1. To lay out the field of hermeneutics and attempt a comprehensive synthesis and integration is an enormous task because its understanding lies as much in the contexts of its development as it does in itself. Hermeneutics draws on many traditions of philosophy, ranging from its critiques of the realist traditions grounded in Descartes and the Cartesian subject-object split (Outhwaite, 1987) to the emergence of Gadamer (1975), the critical theory of Habermas (McCarthy, 1982), and the archaeology of Foucault (1972). Hermeneutics does not stand apart from these traditions. They are all intimately entwined and to describe hermeneutics in isolation would inevitably lead to a shallow and misrepresentative exposition.

2. The force and vitality of the hermeneutic approach lies in its opposition, in its challenge to the existing world views of a positivist science, rather than as a method that is somehow complimentary to that science. Hermeneutics is not simply an alternative method from the variety of methods we have available as researchers. It is an approach that attempts to fundamentally embrace, define, and make possible the conditions under which the other approaches can exist at all. In other words, it takes as its problematic those assumptions that a natural science has to take for granted. To understand hermeneutics, then, we must also understand the tradition whose assumptions it is explicitly designed to question.

3. To attempt to review the major writers who have contributed to the formulation of hermeneutics is a formidable task. Not only are their works formidable in size and scope, I cannot claim to be in a position to fully understand all of it (especially going back to the primary sources), let alone to try and synthesize it for others. Therefore, what will be attempted in this will be a brief survey of my understanding of hermeneutics as it stands at the present time, emphasizing the main themes and problematics as I see them and some of the major figures in its development. However, the richness of hermeneutics can only be appreciated by reference to its role in the greater philosophical traditions and debates, and that can only be hinted at in a paper of this sort.

Hermeneutics and the Intellectual Tradition

[Hermeneutics is]...the theory of human understanding in its interpretative aspect. In particular, a hermeneutic is a set of practices or recommendations for revealing an intelligible meaning in an otherwise unclear text or text-analogue (Shotter, 1983, p. 268).

4. Hermeneutic understanding is understanding based on interpretation rather than observation. It attempts to lay out the principles by which a text and, more recently, social phenomena in general, can mean something to the person who is experiencing it. This type of understanding is quite distinct from a realist understanding where the attempt is made to uncover natural laws which determine the existence and nature of objects in an objective world. In this paper, these different themes of hermeneutics (i.e. hermeneutics as means of understanding and hermeneutics as method) will be discussed with respect to some of the major figures who gave them voice, notably Dilthey, Husserl, Heidegger, and Gadamer.

5. To discuss hermeneutics as a philosophy and method is to discuss another kind of world. In this world, we must be prepared to dismiss the traditional notions of what an objective science is and the type of knowledge it is designed to elicit. We must think of a science where explanation is based, not on prediction and control, but on interpretation; not on accounting for the variance of phenomena with respect to other phenomena, but on what those phenomena mean to the people who observe them. In this world, the concepts of communication and information take on very different identities and demand different ways of seeing and explaining them. To understand hermeneutics, then, is to understand the nature of this new world.

6. In a sense, the two worlds we have described literally exist with respect to the study of communication. These are the worlds of the European and the Anglo/American traditions of communication which are both literally and metaphorically different by virtue of distance and culture. Carey (1977) has outlined these differences in broad strokes, but nevertheless serves to emphasize the point being made. Carey argues that:

European and American work [in communication] derives from quite different kinds of intellectual puzzles and is grounded in two different metaphors for communication...American studies are grounded in a transmission or transportation view of communication. They see communication, therefore, as a process of transmitting messages at a distance for the purposes of control...By contrast, the predominant view of communication in European studies is a ritual one: communication is viewed as a process through which a shared culture is created, modified and transformed...A ritual view of communication is not directed toward the extension of messages in space, but the maintenance of society in time; not the act of imparting information or influence, but the creation, representation, and celebration of shared beliefs (p. 412).

