Gerry's Home Page Preliminary Materials Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3 Chapter 4 Chapter 5 Chapter 6 Chapter 7 Chapter 8 Chapter 9 Chapter 10 Chapter 11 Bibliography Appendix

Sec 4.3

4.3.    Interpretation as Explication in Language

To understand, according to Heidegger, is to be tacitly situated. This philosophy of understanding could be contrasted with Descartes’ “I think, therefore I am,” by saying, “I am situated, therefore I understand.” This would not be meant as a logical existence proof, but rather as a description of human existence as always being in a world that is already understood as meaningful and that opens up possible ways of understanding oneself, artifacts, and other people. Nor would this yet involve any explicit cognitive act in the sense of Descartes’ propositional cogito. Furthermore, it avoids the trap of post-Cartesian philosophy, the problem of how subjective mental acts can understand objects in the world, because such understanding is given with human existence. Also in contrast to Descartes, human existence is not a “clean slate,” but always understands from some concrete perspective, that incorporates shared traditions and personal anticipations as part of its being embedded in an understood situation.

One way of looking at this contrast is to say that Heidegger has described tacit situated understanding as the precondition for explicit knowledge in Descartes’ sense. Heidegger then goes on to show how everyday knowledge and even scientific knowledge are built upon such understanding through processes of interpretation. In general, interpretation is simply the further development of understanding. Through interpretation, what was understood tacitly comes to be known explicitly. Such knowledge is not the acquisition of information in the form of propositional facts (although it can eventually be developed into that form), but the working out of the possibilities that were inherent in the understanding. This “working out” is a matter of interpretation. As discussed in the previous section, such working out can produce unanticipated surprises and require a reinterpretation that revises situated understanding.

In German, the word for interpretation is Auslegung: literally the laying-out of something. This is similar to the English word, explication, that is derived from the Latin for un-folding. Interpretive explication unfolds, lays out, or develops the implications in tacit understanding. This happens in the discovery of artifacts in the situation. When an artifact is discovered as a hammer, the references in the network of significance concerning the hammer (illustrated in Figure 4-3 of Section 4.1) are taken apart, laid out, or un-folded; thereby they become explicitly understood. The artifact is seen as a hammer, as a tool for pounding nails, as a means to the building of a structure, as something useful in pursuing human projects. This is the structure of explicit interpretation: something as something.

The “as” makes up the structure of the explicitness of something that is understood. It is known as the hermeneutic as: the as of interpretation. To simply use the artifact as a hammer is to understand it tacitly, but to articulate it as a hammer is to interpret it explicitly. According to Heidegger (1927), this is, in turn, a precondition for being able to formulate propositional knowledge (and ultimately methodological scientific facts) about the thing as a hammer:

In the mere encountering of something, the thing is understood in terms of a totality of references, and the encounter hides within itself the explicitness of the assignment-relations that belong to that totality. That which is understood gets articulated when the entity to be understood is brought close interpretively by taking as our clue the “something as something”; and this articulation comes before our making any thematic assertion about it. In such an assertion the “as” does not turn up for the first time; it just gets expressed for the first time, and this is possible only in that it lies before us as something expressible. (S.149)

That is, tacitly understanding something as something on the basis of references in the situation is what permits one to interpret the thing explicitly as something subsequently and eventually to name it as something in linguistic discourse.

Section 4.1 suggested that in various kinds of breakdown cases—where an artifact is, for instance, conspicuous, obtrusive, or obstinate by being damaged, missing, or in the way—the implicit working of some of the references in the network of significance may be broken and as a result these references come to prominence. In such a breakdown case, the role of interpretation would be to mend the referential breaks by creating new reference links to the artifact within the situation. As depicted in Figure 4-6 below, the process of understanding would proceed through the following stages:

*    An initial preunderstanding discloses a world from a certain perspective of possibilities.

*    The artifact is discovered and understood as something in terms of the situational network of references.

