Gadamer, Rorty, hermeneutics, and Truth: A response to Warnke

Abstract

Georgia Warnke has recently criticized Richard Rorty's claim that appropriation of Gadamer's work supports Rorty's position that hermeneutics aims not at truth but at ‘edification’. On Warnke's view, however, Gadamer's work suggests that hermeneutical understanding necessarily involves the search for truth and consensus. But such an opposition between Rorty's and Gadamer's hermeneutics on this issue can be seen as primarily a matter of their intentions rather than of their actual explications of hermeneutics, which, when investigated, disclose dangers of both relativism and dogmatism. Rorty's work seems to require, against his intentions, a concept of validity. Gadamer's hermeneutics, when analyzed in terms of three key themes discussed by Warnke ‐ prejudice and tradition, the anticipation of completeness, and the fusion of horizons ‐ yields no coherent account of ‘truth’ without a kind of ‘bias’ in favor of the hermeneutical ‘object’. We still await an adequate account of validity in hermeneutical understanding.