Hermeneutic circle

That the parts are understood through the whole and the whole through its parts - a circle that is not vicious but is how understanding works.

Theme: Logic, language and interpretation
Tradition: Continental
Term fixed: 1927

In plain terms

To understand a sentence you need the paragraph, and to understand the paragraph you need the sentences. To understand a word in an unknown language you need the text, and to read the text you need the words.

That looks like a trap, and treated as a proof procedure it is - you cannot start. But nobody ever starts from nothing. You begin with a guess about the whole, use it to make sense of a part, revise the guess when the part will not fit, and go round again.

So the circle is not a fallacy but a description of what understanding is: provisional, revisable, and always already underway. The only thing it rules out is the idea of an interpretation that begins with no assumptions, which is not a method anyone has ever used.

As a philosopher would put it

Ast and Schleiermacher formulate the circle as a methodological difficulty in reading: the whole must be understood from the parts and the parts from the whole. Schleiermacher treats it as manageable through divinatory and comparative movements, approaching adequacy without reaching it.

Heidegger reframes it in Being and Time. Understanding is not a cognitive operation but a mode of being, structured by a forehaving, foresight and foreconception that any interpretation works out of. The task is not to get out of the circle but to come into it in the right way, which means making the anticipations explicit and answerable to the matter rather than pretending to have none.

Gadamer develops this into the rehabilitation of prejudice - prior orientation as enabling rather than distorting - and the fusion of horizons. The objection, pressed by Betti and Hirsch, is that this makes it impossible to say a reading is wrong, and Gadamer's answer, that the text resists and corrects us, is regarded by critics as insufficient because it supplies no criterion.

Where you meet it

The Linear B tablets from Knossos and Pylos were unreadable for fifty years. Nobody knew the language, nobody knew the values of the signs, and the two problems could not be attacked separately - the sign values would follow from the language, and the language could only be identified from the signs.

Alice Kober found a way in without solving either. By grouping words that varied only in their endings, she established that the language was inflected, and built triplets showing which signs shared a consonant or a vowel without knowing what either was. Michael Ventris then constructed a grid of those relations and, in 1952, tried a guess he had been resisting for years: that the language was an early form of Greek.

The guess made the grid produce Greek words, and the words made the grid coherent. Neither could have been established first. Ventris had spent a decade assuming the language was Etruscan, and what broke the deadlock was replacing one anticipation of the whole with another and finding that the parts fell into place.

What is actually disputed

Whether the circle permits any check on a reading.

If every interpretation proceeds from anticipations, and those anticipations shape what the parts are taken to say, the worry is that a sufficiently confident reader will always find their expectation confirmed. Heidegger and Gadamer answer that the text can frustrate the anticipation, and that the working-out of a projection which does not survive contact is precisely how the circle is entered rightly.

Critics find that too weak. A determined reading can absorb almost any resistance, and the history of scriptural and political exegesis is full of examples. Hirsch's proposal to fix meaning by authorial intention is an attempt to supply the missing check; Gadamer's reply is that the author's horizon is as much a projection of ours as anything else in the text. The dispute is unresolved and structurally similar to the coherence problem in epistemology.

Commonly confused with

circular reasoning A vicious circle assumes what it proves. This one is a movement of revision, and the anticipation gets corrected rather than confirmed by fiat.
trial and error The circle is not random search. Each pass is guided by an interpretation of the whole, and revising that interpretation is the operation.
the hermeneutics of suspicion Reading for concealed meaning is a stance. The circle is a structural claim about all interpretation, suspicious or not.

Defined against

Justification The regress problem in epistemology has the same shape and is treated as a scandal, while the same structure here is treated as constitutive - which is worth noticing

Philosophers

Martin Heidegger The circle as the structure of understanding rather than an obstacle
Jacques Derrida The circle radicalised into the absence of a stable ground
Paul-Michel Foucault Reading practices as historically conditioned
Peter Abelard An early method for moving between conflicting parts and a whole

Works

Being and Time Where the reframing is made
Truth and Method Where it becomes the fusion of horizons
Sic et Non The medieval practice of reconciling parts and whole
Of Grammatology The radicalised version
Phenomenology of Perception Perception as itself circular in the same way

Schools

Hermeneutics Where the circle is the central structure
Phenomenology Where understanding is prior to method
Post-Structuralism Where the circle has no exit at all
Purva Mimamsa Where scriptural exegesis develops rules for the same movement

Related concepts

Interpretation 1819 · Knowledge c. 369 BC · Discourse 1966 · Meaning 1892 · Coherence 1807

Schleiermacher and Ast state the circle as a problem of method; Heidegger's contribution is the claim that it is not a defect to be escaped but the structure of understanding itself.