*    However, the references are inadequate for understanding the artifact and there is a breakdown in the network.

*    The artifact is interpreted by laying out the implicit references and repairing the break in them.

*    This makes explicit the understanding of the artifact as such and such a thing.

*    The new understanding can then be asserted in language and communicated or it can revert to tacit understanding.

*    The revised tacit understanding forms the preunderstanding for any further interpretation, completing the hermeneutic circle of understanding.

 

Figure 4-6. Two similar theories of breakdown.

A comparison of Heidegger’s hermeneutic circle with Schön’s theory of reflection-in-action shows strong parallels. For Heidegger, the breakdown occurs within the network of references that constitute the situation.

 

Note that although this process is similar to Schön’s (1985) theory of breakdown and repair, for Heidegger the breakdown is in the situational preunderstanding, not in the activity itself.

Actually, if one reads Schön carefully, it is apparent that he also views breakdowns as taking place at the level of understanding, even though his terminology is open to the misinterpretation that the breakdown is at the action level. As quoted in Section 2.3, Schön (1985) says, “Sometimes, however, there are surprises. These take the form of unanticipated events which do not fit existing understandings, fall outside the categories of knowing-in-action. . . . There is a demand for reflection [that] converts tacit knowing-in-action to explicit knowledge for action (p.24; italics added).

At the corresponding point in Being and Time, where he is formulating his general theory of understanding and interpretation, Heidegger does not limit himself to cases of breakdowns in action. Rather, he emphasizes the tacit basis of all understanding of artifacts. The grounding of all understanding in a tacit grasp of the significant references of the situation provides the first of three important characteristics of interpretation. According to Heidegger’s analysis, there are three preconditions of interpretation, here referred to as pre-possession, pre-view, and pre-conception.

(a) Artifacts are always understood in terms of the totality of references of the situation. This totality is generally not explicitly grasped through a thematic interpretation. In fact, if it has once been grasped that way, it tends to return again to a tacit understanding. It is in this tacit mode that understanding is the essential foundation for everyday interpretation. In other words, interpretation of something as something is always grounded in a situatedness or pre-possession: the interpretation already possesses the situation through an understanding of the totality of references, and it moves within this understandingly in order to develop the understanding into a more explicit form.

(b) Interpretation is also always grounded in a pre-view. The development of understanding of something that is still veiled takes place through an unveiling that is always guided by a point of view that fixes that with respect to which the thing should be interpreted. The preview carves up that which the prepossession has in terms of a specific interpretability; it specifies what are to be viewed as the things and what are the joints dividing them. This basis of interpretation was taken up later by Kuhn (1964), who argued that even the natural sciences viewed reality through paradigms that institutionalized this kind of preview. An indication of the importance of preview can be seen in the way that both Schön (1983) and Kuhn (1964) claim that a major outcome of professional schooling is the transfer (tacitly, through apprenticeship relationships) of modes of preview that are definitive of schools of science, technology, or design.

(c) Interpretation is grounded in pre-conception as well. Interpretation has always already chosen a way of conceptualizing whatever is being interpreted. The choice need not be a final decision; it can be tentative and subject to future change. The conceptual framework can either be created appropriately through articulation of the thing being interpreted, or the thing can be forced into a conceptualization that contradicts its nature. But some framing of the interpretive effort in terms of a system of concepts must be chosen. To interpret x as y is to choose a conceptualization of x in terms of something like y. Even if this is not an explicit choice, but happens spontaneously or implicitly, it opens a range of possible interpretations and excludes other ways of grasping x.

 

Table 4-1. The three aspects of interpretation.

They are grounded in the three-fold preconditions of all understanding.

