This dissertation examines the issue of intercultural understanding. I explore the role played by language in constituting human subjectivity in accordance with the common insights of Ludwig Wittgenstein, Martin Heidegger, and Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin, in order to: affirm the complexity and fragility of the process of building understanding in fight of our immersion in specific cultural-linguistic worldviews; and demonstrate that human beings are ontologically predisposed to achieve understanding, and that this ontological predisposition is enhanced by a constant and inescapable process (...) of crossing "language boundaries" in daily life. I argue that the very manner of human induction into cultural-linguistic worldviews suggests the means by which intercultural understanding might best be fostered: through the bestowal of recognition and the cultivation of dialogical relationships. (shrink)