7. Carey's quote, much exaggerated as it is (and Carey admits as much in his paper), makes clear that the European and American traditions are not two approaches to the same object of study. The fundamental questions that drive American research are very different questions from those that drive European thought. The consequences of this difference are profound in terms of the theory generated and the methods used to generate theory and data. For example, it is on the basis of these different problematics that the distinction between quantitative and qualitative methods has become a major issue in recent American communication studies. However, to try and compare quantitative and qualitative methodologies without recourse to the underlying philosophies which demand them is not a useful exercise and will inevitably lead to misunderstanding. To understand the qualitative methodologies of the European tradition is to understand them on their own terms with respect to the different world it is attempting to uncover. One cannot understand them in terms of an Anglo/American tradition built upon the assumptions of a realist epistemology and quantitative methodology.

Biblical Hermeneutics

8. According to Deetz (1977), hermeneutics received its first systematic formulation in "proper biblical interpretation:" the interpretation of the word of God as it was expressed through the bible. The hermeneutic interpretation of the bible was to take precedence over alternative or arbitrary readings. The hermeneutic operation was necessary because of social and historical differences and change. Different people would interpret the bible in different ways depending on their background. The hermeneutic rendered the true meaning of the text, written in another time and place, intelligible to the people of a different time and place.

9. This, then, is the foundation of the hermeneutic problem. As Ricoeur (1974) points out:

the very work of interpretation reveals a profound intention, that of overcoming distance and cultural differences and of matching the reader to a text which has become foreign, thereby incorporating its meaning into the present comprehension a man is able to have of himself (p. 4).

10. At this point, we can see the major themes of modern hermeneutics in the problem faced by the biblical scholars:

Texts need to be interpreted with respect to a historical and social time and place. How can the "true" meaning of the text be expressed in these new conditions?

11. There is more than one way to interpret or "read" a text. Therefore, we have to consider what are the criteria by which one interpretation is considered more valid, fair, or reasonable than another?

12. In biblical hermeneutics, there is the implicit assumption that the text has two meanings: the spiritual (or true meaning, "the word of God") and the historical. Biblical hermeneutics was the means by which the spiritual is interpreted in terms of the historical. As we shall see, little has changed in modern conceptions of the hermeneutic problematic.

Hermeneutics and History: Wilhelm Dilthey (1833-1911)

13. The adoption of hermeneutics as a general model for studying human sciences in general is generally credited to Wilhelm Dilthey (Deetz, 1977; Palmer, 1969; Ricoeur, 1974). What Dilthey did was incorporate the historical nature of interpretation as the basis of a general theory of knowledge and understanding. This in turn provided the foundation of a new account of the role and function of the human sciences (Geisteswissenschaften).

14. According to Rickman (1961), Dilthey was a philosopher interested in history. For Dilthey, history was important because it gives us an understanding of the world and how it has come to be the way it is. However, history is not just a collection of events and dates laid out in chronological order. It is also an interpretation: an account of how those events relate and what they mean when they are related. As Rickman (1961) points out, in his consideration of Dilthey's work, such interpretations could take very different forms:

Confident and optimistic spirits to whom, on the whole, life seemed good, saw, in the course of history, the forward march towards a splendid present and an even more splendid future. Saddened and oppressed minds saw only a futile meandering, or even a plunge towards disaster of which they tried to warn their contemporaries. Religious thinkers saw in history, dimly or clearly, the working of God's purpose, liberals the spread of free institutions. Thus, in their views of history, individuals or whole ages have expressed their own conceptions of life (p. 13).

15. The interpretation of a history is thus a hermeneutic operation in much same way as biblical scholars interpreted the word of God. We believe there is some right or true account of something that "actually happened" and that our history is an obligation to recreate those actual conditions and the forces which formed them. Those accounts, however, were very much subject to the beliefs and values of the people who were making them. Thus Dilthey argued that the historian cannot be apart from the history he purports to be describing. One cannot treat history as an autonomous object because the historian himself is part of that history. Indeed, the historian creates it. For Dilthey, then, there can be no true account of what "really happened". As Palmer (1969) describes:

man does not escape from history, for he is what he is through history...For Dilthey, this resulted in an historical relativism...It is in no way possible to go back behind the relativity of historical consciousness...History is ultimately a series of world views, and we have no firm and fixed standards of judgement for seeing the superiority of one world view over another (p. 117).