 

 

(a)

 

(b)

 

(c)

 

preunderstanding

 

prepossession

 

preview

 

preconception

 

interpretation

 

situated

 

perspectival

 

linguistic

 

Chapter 4

 

Section 4.1

 

Section 4.2

 

Section 4.3

 

 

The characteristics of prepossession, preview, and preconception make up the three-fold preconditional structure of interpretation in Heidegger’s analysis. The understanding that has this three-fold structure will be referred to as preunderstanding to distinguish it as a stage of the more general term, “understanding”, and to emphasize that it forms the initial precondition for the development of any interpretation. The character of interpretation as situated, perspectival, and linguistic is derived from the three-fold structure of preunderstanding (see Table 4-1).

The three aspects of preunderstanding can be illustrated with the example of interpretation in design given in Section 3.1, where Archie and Desi begin to discuss privacy issues. The action in that opening scene of the transcripts is propelled by a tension between Archie and Desi’s two different understandings of the proposed design. They start out with somewhat different prepossessions, previews, and preconceptions. Desi starts off trying to orient Archie to share his prepossession of the situation represented in the sketch (Figure 3-1): “You have a big ‘family room’ or ‘den’. And what they do is either fold down the Murphy bed or set up cots....” Archie gets the picture—i.e., he starts to have the same understanding of the situation in the habitat—but he has a different preview or slant on it. Desi views the design as meeting the need to provide a minimal accommodation for sleeping: a place to stretch out one's body during the period set aside for sleep. Archie, however, views it on the basis of his own personal experiences. In his view, “There are times when you’re waking up or going to sleep and getting your clothes on or whatever, when a modicum of privacy can actually be treasured, and when some people read a book.” While Desi is quick to respond to Archie’s concerns, he does it while remaining within a preconception that he has adopted from NASA. That is, he had started with an austere, military view of providing a minimal “accommodation for sleep” and then he switched to discussing “crew compartments”, a term used within NASA to describe private sleeping cubicles for astronauts in Space Station.

The initial discussion of privacy ends with agreement about the importance of privacy for a long mission:

Archie: It's an interesting question. If you cross this 30 day limit, then it seems likely the sleep compartments suddenly become a dramatically higher priority. People start freaking out that they can't get away from other people.

Desi: I would think so. I would think that the idea of being able to get away would be nice. Having that privacy, the control, even if they don't use it.

Here it is clear, first of all, that Archie and Desi each have an understanding of the situation that goes far beyond what is explicitly drawn in the sketch to include a sense of what life would be like in the nexus of artifacts, meanings, and relationships that are implied there. Secondly, they view this from specific perspectives, whether based on personal experiences of feelings of privacy or on traditions passed down by other designers. Thirdly, they bring to bear conceptualizations such as “crew compartment” in order to understand the given possibilities and to share this understanding.

The preconditional structure of understanding—the fact that interpretation always already has a prepossession of the situation, a preview of a perspective, and a preconception in specific language—means that interpretation is never a presuppositionless apprehending of something pre-given. Rather, all interpretation that is to contribute to understanding must have already understood the thing that is to be interpreted. The interpretation process must understand the context of significance in which the thing is situated; it must know how to carve up the matter appropriately; and it must use suitable terms to interpret it as something. The circularity of this undertaking is known as the hermeneutic circle. It is a well-known phenomenon in literary interpretation and in holistic disciplines: one cannot, for instance, interpret the line of a poem without understanding the context of the whole poem, the poet’s other works, or the poet’s life; but the interpretation of the line may be needed in order to understand these very contexts.

Such circularity cannot be avoided. It is part of the structure of human existence and of interpretation. It does not mean that things cannot be interpreted appropriately, but just that this is not automatic. The circular structure must be taken into account. In it, according to Heidegger (1927), is buried “a positive possibility of the most primary kind of knowing, that, however, can only be grasped if the interpretation has understood that its first, last, and constant task remains to make sure that the prepossession, preview, and preconception are not given by fancies and popular conceptions, but that the scientific theme is secured by working them out from the things themselves” (S.153).

