[full article, abstract in English; abstract in Lithuanian] We will hereinafter discuss the author’s philosophy on gnoseological and historical premises. More precisely, by exploring the genealogy of the idea of the “Death of the Author” from modernism to postmodernism, we will analyse the concepts and ideologies that have become the stratagem of the denial of western literary canon, as well as the denial of equilibrium between philosophical and literary identity and universality. By treating the works of philosophers, authors, and fundamental (...) semiologists who perpetuated the idea of the Death of the Author, we will observe how the latter gradually fled from the philosophy of doubt and as mea culpa admitted that without the author’s authority the philosophical and literary legacy is no longer the theatre of memory, but the abyss of oblivion. Moreover, with fundamental examples, we will observe the influence of this philosophy in the process of studying of the literature. (shrink)

This article discusses the relationship (or lack thereof) between authors’ intentions and the meaning of literary works. It considers the advantages and disadvantages of Extreme and Modest Actual Intentionalism, Conventionalism, and two versions of Hypothetical Intentionalism, and discusses the role that one’s theoretical commitments about the robustness of linguistic conventions and the publicity of literary works should play in determining which view one accepts.

In contemporary analytic philosophy of art, the intentionalist debate is about whether the author’s intention is relevant to the interpretation of her work. Various positions have been proposed, and in this paper I defend what I call hypothetical author-hypothetical intentionalism, the position that interpretation is based on the intention attributed to the author constructed from the work. There are three aims to achieve: (1) to give a general account of hypothetical author-hypothetical intentionalism; (2) to present a moderate version of hypothetical (...) author-hypothetical intentionalism; (3) to defend the moderate version of hypothetical author-hypothetical intentionalism against actual intentionalism and actual author-hypothetical intentionalism. Against the current trend that focuses on actual authors, I hope to show that the hypothetical author account is still a sustainable contender in the intentionalist debate. (shrink)

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, rising rates of suicide were widely held to be indicative of a pervasive crisis of meaning. This article examines the response to the problem of...

Several years ago, the poet & critic Joan Houlihan offered a scathing and hilarious indictment of a lot of postmodern poetry for using words in a way that treats them as meaningless (or, perhaps, renders them meaningless). She suggested that word choice in such poems doesn’t really matter, and that the poet could just as well have substituted in other words without any change in meaning or aesthetic qualities. I argue that she’s wrong about this. I offer an account of (...) how interpretation and meaning function in poems that use words in highly non-standard ways. In such poems, there are associations and implicatures that one can reasonably expect a suitably backgrounded reader to grasp, rescuing interpretation from being a purely subjective and arbitrary activity. (shrink)

We aim to develop a take on the meaning of works of art that builds on Dennett’s view on the nature of intentionality, namely, that the intentionality exhibited by mental phenomena is not original, but derived. Regarding the meaning of works of art, theories that hold that the meaning is determined by the intentions of the author when creating the work are considered intentionalist. Adopting the view of derived intentionality implies that it is no longer possible to maintain that the (...) semantic content of a work of art is closely linked to the creative act that gave rise to it; accordingly, intentionalist theories should be, broadly speaking, abandoned. However, we claim that one aspect of intentionalist theories is accurate and, moreover, compatible with the perspective on intentionality we adopt: The fact that part of the meaning of a work of art is given by the interpretations that arise when it is assumed that the work was produced by an agent with the purpose of transmitting something. We call this interpretative strategy the work-of-art stance and argue that it should be understood as a subtype of the intentional stance. According to our proposal, this interpretive strategy is part of a view that tries to explain the meaning of works of art as partially indeterminate, relative to a history (and not to a foundational origin) and dependent on interpretive attribution. En este artículo elaboramos una propuesta sobre el significado de las obras de arte que se apoya en la perspectiva de Dennett acerca de la naturaleza de la intencionalidad de los fenómenos mentales. De acuerdo a ella, la intencionalidad que estos exhiben no es original, sino derivada. Adoptar la perspectiva de la intencionalidad derivada implica que ya no será posible sostener que el significado de una obra de arte esté vinculado al acto creativo que le dio origen o que esté determinado por las intenciones que tuvo su autor al crearlas, como han sostenido las teorías intencionalistas. Ahora bien, creemos que hay un aspecto de estas que no es incompatible con la perspectiva de intencionalidad derivada. Se trata del hecho de que parte del significado de la obra de arte está dado por las interpretaciones que surgen sólo cuando se asume que la misma fue producida por un agente con el propósito de transmitir algo. Llamaremos a esta estrategia interpretativa actitud de la obra de arte y defenderemos que debe ser entendida como un subtipo de la actitud intencional. Esta estrategia interpretativa forma parte de una propuesta que intenta explicar el significado de las obras de arte como siendo parcialmente indeterminado, relativo a una historia y dependiente de la atribución interpretativa. (shrink)