16. According to Ricoeur (1974), the hermeneutic problem in Dilthey's terms now transcends the issue of method and correct interpretation. It now becomes one of philosophy and epistemology. In discussing the nature of history, we are also discussing the nature of knowledge and the status of the things we purport to know. For example, what constitutes knowledge in a world that is historically relative? Is it possible to really know what happened in the past with respect to an understanding and an articulation that is located and bound in the present? Is it possible to transcend this historical position to get at the objective meanings of what really happened? Ricoeur (1974) describes Dilthey's paradox as follows:

Historical understanding thus involves all the paradoxes of historicity: how can a historical being understand history historically? These paradoxes, in turn, lead back to a much more fundamental question: in expressing itself, how can life objectify itself, and, in objectifying itself, how does it bring to light meanings capable of being taken up and understood by another historical being, who overcomes his own historical situation? (p. 5).

17. In other words, how do we read, in our own historical dimension, the artifacts (or texts) left to us from another?

Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences: The Rejection of Realism

18. The hermeneutic problem as described by Dilthey is not confined to historical understanding, it is also germane to the explication of understanding in general. Given the hermeneutic nature of knowledge, how is it possible to understand the world and the people in it as they really are? The natural sciences, built upon the foundations of subject object dualism of Descartes, have developed an elaborate system which purports to bypass the problem of historical relativism with respect to the scientific method (see Deetz, 1973) and the adoption of the assumptions of Realism (Outhwaite, 1987). Outhwaite describes the Realist philosophy as follows:

No serious account of knowledge can begin without the assumption that 'to be' is more than 'to be perceived.' And no theory of science is conceivable without the assumption that what we are pleased to call laws of nature operated in the same way as they do now before humans evolved and "a fortiori" before they began to do science. Realism is, then, a commonsense ontology in the sense that it takes seriously the existence of the things, structures, and mechanisms revealed by the sciences at different levels of reality (p. 19).

19. In other words, for natural science, there exists out there a true account that needs to be discovered (as opposed to interpreted). There is something real that we can set out to describe.

20. In Dilthey's account, the assumptions of Realism are unrealizable in practice. For him, all knowledge is historically bound. It cannot exist independent of its historical conditions. Even the assumption of an ahistorical world with ahistorical knowledge is an historical construction! Thus science, like history and biblical exegesis before it, is a hermeneutic operation.

21. The problematic of a true science, then, is comparable to the problematic of an objective history: how can we get beyond the categorizations that history and science give us in order to see the world as it really is? In other words, the world as it is before we impose relativistic history or science on it. As Merleau-Ponty (1962) points out:

All my knowledge of the world, even my scientific knowledge, is gained from my own particular point of view, or from experience of the world without which the symbols of science would be meaningless. The whole universe of science is built upon the world as directly experienced, and if we want to subject science itself to rigorous scrutiny and arrive at a precise assessment of its meaning and scope, we must begin by reawakening the basic experience of the world of which science is the second-order expression (p. viii).

22. In order to answer these questions, we must have recourse to a theory of knowledge and its relation to the world which addresses the pre-reflective nature of the world. Following Dilthey, Edmund Husserl developed the foundations of the modern conception of Phenomenology, which takes as its focus the reduction, description, and interpretation of the pre-reflective world of experience. It was Dilthey who laid out the fundamental problematic of a hermeneutic theory of the human sciences. However, it is through the philosophy of phenomenology, and its transformations via Husserl, Heidegger and Gadamer, that it is possible to understand the status and impact of hermeneutics in modern communication studies.