One necessarily starts with sets of prejudices that have been handed down historically. However, the interpretation process allows one to methodically reflect upon these prejudices and develop new understandings, perspectives, and words for carrying on the interpretation. Being and Time is itself a model of such a process, beginning as it does with the vague, confused, and obscured historical sense of the meaning of being and explicating the way that it is understood in order to develop a new viewpoint and vocabulary for interpreting being. Of course, the danger exists that one will not pursue this effort and will remain with the prevailing prejudices. (This is the basis for Heidegger’s critique of the understanding defined by the public realm and of the corresponding inauthentic existence that does not strive to develop beyond such understanding.)

The way the hermeneutic circle works can be seen in the way Desi and Archie develop their understanding of the location of the toilet in Section 3.2. They start with a set of prejudices that have been handed down in the preconditional structure of their understanding. Desi bases his first design on the wet-wall principle, the idea that all appliances needing plumbing should be located together to facilitate the supply and removal of water. Archie starts out his thinking with the conventional (at least in his culture) idea that the toilet and shower are located in a single room, the bathroom. But then they both begin to reflect on the role of each item in the unique situation that is being designed. If the toilet is too close to the sleep compartments, then people may be disturbed by it during the night (as they in fact were in Skylab). On the other hand, as Desi points out, “You’re not going to get up in the middle of the night and take a shower.” So Archie suggests, “Could we separate them, have the shower a little more convenient to where you’re going to change, get dressed?” The idea of separating the shower and toilet arises out of the process of interpretation, and then motivates the subsequent thrust of the design effort to establish a public-private gradient across the habitat.

For both Desi and Archie, the understanding began with an assumption that the shower and toilet would be located together. They were able to get beyond this starting-point only on the basis of starting there and then reflecting on the problems that they could see in the consequences of this starting-point. (In Schön’s terms, they had to make a design decision and then let its implications talk back to them.) Then they were willing to make their initial assumptions explicit and to criticize them in terms of the things themselves: in this case, the functions of the shower and toilet in the life of the habitat. Their designing necessarily begins with uncritically accepted popular prejudices (the preconditional structures of understanding), but it then works out more appropriate interpretations through an on-going analysis and critique of the specific relationships of the situation, of their own perspectives, and of the conceptual framework being used.

The first two components of the preconditional structure of interpretation have already been discussed in the preceding presentation of Heidegger’s philosophy. The prepossession of a situation was considered in terms of the situated cognition of artifacts in Section 4.1, and the preview of public and personal perspectives was presented in terms of public opinion and moods in Section 4.2. However, the conceptualization or language of preconceptions has not yet been examined. Heidegger discusses it in terms of assertion and discourse.

Assertions are familiar from the rationalist tradition as propositional judgments (statements of the form: “x is a y” or “x as y”). Heidegger reviews three basic meanings of assertion: (a) assertion means pointing out, (b) assertion means predication, (c) assertion means communication. In each case, Heidegger argues that assertions are not fundamental, but are derivative of understanding and interpretation.

 

Table 4-2. The three aspects of assertion.

They are grounded in the preunderstanding that belongs to discourse. Discourse, in turn, is grounded in the preunderstanding of human involvements.

preunderstanding

 

prepossession

 

preview

 

preconception

 

discourse

 

situation

 

view

 

shared language

 

assertion

 

pointing out

 

predicating

 

communicating

 

 

(a) When someone asserts, “The hammer is too heavy,” this is a pointing out of an artifact that has already been understood as a hammer and has been interpreted as too heavy. The assertion is not about some kind of representation of a hammer (where the status of the representation and its relation to the assertion are problematic), but about the hammer artifact itself, as it is discovered in the understood situation.

(b) In predication, we assert a definite character of the thing discussed. But this is simply a variation on pointing out. We point out the thing in a way that restricts our view of it, for instance, to its heaviness. By this explicit restriction of the view, that which is already manifest may be made explicitly manifest in its definite character. So predication is a development of tacit understanding into a more explicit form.

(c) As communication, assertion is letting other people see with us what we are pointing out, and letting them see it as explicitly restricted. It is a sharing of the more explicit interpretation of something in the world whose understanding is already shared as part of a shared situation.