Wilhelm Dilthey's late nineteenth-century doctrine of `re-experiencing' the thoughts and feelings of the actors whose lives the social scientist seeks to understand has been criticized by several commentators as entailing a `naïve empathy view of understanding' in which social scientists are said to transport themselves into other cultural contexts in a wholly uncritical, unreflective manner. This article challenges such criticisms by arguing that Dilthey's writings on hermeneutics amount to a highly sophisticated defence of the role of psychological feeling in understanding (...) that should still be of interest to contemporary social theorists. Beginning with a review of the reception of Dilthey's work by Max Weber and the Neo-Kantians, the article goes on to enumerate a number of significant parallels between Dilthey's insights and more recent approaches in social and cultural theory. (shrink)

Communication and content presents a comprehensive and foundational account of meaning based on new versions of situation theory and game theory. The literal and implied meanings of an utterance are derived from first principles assuming little more than the partial rationality of interacting agents. New analyses of a number of diverse phenomena – a wide notion of ambiguity and content encompassing phonetics, syntax, semantics, pragmatics, and beyond, vagueness, convention and conventional meaning, indeterminacy, universality, the role of truth in communication, semantic (...) change, translation, Frege’s puzzle of informative identities – are developed. Communication, speaker meaning, and reference are defined. Frege’s context and compositional principles are generalized and reconciled in a fixed-point principle, and a detailed critique of Grice, several aspects of Lewis, and some aspects of the Romantic conception of meaning are offered. Connections with other branches of linguistics, especially psycholinguistics, sociolinguistics, historical linguistics, and natural language processing, are explored. -/- The book will be of interest to scholars in philosophy, linguistics, artificial intelligence, and cognitive science. It should also interest readers in related fields like literary and cultural theory and the social sciences. (shrink)

In the philosophical debate about literary interpretation, the actual intentionalist claims, and the anti-intentionalist denies, that an acceptable interpretation of fictional literature must be constrained by the author’s intentions. I argue that a close examination of the two most influential recent strands in this debate reveals a surprising convergence. Insofar as both sides (a) focus on literary works as they are, where work identity is determined in part by certain (successfully realized) categorial intentions concerning, e.g., title, genre, and large-scale instances (...) of allusion, allegory, and irony and (b) allow that works can acceptably be interpreted for unintended meanings—since an intentional act can, under a different description, exhibit unintended features—then they turn out to share the same interpretive policy concerning authorial intention. This suggests that philosophers should shift the interpretation debate away from issues of authorial intention and toward issues about the aims of interpretation. (shrink)

Une œuvre de fiction contient une mise en suspens si elle se termine au moment où un personnage central se retrouve dans des circonstances périlleuses. Le but de cet article est d’établir que les intentions narratives des auteurs déterminent ce qui se passe ensuite dans les œuvres qui se terminent par des mises en suspens et pour lesquelles aucune suite n’est produite. À cette fin, j’argumente à partir de l’idée qu’une suite écrite par l’auteur original résoudrait de façon unique une (...) œuvre de fiction qui aboutit à une mise en suspens; je conclus que les intentions narratives de l’auteur servent de vérifacteur pour des affirmations sur ce qui arrive ensuite en l’absence d’une telle suite. (shrink)

This article attempts to show the continuing practical relevance of hermeneutics through the example of legal interpretation. The article begins with the very concrete nature of legal hermeneutics that forms everyday legal practice – the interrelation of meaning and application – and expands at a more theoretical to show how legal hermeneutics, and hermeneutics more generally, offers what Ricoeur calls an interpretive “choice in favor of meaning.” The choice in favour of meaning underscores the restorative character of hermeneutics that legal (...) hermeneutics can epitomize. The article concludes with some of the challenges facing contemporary legal hermeneutics. (shrink)