Hermeneutics and Phenomenology: Edmund Husserl (1859-1938)

23. Husserl's phenomenology is a philosophy and method that arose as a critique to the assumptions and practices of realism as outlined above. Its task was to go beyond the preconceptions that science brings to the objects they study in order to get to the objects themselves. For Husserl, the "object" is not located in space and time in an objective and autonomous world outside of a detached observer who can then come to know it, but rather as an object as it is experienced in consciousness. This is not to say that all experiences are subjective or relative to the whims of an individual consciousness. There is a difference between "introspection," i.e. the conscious reflection on what we are experiencing, and "inner perception," which is the direct awareness of our own conscious experience prior to that conscious reflection (Shotter, 1983). According to Husserl, this pre- reflective experience is connected with the discovery of an universality, or an essence. The pre- reflective is that moment of immediate experience wherein the universal is grasped and the object made meaningful. Thus, in observing a die, we experience its essence of diceness which enables us to grasp the totality of an object. It enables the object to point beyond itself. Thus, in looking at the die, although we can only ever observe one part of it at once while the other remains hidden from view, we still know it is a die because we continue to experience it as a die and not some other object. In listening to music, for example, we do not experience each note as separate sense experience. Rather we hear a melody, which exists neither in the notes, nor in the listener, but as the experience when the two combine and the melody is formed. The objective of phenomenology, then, is to bracket all the preconceptions we hold about a given object and to analyze it as it appears in experience at the pre-reflective level.

24. This pre-reflective knowledge, our experience of the object in its pure form before the categorization of language and the taken for granted knowledge we hold about the world, is the object of study for phenomenology. As Edie (1962) argues, this constitutes the true object of a truly rigorous science:

in the sense that it is an investigation of the most radical, fundamental, primitive, original evidences of conscious experience; it goes beneath the constructions of science and common sense towards their foundations in experience. It studies what all particular sciences take for granted and what we in "natural" everyday experience take for granted. A "presuppostionless" philosophy is one which will reach what is absolutely primary or most fundamental in experience (pp. 18-19).

25. Husserl's phenomenology is labeled as "transcendental" (Edie, 1962) because it takes as its object the fundamental structures of consciousness and experience which are presumed to exist outside of both objects and knowers. The essence which structured knowledge and perception lies behind them both, and makes both possible. As Merleau-Ponty (1962) explains:

Perception is not a science of the world, it is not even an act, a deliberate taking up of a position; it is the background from which all acts stand out, and is presupposed by them. The world is not an object such that I have in my possession the law of its making; it is the natural setting of, and field for, all my thoughts and all my explicit perceptions (p. xi).

26. Husserl's contribution to Dilthey's Geisteswissenschaften, then, was the rejection of the Cartesian subject-object split in which Realist epistemology is entrenched. Husserl was able to formulate an epistemology where meaning resides at the point of contact where subject and world meet, as opposed to meaning residing "out there" waiting to discovered by a knowing subject, or knowledge residing in human consciousness ready to impose itself on an unresisting world. However, what Husserl didn't do was incorporate the historical nature of Dilthey's account. In conceiving of the fundamental structures of conscious experience as universal and transcendental, Husserl is assuming that meaning itself could be ahistorical. For Husserl, the project was to strip away the preconceptions of history and science to arrive at the essence of the object "as it really is" as it appeared in pre-reflective experience. In the writings of Martin Heidegger, this assumption is challenged and experience is located back in its historical domain.

Hermeneutics and the Life-World: Martin Heidegger (1889-1976)

27. Heidegger's (1962) major work, Being and Time, addresses essentially the same problematic of Husserl's phenomenology; i.e. the explication of the preconceptual apprehending of phenomena. However, whereas Husserl attempted to locate pre-reflective experience in transcendental structures of conscious experience, Heidegger returned to Dilthey's conception of historicality. For Heidegger the structures which underly and make possible understanding are historically bound, and the phenomenologist who is trying to unravel so-called universal essences is also bound by those same historical conditions. Thus the phenomenologist is in the same paradox as the "historical being trying to understand history historically." As Deetz (1977) argues:

Husserl's early quest for a pure transcendental phenomenology, where all presuppositions were suspended in the description of essences..proved impossible. The phenomenologist himself is an historical being existing in a particular language and cultural world (p. 59).

