conceptual dynamic which leads from Carl Hempel's "The Function of General Laws in History" to Peter Winch's neo-Wittgensteinian analysis. The second chapter focuses on the German hermeneutic tradition from F. D. E. Schleiermacher through Wilhelm Dilthey. Both chapters attempt to indicate the "objectivistic" orientation of pre-Gadamerian accounts of the human sciences insofar as the implications of their historicity are not adequately comprehended. ;Chapter Three concentrates on Gadamer's hermeneutic perspective as it is elucidated in Truth and Method. I focus on three crucial components of this position: the concept of effective history, the identification of hermenuetic understanding as a form of practical philosophy and the argument for the dialogic structure of the interpretive process. These analyses clarify the implications of the historicity of the social and historical sciences. Because they are involved in the human world they study, they cannot be conceived as methods of acquiring insight into an independent object-domain; they rather contribute to the self-understanding of the history to which both they and their objects belong. ;In Chapter Four, I draw on objections that Jurgen Habermas and Karl-Otto Apel have raised against Gadamer to develop my own views. I argue that a satisfactory philosophy of the human sciences must incorporate Gadamer's insight into their historicity, but that it need not abandon them to historical contingency.