During the last decades, there has been a debate on the question whether literary works are utterances, or have utterance meaning, and whether it is reasonable to approach them as such. Proponents of the utterance model in literary interpretation, whom I will refer to as “utterance theorists”, such as Noël Carroll and especially Robert Stecker, suggest that because of their nature as linguistic products of intentional human action, literary works are utterances similar to those used in everyday discourse. Conversely, those (...) whom I will refer to as “appreciation theorists”, such as Stein Haugom Olsen and Peter Lamarque, argue that literary works are by no means comparable to conversational utterances, and treating them in terms of utterances mistakenly dismisses their literary features. The aim of this article is twofold: to defend a central aspect of the utterance theory and to reconcile the two main positions about central issues in the debate on the meaning of literary works. On the one hand, I shall argue that it is both legitimate and reasonable to discuss the utterance meaning of a literary work on the basis of an interpretative approach interested in the author's “message”. My aim is to show that literary works should be considered utterances in a conversational approach which aims at examining the illocutionary actions conveyed through the work. On the other hand, I attempt both to show that there are various legitimate interpretative approaches which are governed by the interpreter's purposes, and to suggest that the debate between utterance theorists and appreciation theorists is actually about merely different emphases. (shrink)

The concept of empathy in history education involves students in the attempt to think within the context of historical agents’ particular predicaments. Tracing the concept’s philosophical heritage to R. G. Collingwood’s philosophy of history and ‘re-enactment doctrine’, this article argues that our efforts in history classrooms to understand historical agents by their own standards are constrained by a tension that arises out of the need to disconnect ourselves from a present that provides the very means for understanding the past. Though (...) rather than serving to undermine the concept, it is proposed that the moderate hermeneutics of H.-G. Gadamer, through a positive conception of prejudice, tradition and temporal distance, transforms the factors typically seen as inhibitors to empathy’s operation into those that potentially enable it. The article aspires to shed new light on what is at play when history students engage in the intellectually demanding task of empathizing in history. (shrink)

I propose a minimal account of authorship that specifies the fundamental nature of the author-relation and its minimal domain composition in terms of a three-place causal-intentional relation holding between agents and sort-relative works. I contrast my account with the minimal account tacitly held by most authorship theories, which is a two-place relation holding between agents and works simpliciter. I claim that only my view can ground productive and informative principled distincitons between collective production and collective authorship.

Die vorliegende Studie unternimmt den Versuch, Gadamers Ideen zur Begriffsbildung und Textbedeutung einer rationalen Rekonstruktion im Licht neuerer Entwicklungen in der linguistischen und philosophischen Semantik zu unterziehen. Anschließend an eine Kritik gewisser auf Heidegger zurückgehender Annahmen in Gadamers Wahrheit und Methode werden seine Begriffe der Applikation und der Geschichtlichkeit von Textbedeutungen reformuliert. Dies geschieht unter Bezugnahme auf J. J. Katz' Bedeutungs- und Referenztheorie, H. Putnams Theorie der Stereotypen und J. M. E. Moravcsiks Begriff der 'aitiational frames'. Es wird im besonderen (...) die These vertreten, daß Gadamers Idee der Interpretation als eines Prozesses, bei dem Autor und Leser zu einer Übereinkunft über die 'Sache' kommen , neu und fruchtbar in Begriffen der Interaktion zwischen semantischer Kompetenz und Alltagswissen im Leseprozeß überdacht werden kann. In Verbindung mit weiteren Teilen linguistischer Theorie würde ein solcher Neuansatz es ermöglichen, die Frage zu beantworten wie Verstehen im Prinzip möglich ist. Eine rationale Rekonstruktion von Gadamers Begriff der Applikation in dieser Richtung würde es ferner erlauben, Antworten auf eine Reihe weiterer schwieriger Fragen wie zum Beispiel der nach dem Grad der Unbestimmtheit von Textbedeutungen und der 'Korrektheit' von Interpretationen zu erhalten. (shrink)

Résumé Steven Burns soutient que les œuvres d'art riches ont tendance à donner lieu à des lectures meilleures plutôt qu’à des interprétations ambiguës. Ce n'est pas une simple affirmation statistique. Burns soutient qu'une telle richesse rendra l'ambiguïté moins probable ou moins durable. Dans cet article, je critique la position de Burns à partir de mon point de vue de champion de l'interprétabilité multiple. Ajouter des détails à une œuvre ambiguë pourrait ne pas lever son ambiguïté, et pourrait au contraire augmenter (...) la gamme d'interprétations tout aussi enrichissantes les unes que les autres. Les œuvres ambiguës sont nombreuses et remarquables, et couvrent diverses formes d'art. Toutes choses étant égales par ailleurs, l'ambiguïté semble ajouter à la richesse de la plupart des œuvres plutôt que la réduire. (shrink)