28. What Heidegger essentially did, then, was to make the move from a transcendental to an existential phenomenology; i.e. a phenomenology in which the structures of pre-reflective experience are historically situated rather then universal. Thus, for Heidegger, one cannot bracket the presuppositions that come with historicality. Instead they become the structures that demand explication. As Deetz (1977) explains:

In an existential phenomenology, one's historical and linguistic prejudices, rather than being suspended, become resources for understanding since they are part of the very existence to be understood (p. 59).

29. Where does this discussion leave hermeneutics as a method for understanding human experience? In Dilthey's original formulation of Geisteswissenschaften (the human sciences), he made it quite clear that human beings were a very different type of phenomena than natural objects, and thus demanded a different way of studying and understanding them. As Palmer (1969) points out:

The human studies do not deal with facts and phenomena which are silent about man but with facts and phenomena which are meaningful only as they shed light on man's inner processes, his 'inner experience.' The methodology appropriate to natural objects is not adequate to the understanding of human phenomena except in their status as natural objects (pp. 103-104).

30. The adequate methodology Dilthey proposed for the human sciences was Geisteswissenschaften, based on understanding (verstehen) and interpretation (hermeneutics). His goal was to "formulate a methodology of understanding that will transcend the reductionist objectivity of the sciences and return to the 'fullness of life,' of human experience" (Palmer, 1969, p.105).

31. Following Heidegger's reconceptualization of the phenomenological method, hermeneutics seeks an understanding of human experience in its "fullness" as Dilthey envisaged it, and with respect to its situation in a socio/historical context which gives it sense. For Deetz (1977), such an understanding is the very key to understanding the world since "interpretation is not added to the world: it is the world (p. 60). The world literally is the world as we know it and it is this world that hermeneutics seeks to understand; the world as it exists to the people who live and behave in it at a historically bounded point in time.

32. The move from seeing the world as an objective and autonomous entity to seeing it as a hermeneutic operation that shapes both perceiver and perceived has generated methods of investigation and understanding that are quite distinct from the quantitative based methods of the natural sciences. For example, Ricoeur (1971) argues that human action should be considered as a type of "text" and its "meanings" interpreted in a hermeneutic manner. Similarly, the notion of reading human institutions as "texts" is apparent in Deetz and Mumby's (1985) "metaphor" analysis of power in organizations.

33. The hermeneutic/phenomenological epistemology has also provided the philosophical foundations for qualitative research in communication and the social sciences. In doing qualitative research in communication studies the attempt is being made to understand and give an account of human action in its own terms; i.e. in terms of the life-world of which it is both a part and contributor. This life- world cannot exist apart from the human actors as something to be explained; the life world produces the possibility of the actors being what they are and the actors are, in turn, responsible for producing the life world. It is this dialectic which forms the epistemological foundations of such qualitative methods as ethnomethodology (Garfinkel, 1967), participant observation (Anderson, 1987; Lofland and Lofland, 1984) and the ethnography of communication (Spradley, 1979).

34. Here one can see the importance of Husserl's contribution of the intentional consciousness: i.e. that consciousness can only be consciousness of something. Both coexist and mutually create each other. So it is with the historically located lifeworld described in Heidegger. People do indeed exist with respect to a lifeworld, the lifeworld exists to make human experience meaningful and understandable, but the lifeworld cannot exist independent of those people, as natural science assumes. The lifeworld in a hermeneutic sense exists in and through the people who continually create and recreate it in their everyday practices. It is these practices, and the lifeworld they both create and are defined by, that are the objects of study for qualitative research in communication.

