GADAMER AND PLATO'S STYLE OF ARGUMENT
My introduction to this will involve an exploration
of the opening chapter of Truth and Method. You may therefore meet these
pages from several different points in the workspace.
Gadamer opens Truth and Method with an
argument that the logic of the natural sciences cannot be applied easily if at
all to the study of history and culture. In some ways this seems an odd argument
for the opening of this text. The argument had been made before. You can explore
the status of this argument in other WEB pages of our study of Gadamer. For
present purposes I want to highlight what Gadamer said about the inductive
method in the opening section of his major work:
But the specific problem that the human sciences
present to thought is that one has not rightly grasped their nature if one
measures them by the yardstick of a progressive knowledge of regularity. The
experience of the sociohistorical world cannot be raised to a science by the
inductive procedure of the natural sciences.....The individual case does not
serve only to confirm a law from which practical predictions can be made. Its
ideal is rather to be understand the phenomenon itself in its unique and
historical concreteness.
Gadamer here is pointing up a well known problem -
the inapplicability of natural science methods to many forms of social
experience. Gadamer takes this argument through an examination of contrasts
within scientific logic and then introduces the central concept of Bildung
or culture. Follow this up separately if you wish bildung
The central point is that Bildung refers to
'becoming' and cultural character. It contains strong echoes of immanence.