Shelley’s Swellfoot the Tyrant has recently begun to gain the concerted attention of critics, who have noted the play’s signature blend of low and high, of ephemeral, late Regency politics with the classic genres of Sophoclean tragedy, Aristophanic comedy, and mock epic. But Austin Warren’s famous and widely accepted definition of mock epic as “not mockery of the epic but elegantly affectionate homage, offered by a writer who finds [the serious epic] irrelevant to his age” does not describe Shelley’s earnest (...) goal of immediate political reform in authoring Swellfoot. Instead, the play evinces Shelley’s unique, conscious reconfiguration of four conventions characteristic of the high, classical epic: the “prosperous breeze”; the epic simile; katabasis or descent into the underworld; and divine intervention. I argue that Shelley’s comic adaptation of these epic conventions reflects his serious aim of helping effect reform through Swellfoot and embodies his absorption of the concept of Shakespeare’s history plays as an experimental hybrid of dramatic forms with epic subjects, gained during his earlier reading of A. W. Schlegel’s Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature. Though the immediate suppression of Swellfoot prevented its relevance in its own historical moment, it comprises a singular hybrid of Aristophanic satire and Sophoclean tragedy with high epic conventions, while ironically also identifying Shelley as a proponent of the French neoclassical theory of the epic’s consciously didactic purpose propounded by Le Bossu. (shrink)

This paper investigates how Schleiermacher’s universal hermeneutics can be considered as a better alternative to both, German rationalist aesthetics as pioneered by Christian Wolff, and Kant’s transcendental idealism, to the extent of overcoming the problematics of rule-following. A general account of the necessity of a universal hermeneutics and its meaning from historical practices of exegeses is given. This is then followed by the account of rule-following in the tradition of both German rationalist aesthetics and Kant’s transcendental idealism with latter as (...) expounded in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. The investigation is comparative and descriptive. The purpose of this study is to discuss the hermeneutic possibilities in research methodologies for human sciences. (shrink)

I probe the judgments of the agreeable that we make about food and drink. I first separate different concerns that we might have with food and drink. After that, I address expressive language by first sketching an evolutionary language-game-theoretic approach for referential language. I then try to extend it to expressive language, showing how expressive signaling might be likely to evolve. Given an account of expressive prediction, and its point, I turn to the Frege-Geach problem for the agreeable. I show (...) how a proper understanding of what expression is, in the evolutionary language-game-theoretic framework, allows us to side-step a central aspect the problem. (shrink)

This paper addresses the question of the function of genre in Gadamer’s hermeneutics by examining his treatment of Plato’s political writings in the context of the “utopian genre.” I argue that Gadamer’s reading of Plato informs us on the hermeneutics of genre, which is otherwise undiscussed in Truth and Method. First, I reconstruct the utopian genre as Gadamer treats it in a 1983 lecture hitherto neglected. Second, I expand Gadamer’s “logic of question and answer” by drawing on the notion of (...) genre as articulated by E.D. Hirsch and show that attention to genre is not only compatible with Gadamerian hermeneutics, but also productive. Finally, I demonstrate that an application of this concept of genre to the case of Plato’s political philosophy reveals a problem in Gadamer’s interpretation, namely a certain confusion between dialogue and utopia, and propose two ways of explaining this confusion and thus of resolving the aporia. (shrink)

Focusing on the production of lists of evaluative criteria has oversimplified our judgments of qualitative research. On the one hand, aspirations for global criteria applicable to “qualitative” or “interpretive” research have glossed over crucial analytic differences among specific types of inquiry. On the other hand, the methodological concern with appropriate ways of acquiring trustworthy data has led to an overly narrow proceduralism. I suggest that rational evaluations of analytic worth require the delineation of species of analytic tasks and the exercise (...) of genre-appropriate judgments, to determine what constitutes explanatory, interpretive, or explicatory adequacy. I focus on the parameters of judgment for interpretations and explications because their analytic differences have not yet been made distinct in qualitative research. (shrink)

What is the value of art? Standard responses draw on the different kinds of value that we tend to ascribe to individual artworks. In that context, none have been more significant than aesthetic value and moral value. To understand what makes an artwork valuable we then need to examine the interaction between these two kinds of value and how this contributes to the artwork's final value. The main aim of this article is to highlight two areas of concern for interaction (...) theories, in order to improve our understanding of the dynamic relations between kinds of value in art. In the first instance, I shall outline the main tenets of the three leading interaction theories. Next, I shall discuss what it might mean to say that an artwork has moral value, in an attempt to establish on what grounds interaction theories base their central claims. Subsequently, I will look at how our conception of art's moral value affects the possibility of a bona fide form of value interaction, or one capable of shaping a work's final value in conjunction with its aesthetic value. Finally, I shall turn to a discussion of the notion of aesthetic value. (shrink)