Hermeneutics and the Critique of Method: Hans-Georg Gadamer (1900-2002)

35. The work of Gadamer, and in particular Gadamer's (1975) Truth and Method, represents the major thrust of contemporary hermeneutics. Gadamer's work develops hermeneutics into a distinctly philosophical discussion of the nature of understanding itself as opposed to the explication of procedures for eliciting understanding. This distinction between "understanding" and "procedures" (or "Truth and "Method") is fundamental in Gadamer's hermeneutics. Whereas Dilthey employed hermeneutics to question the foundations on which the natural sciences purported to explain the world, Gadamer takes the next step to question the assumptions of hermeneutics and its capacity to determine the appropriate, valid, or reasonable interpretation of a text. Gadamer wishes to go beyond both Realism and hermeneutics as methods for understanding to try and get at the nature of understanding itself. As Hekman (1986) describes:

Gadamer defines hermeneutics as the philosophical exploration of the character and fundamental conditions of all understanding and rejects the contention that the task of hermeneutics is methodological investigations into the social sciences and other disciplines (p. 92).

36. This marks a radical change of direction from the original project of Dilthey. In work of Dilthey, the attempt was made to distinguish the human sciences (Geisteswissenschaften) and the natural sciences (Naturwissenschaften). Dilthey argued that the understanding of human experience in its "fullness," as opposed to its psychological reduction into "concepts," needed a different type of methodology from that being used in the natural sciences. Dilthey proposed such a method based on hermeneutics, and this was subsequently developed in Husserl and Heidegger. However, what has remained implicit in the works of all three of these writers is the assumption of method. It has been assumed that there is something that might be called a human science. Husserl's phenomenology, for example, was an explicit attempt to formulate such a science. Gadamer, however, has dug one level deeper in the strata of what we can and cannot take for granted. For Gadamer, the very idea of "method" is itself a historical construction which can only make sense within a prevailing historical tradition. As Thiselton (1980) describes:

Gadamer strives to show that, far from being a permanent tradition in philosophy, a belief in the all-embracing power of theoretical reason [and method] is bound up with particular historical factors, such as the mood of the Enlightenment (p. 294).

37. Thus, theoretical reasoning and method have not always been the norm in the creation of knowledge and understanding. They are particular forms of thought that have arisen at a particular point in time with reference to a particular historical tradition which gives it meaning. The development of Dilthey's "alternative" Geisteswissenschaften cannot escape this tradition. Although it purports to be describing a different object of study, i.e. the fullness of human experience as opposed to objective laws of nature, hermeneutics still embraces the tenets of reason and method as the proper means of investigation. For Gadamer, however, method is not a means by which we can free ourselves from this history and achieve a true knowledge of things as they really are, whether we are doing natural science or hermeneutics. Method itself is a historical construction; it is only a certain way of achieving understanding.

38. Gadamer, then, takes the problematic of understanding one level of abstraction higher. For Gadamer, it is the human sciences themselves that become the object of study and not the phenomena they purport to describe and explain. In other words, Gadamer wants to describe how understanding is possible at all, given that science (whether human and natural) is itself historically bound. As Hekman (1986) describes:

39. Gadamer's views on the nature of method naturally have implications for the nature of knowledge. Like Dilthey, Gadamer is concerned with the historicality of knowledge; the assertion that understanding can only be achieved with reference to the historical context in which that understanding is taking place. However, the project of a hermeneutics as proposed by Dilthey, and later in Heidegger, was to be able to interpret some sense of an original meaning of a text that it possessed at the time of its creation. Hermeneutics was the means by which that meaning could be rendered intelligible to a new historical readership. Similarly, in understanding human action, Heidegger believed that there was an underlying essence of being that, though shaped by historical forces, was also concealed by them. As Palmer (1969) describes:

In its historicality and temporality, he [Heidegger] saw clues to the nature of being; being as it discloses itself in lived experience escapes the conceptualizing, spatializing, and atemporal categories of idea-centered thinking. Being was the concealed prisoner, almost forgotten, of Western static categories, that Heidegger hoped to release (p. 125).