Because it is derived from interpretation, assertion has the three-fold preconditional structure. The pointing out requires a prepossession of what gets pointed out. The predication that narrows the view is a development of the preview, that had already narrowed the view in that direction. The communication takes place within a language that inconspicuously implies a preconception, because language already hides in itself a developed conceptualization.

However, assertion (that rationalist philosophy focuses on as the basic form of objective knowledge) may also entail an essential transformation from primary interpretation, from which it is derived. The hermeneutic-as can become transformed into the apophantic-as of discourse, and ultimately into the copula (“is”) of propositional assertions. This happens through a process of decontextualization; the artifact that is the subject of the assertion losses its embedding in the situation. The prepossession no longer has the situation with its nexus of references that determine the artifact’s significance (the basis of the hermeneutic-as). Now the thing is simply present as an isolated object, which can have attributes. The assertion still points out the thing in a definite way, but now the definiteness is associated with an attribute, rather than with an aspect of the situation. The binding of the object to its attribute can be further formalized into a calculus of relations. In this way, situated understanding can eventually develop through interpretation into theoretical knowledge, which can be represented in formalisms. As the interpretation draws further and further from its original concrete embedding in the situation, it becomes increasingly abstract.[1]

Despite the importance of language in Heidegger’s philosophy of interpretation, he is very sketchy in his discussion of the various layers of abstraction through which understanding can be transformed (Table 4-3) and the way each successive level in grounded in previous levels (Table 4-2). The transformations of tacit preunderstanding into increasingly explicit and formalized knowledge will have to be further worked out in Chapter 5 in order to provide a basis for the theory of computer support of interpretation in Chapter 6. Thereby, the entries in Table 4-3 will be clarified in Part II.

 

Table 4-3. Increasing abstraction of the preconditions of understanding.

preunderstanding

 

prepossession

 

preview

 

preconception

 

implicit as

 

interpretation

 

situated

 

perspectival

 

linguistic

 

hermeneutic as

 

discourse

 

identify

 

filter

 

associate

 

the word “as”

 

assertion

 

name

 

clause

 

adjective

 

apophantic as

 

predication

 

object

 

modifier

 

attribute

 

the copula “is”

 

logical calculus

 

variable

 

conditional

 

operator

 

relation

 

 

Like all interpretation, assertion has its dangers. Assertions can become abstracted from their basis in the preunderstanding of discourse. Communication in the public realm can degenerate to hearsay, where the grasp on the original phenomena becomes veiled. As assertions are passed on in re-telling, there is a widening of the range of shared interpretations, as Plato (348 BC) had already remarked in his famous seventh letter where he discusses the potential dangers of written language. Whenever something is uncovered in a process of explication, there is the possibility or even likelihood of its becoming covered up again in various ways. Such is the dialectic of tacit and explicit. This need not be considered a problem in every case. It is often necessary that our explicit interpretations re-submerge into tacit understanding in order to function effectively. Heidegger (1951) provides a good example of this in his later writings on poetry interpretation. Literary interpretation is a process of explication whose goal is to be absorbed into a deeper, but tacit understanding of the work:

Whatever else a commentary may or may not accomplish, the following is always true of it: in order to make what has been composed in the poem somewhat clearer, the commentary must always shatter itself and what it is trying to do. For the sake of what was composed, the commentary to the poem must strive to make itself superfluous. The final, but also the most difficult step of every interpretation consists in disappearing along with its commentary in favor of the pure presence of the poem. The poem, that then stands under its own law, itself directly shines a light on the other poems. Then, during repeated readings we believe we had always already understood the poems that way. It is good that we think that. (S.7 f)

Heidegger’s point here is simply to show that the basis of all knowledge is in situated understanding and in its explication via hermeneutic interpretation. He notes that many intermediate gradations are possible between the primary form of engaged understanding that is absorbed in the situation and propositional assertions about objects of theoretical study that have distanced themselves from their situatedness. There are, for instance, assertions about what is happening within the situation, accounts concerning artifacts being used, reports on things discovered in the world, the recording and fixing of “facts”, descriptions of states of affairs, or narrations of events that have transpired. Such assertions have their basis in our understanding of the world; to take them as propositions whose meaning is traced back to theoretical observations would be to pervert their origin and misconstrue their derived status.