Given an interpretive ontology of the artwork, exemplified by Danto’s “constitutive interpretation” thesis, the present paper considers a fundamental “obscurity” at the heart of the artistic phenomenon – the ontological confusion between the material and the semantic “body“ of an artwork. For Danto, the material object of an artwork is nothing but the embodiment of an intended meaning, metaphorically expressed by the artist and waiting to be reconstructed by its audience. Therefore, an epistemic concept of truth, understood as interpretive validity, (...) seems to be required for maintaining the identity of the artwork. In this paper, I am trying to show that Danto’s epistemic conditions of interpretive validity are too strong to be maintained in the experience of an artwork. Instead, using the difference between understanding and interpretation, I try to show, following Shusterman and Gadamer, that the experience of the artwork could be democratically reconstructed in the frame of a pluralistic view of the concept of interpretive validity. The necessity of a “hermeneutic” concept of “truth” is thus maintained, given that the artwork and its experience by a concrete public would not be dissociated. (shrink)

Perhaps no other aspect of Hans-Georg Gadamer's Wahrheit und Methode has generated more controversy and caustic criticism than his attempt to defend the role of ‘prejudice’ in human understanding. Gadamer's goal in challenging what he calls ‘the Enlightenment's prejudice against prejudice’ is not to defend irresponsible, idiosyncratic, parochial or otherwise self-willed understanding in the human sciences, but to argue that all human cognition is ‘finite’ and ‘limited’ in the sense that it always involves, to borrow Polanyi's phrase, a ‘tacit dimension’ (...) of implicit judgments, concerns, or commitments which shape definitively our grasp of the subject matter in ways we cannot anticipate or control. This implies a ‘finite’ or ‘limited’ view of human understanding in at least two ways. First, Gadamer seems to use the word ‘finite’ in conscious opposition to Hegel's notion of an ‘infinite’ intellect. For Hegel the ‘infinite’ was the ‘unconditioned’ and ‘self-determining’. An ‘infinite’ intellect would be its own master, an autonomous, spontaneous source of all its essential activities and contents. (shrink)

Judging Gadamer’s theoretical stance is a complicated matter, and his ontological hermeneutics is usually regarded as a text-centered theory of understanding. Through an analysis of the phenomenological premises from which his theories take off, however, we can clearly see his reader-centric stance. On the basis of this stance some cease to seek for the original intention of the author or the original meaning of the text, which ineluctably leads to the ignorance of an understanding methodology. As far as people’s intentional (...) understanding is concerned, however, the important as well as essential task is still that of striving for a certain kind of understanding that is relatively correct, with universally effective methodology as its necessary prerequisite. What is more, herein lies the significance of the epistemology of hermeneutics. This article aims to re-insert a sense of methodology after hermeneutics went through a period of ontological reflection, and hence clarify that it is of necessity that hermeneutics resumes its text-centric methodological stance. (shrink)

A number of recently published studies by reformist-minded Muslim scholars have both questioned the normative nature of and emphasized the need to rethink some of the fundamental assumptions and interpretational models governing traditional Islamic legal theories and ethics. As part of this process they have emphasized the need to develop novel Islamic hermeneutics. One major element in this emergence of novel Islamic hermeneutics is the production of an increased number of what I term ‘gender equality affirmative scholarship on Islam’. What (...) is particularly interesting, if not intriguing, from the perspective of the author of this article is that the scholarship on gender equality affirmative interpretations of Islam is theorized by reformist-minded Muslim male scholars at historically unprecedented levels which is what this study seeks to highlight. This article examines the arguments employed by three prominent contemporary Muslim male reformist scholars, both Shī’ī and Sunnī, in developing gender equality affirmative interpretations of Islam – Nasr Abu Zayd, Mohsen Kadivar, and Khaled Abou El Fadl. The focus on male scholars in this article is intentional and seeks to highlight the most fundamental point and indeed the raison d’être behind it, namely to underscore the historically unprecedented support Muslim male scholars are providing to the development of feminist interpretations of Islam. (shrink)