40. For Gadamer, there can be no return to an "original meaning" or a fundamental "being." For Gadamer, meaning is always new, because it is always a new experience that is contextualized in a constantly evolving history of experiences. There is never a true, definitive, or final interpretation of a text since new meanings can always be determined in future experiences of it. As McCarthy (1978) describes:

If interpretation is always a hermeneutic mediation between different life-worlds and if the hermeneutic "initial situation" is itself caught up in the movement of history, the notion of a final valid interpretation makes no sense... Unless there is an end to history, there can be no end to this interpretive process (pp. 173-174).

41. As like Dilthey and Heidegger, the question of historicality is central in Gadamer's hermeneutics. However, unlike Dilthey and Heidegger, Gadamer takes the historical nature of understanding one level further. For Gadamer, even the means we have available for achieving understanding, the sciences, are themselves historical manifestations. In hermeneutics, it is explicitly realized that the meaning of any text is always bound up in the historicality of its interpretation. Gadamer's contribution to hermeneutics, then, is to take the next step and say that not only is our knowledge of any text historically bound, so are our hermeneutic methods for interpreting it.

Hermeneutics and the Study of Communication

42. What has hermeneutics have to do with the study of communication? As stated in the introduction, hermeneutics offers an alternative perspective to the reductionist approach of a natural science grounded in a realist epistemology. Hermeneutics also has the potential to fulfill this same role with respect to contemporary approaches in American communication studies (see Carey, 1977; Deetz, 1973, 1977). In the American tradition, studies of communication, like the social sciences in general, have implicitly adopted the realist epistemology in its research (see Carey, 1977; Delia, 1987). Berger and Chaffe's (1987) definition of a "communication science" typifies much of what communication considers as acceptable research, and this is clearly founded in the natural science model:

Communication science seeks to understand the production, processing, and effects of symbols and signal systems by developing testable theories, containing lawful generalizations, that explain phenomena associated with production, processing, and effects (p. 17).

43. The predominance of so-called "communication models" also clearly demonstrate the reductive approach communication scholars have adopted in explaining the so-called "communication process" (see Ruben, 1988b, chapter 2). Even the notion of an autonomous "communication process" existing at all is a realist assumption. Communication models such as those developed by Shannon and Weaver (1949), Schramm (1954), Lasswell (1960), and Berlo (1960), to name but a few, all attempt to reduce communication into component parts, which are then usually operationalised and correlated with other variables. Stimulus-response, Sender-receiver, message-effects, and even the more complex information processing models of communication, are all variations on this same reductionist theme. But what they all have in common is the abstraction of communication from the people who are producing, using, and making sense of it. Communication, then, is treated as an object that exists out there in a natural world.

44. In a sense, to ask what hermeneutics can say about communication is already a loaded and ultimately misleading question. By asking the question in this manner, we are implicitly buying into the assumption that communication can exist as autonomous entities that can be objectively studied, and that a method such as a hermeneutics can somehow shed further light on it. However, by asking that question, we are also implicitly adopting the realist philosophy of the nature of the world that hermeneutics seeks to reject and replace. The key point to be made here is that hermeneutics exists to question the very idea of the "communication process" as being a valid concept at all. The role of hermeneutics in the study of human communication today has not changed substantially from the role it played in Dilthey's original formulation of the Geisteswissenschaften. It is a need to return to the fullness of human experience rather than the reduction of it. In achieving Dilthey's project, it is not enough to posit hermeneutics as a complimentary science to the natural sciences. It is a radical alternative. To adopt a hermeneutic stance means to reject the preconceptions of natural science altogether and to literally study a different world. The adoption of such a radically different world view is never an easy task because it is so difficult to part with traditional ways of seeing and explaining. It is so tempting to consider the new approach in terms of the old. As Harre, Clarke, and De Carlo (1985) make clear in their discussion of a hermeneutic psychology of human action:

the new approaches to theory and method of enquiry in some well-established field are often made more difficult by a natural and persistent tendency to understand new ideas in terms of the old ways. It is important to realize that the approach we have chosen to call 'the psychology of action'...is not just a revision or modification of old ways of doing psychology but a radically different approach to the understanding of human behavior. It is not just an additional theory inserted into existing psychology but a thoroughgoing alternative to it (p. viii).

