Truth and Method

Truth and Method is a book published in 1960 by the German philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer, regarded as his major work. In it he develops the concept of «philosophical hermeneutics» that Martin Heidegger had sketched in Being and Time (1927) without treating it at length. Gadamer did not intend to offer a new method for interpreting texts. He aimed to describe what we always do when we understand something, even if we are not aware of doing it. His interest, as he himself stated, was philosophical: not what we do or ought to do, but what happens to us beyond our wanting and doing.

The book draws on the ideas of Romantic hermeneutists such as Friedrich Schleiermacher and on the later work of Wilhelm Dilthey. Gadamer questions objectivity as an attainable goal and argues that meaning arises through intersubjective communication. He holds that truth and method stand in tension. He criticizes both the attempt of the human sciences to imitate the rigorous methods of the natural sciences and the traditional view that interpreting a text means recovering its author's original intention. Against both positions, he argues that people possess a «historically effected consciousness» and are embedded in the history and culture that shape them. To interpret, then, is to achieve a «fusion of horizons», in which the interpreter discovers how the history of the text connects with their own background.

The work has been highly influential in philosophy and the social sciences, especially on Jürgen Habermas. It also provoked reactions. E. D. Hirsch reasserted the reconstruction of the author's intention, and Adolf Grünbaum criticized Gadamer's account of the natural sciences and the contrast he draws with the humanities.