An interpretation or assertion can be articulated as discourse, which is expressed in language. The existential foundation of language is discourse and hearing: our ability to talk and to listen form the basis of our ability to use language to articulate the meaning of our understanding or interpretations. For instance, the articulation of the interpersonal shared world gets constituted in speech acts like assenting, refusing, demanding, warning, and so on. Discourse and hearing make it possible to communicate a shared world, and thereby to grasp it as truly shared. They also make it possible (e.g., through intonation) to communicate one's personal mood. So discourse and listening are the way in which we are open to other people and to our shared being together.

Once more, Heidegger (1927) reverses the priority of phenomena from the scientific view. When we hear sounds, we do not first hear tones and then subsequently interpret them as signifying something—as though we apprehended the tone as a neutral object and then associated an attribute with it. Rather, we first hear meaningful, understood artifacts, that we can later abstract to pure sounds and facts: “What we ‘first’ hear is never noises or complexes of sounds, but the creaking wagon, the motor-cycle. We hear the column on the march, the north wind, the woodpecker tapping, the fire crackling” (S.163).

When Desi and Archie look at the sketch reproduced in Figure 3-2 of Section 3.2, with the rectangle labeled “toilet” near the rectangle labeled “ward room table”, they do not observe a series of lines forming rectangles, etc. Rather they directly perceive a public meeting and eating area with a bathroom opening onto it. Desi immediately starts to talk about this (sketched) situation as being like the (real) arrangement at his office, where the bathroom faces the reception area. Archie also points to the situation as being problematic. He perceives the habitat as consisting of meaningful areas interacting, he does not have to deduce this fact from an analysis of coordinates of points and distances between lines—the way a computer would have to. Furthermore, the language for talking about his understanding and sharing it with other people is immediately available as part of his linguistic traditions.

When Archie tries to rethink the concept of bathroom and to suggest to Desi that other definitions might be worth exploring for the sake of the design, he does all this in language. It is clear from the videotape that his chain of ideas follows haltingly, as one link after the other is brought out as a follow up to what came before. It is not that Archie had an argument all logically thought out in his mind that he then telegraphed to Desi. Rather, he thought out the relationships of the different national models of bathrooms by linguistically pointing out different aspects. Desi followed the discussion, not by translating sounds into symbols and deducing consequences for some representation of bathrooms in his head, but by seeing their shared notion of bathroom develop as its various aspects were unveiled through discourse.

Language is the medium in which our understanding of our world is interpretively explicated. Whereas animals exist in the wilderness of environments that are simply understood in unmediated, instinctual ways, people dwell in richly interpreted, socially-mediated worlds thanks to language. As Heidegger (1947) puts it, “Language is the house of being” (S.188). Gadamer (1960) attributes an even more universal role to language, simultaneously stressing that it is a medium of discovery as well as of projection: “Being that can be understood is language” (p.xxiii). For Heidegger and Gadamer language is not an arbitrary system of symbols for representing things (the way a programming “language” is), but the embodiment of historical tradition, the constantly evolving encapsulation of mankind’s understanding of the being of the world, artifacts, and people. In this sense, “being is not experienced where something can be constructed by us and is to that extent conceived, but it is experienced where what is happening can merely be understood” (ibid.). Thanks to our dwelling in language, we can understand, discover, interpret, and share whatever can be that can be understood. 

[1] The term abstract comes from the Latin abstrahere, to draw away.

Go to top of this page

Return to Gerry Stahl's Home Page

Send email to Gerry.Stahl@drexel.edu

This page last modified on January 05, 2004