[Gadamer and Application]

p.55 For Gadamer "the central problem of hermeneutics...is the problem of application" (TM 307; emphasis in original). Application, literally the point at which hermeneutics is applied to a specific problem, is central because "knowledge that cannot be applied to the concrete situation remains meaningless and even risks obscuring what the situation calls for" (313)... Gadamer, for all his involvement with philosophy, believed abstract ideas on their own can have no philosophical weight. It is in the world that meaning is found.

p.58 for Gadamer, looking at something objectively is impossible. It can only be looked at as do human beings, as one caught up in and as a product of the flow of time.

p.58 Gadamer maintains throughout his work that not only is objective knowledge of anything impossible, but also that the interpreter must belong to it in some way, to see it as a part of human life, in order to understand it at all.

[Reading, Interpretation, and the Problem of Truth in Gadamer]

p.67 Among the hermeneutic consequences of the playing's being foregrounded is the raising of the question of truth. As Gadamer says, "In being presented in play, what is emerges" (TM 112). It is the manifestation of the world and of Being-in-the-world in a text that presents what "is." This "is" represents the truth of things, but "truth" is obviously not meant here in an empirical sense... the "is" here must be taken ontologically as something which opens men and women to Being-in-the-world... Gadamer wants to maintain that, since "what is emerges" from an encounter with a text, this means the question of truth necessarily arises there as well.

p.73 Gadamer's principal point in Truth and Method, as has been seen, is that what truth means for the human sciences is not what it means for the natural sciences. Truth in the human sciences cannot be determined empirically and definitively. What is required for the ascertaining of hermeneutic truth is what Gadamer calls "tact," which is comparable to the practical judgment Greeks call phronesis (see TM 20-22, 39-40). Tact is based on a larger understanding of the nature of the world and its ways that allows judgements to be made which are not predicated merely on facts.