This paper investigates how unsupervised machine learning methods might make hermeneutic interpretive text analysis more objective in the social sciences. Through a close examination of the uses of topic modeling—a popular unsupervised approach in the social sciences—it argues that the primary way in which unsupervised learning supports interpretation is by allowing interpreters to discover unanticipated information in larger and more diverse corpora and by improving the transparency of the interpretive process. This view highlights that unsupervised modeling does not eliminate the (...) researchers’ judgments from the process of producing evidence for social scientific theories. The paper shows this by distinguishing between two prevalent attitudes toward topic modeling, i.e., topic realism and topic instrumentalism. Under neither can modeling provide social scientific evidence without the researchers’ interpretive engagement with the original text materials. Thus the unsupervised text analysis cannot improve the objectivity of interpretation by alleviating the problem of underdetermination in interpretive debate. The paper argues that the sense in which unsupervised methods can improve objectivity is by providing researchers with the resources to justify to others that their interpretations are correct. This kind of objectivity seeks to reduce suspicions in collective debate that interpretations are the products of arbitrary processes influenced by the researchers’ idiosyncratic decisions or starting points. The paper discusses this view in relation to alternative approaches to formalizing interpretation and identifies several limitations on what unsupervised learning can be expected to achieve in terms of supporting interpretive work. (shrink)

Perhaps no other aspect of Hans-Georg Gadamer'sWahrheit und Methodehas generated more controversy and caustic criticism than his attempt to defend the role of ‘prejudice’ (Vorurteil) in human understanding. Gadamer's goal in challenging what he calls ‘the Enlightenment's prejudice against prejudice’ is not to defend irresponsible, idiosyncratic, parochial or otherwise self-willed understanding in the human sciences, but to argue that all human cognition is ‘finite’ and ‘limited’ in the sense that it always involves, to borrow Polanyi's phrase, a ‘tacit dimension’ of (...) implicit judgments, concerns, or commitments which shape definitively our grasp of the subject matter in ways we cannot anticipate or control. This implies a ‘finite’ or ‘limited’ view of human understanding in at least two ways. First, Gadamer seems to use the word ‘finite’ in conscious opposition to Hegel's notion of an ‘infinite’ intellect. For Hegel the ‘infinite’ was the ‘unconditioned’ and ‘self-determining’. An ‘infinite’ intellect would be its own master, an autonomous, spontaneous source of all its essential activities and contents. (shrink)

(1988). Approaches, opportunities and priorities in the rhetoric of political inquiry: A critical synthesis. Social Epistemology: Vol. 2, No. 1, pp. 21-42.

Se ofrece una interpretación teórico-política de la fusión de horizontes de Gadamer. Se argumenta que el diálogo político, desde un punto de vista hermenéutico, debe entenderse como el proceso de cuestionamiento y disputa de los horizontes de sentido en donde descansan las prácticas sociales. Asimismo, se sostiene que el diálogo instituye una pregunta-escenario-común que abre el horizonte social de sentido hacia la contingencia e incertidumbre, así como que este nunca busca un consenso procedimental o sustancial que subsane los conflictos y (...) concilie las diferentes perspectivas en un punto de vista homogéneo. (shrink)

Se ofrece una interpretación teórico-política de la fusión de horizontes de Gadamer. Se argumenta que el diálogo político, desde un punto de vista hermenéutico, debe entenderse como el proceso de cuestionamiento y disputa de los horizontes de sentido en donde descansan las prácticas sociales. Asimismo, se sostiene que el diálogo instituye una pregunta-escenario-común que abre el horizonte social de sentido hacia la contingencia e incertidumbre, así como que este nunca busca un consenso procedimental o sustancial que subsane los conflictos y (...) concilie las diferentes perspectivas en un punto de vista homogéneo. The article provides a theoretical-political interpretation of Gadamer's fusion of horizons, arguing that, from a hermeneutical point of view, political dialogue should be understood as the process of questioning and challenging the horizons of meaning underlying social practices. Likewise, the article holds that dialogue establishes a common question-scenario that opens up the social horizon of meaning to contingency and uncertainty, and that it never seeks a procedural or substantial consensus that eliminates conflicts and reconciles different perspectives in a homogeneous point of view. Neste artigo, oferece-se uma interpretação teórico-política da fusão de horizontes de Gadamer. Argumenta-se que o diálogo político, sob um ponto de vista hermenêutico, deve ser entendido como o processo de questionamento e disputa dos horizontes de sentido em que descansam as práticas sociais. Além disso, sustentase que o diálogo institui uma pergunta-cenário-comum que abre o horizonte social de sentido à contingência e incerteza, bem como que este nunca procura um consenso procedimental ou substancial que ressarça os conflitos e concilie as diferentes perspectivas num ponto de vista homogêneo. (shrink)