45. Thus, in contemporary texts on hermeneutic approaches to human action and communication, the first task that has to be performed is a critique of the prevailing realist approaches to communication. Before the hermeneutic approach can be described, the prevailing world view has to be discounted. Thus, Harre and Secord's (1972) hermeneutic theory of human action is presented alongside a critique of the traditional realist notion of a experimental social psychology. The same is true of the "psychology of human action" described in Harre, Clarke, and De Carlo (1985) and John Shotter's explicitly hermeneutic account of human selfhood (Shotter, 1975, 1984; Gauld and Shotter, 1977). A hermeneutic theory of communication and human behavior is always a theory in tension with and in opposition to prevailing views of the world. That is why hermeneutics is so frequently misunderstood when it is evaluated with respect to realist criteria; criteria which hermeneutics seeks to reject and invalidate when applied to human experience.

46. Without going into specifics of particular hermeneutic approaches, I would argue that the value of hermeneutics for communication studies in the Anglo/American tradition lies precisely in this tension which exists between the naturalistic and the humanistic approaches. The existence of an alternative epistemology enables the informed critique of concepts such as the "communication process" or the "cognitive information processing system." It allows scholars to step outside the prevailing frames of realist thinking and give a new distance to the consideration of some fundamental problems in the field. Thus I would agree with Deetz (1978) when he argues that:

At the minimum such an analysis should give a degree of self-awareness about current concepts and research not possible without the distance of another perspective. Ideally a hermeneutic stance will not only give the distance necessary to develop a sense of perspective on current work and knowledge but will give a legitimate mode of thinking and working which denies the battles between subjectivity and objectivity and between idealism and empiricism (p. 12).

Hermeneutics and Critical Theory

47. What hermeneutics and critical theory hold most fundamentally in common is their radical critique of prevailing realist epistemologies of understanding and the nature and production of knowledge. But while the task of both approaches is the explicit undermining of such realist world views, their objectives for doing so are very different. Following Dilthey, Husserl, and Heidegger, the goal of hermeneutics was to develop an alternative methodology which was appropriate for the human sciences (Geisteswissenschaften); i.e. a means of investigating the fullness of human experience in a socially and historically situated life-world. Thus hermeneutics emerged as an explicitly descriptive operation. It was an attempt to describe human experience as it is without the imposition of potentially distorting value laden categories of science or ideology.

48. In critical theory however, the goal of theory is explicitly evaluative. It asks not only how are meaning systems constructed and maintained, but in whose interests they are constructed and maintained. Critical theory sets out, not to describe what is apparent in the life-world, but to critique and change it. The move to a critical interpretative theory (or a critical hermeneutics) is to add the evaluative component to the interpretive operation. Through the influence of Dilthey and Husserl, in particular, hermeneutics has always strived to repress evaluation in its quest for a truly "objective" and "rigorous" science. However, as Deetz and Kersten (1983) have argued, it is through the work of Gadamer (1975) that the notion of an "objective" understanding through the use of "method" was rejected since all understandings and methods are historically bound. For Gadamer, meanings are constantly in the process of being "produced" afresh in the experience between text and interpreter. Meaning is not an entity that is "reproduced" from one time and place and place to another. Thus, Gadamer's hermeneutics explicitly recognizes that the "meaning" of a text can never be free of the values and evaluations of the interpreter since these are an integral part of the historical tradition of which he is a part. In other words, the interpreter must "adopt a position" with respect to the text.

49. It follows from this argument that the same must be true of hermeneutic research itself, since it also has to adopt a "position" with the text it wishes to make meaningful. Thus this position can never be value-neutral (as the natural sciences purport to be through their scientific method). The text is never free to speak for itself, it only speaks with respect to the position of the interpreter, and this position is, inevitably, value laden. From Gadamer, then, we have the potential to move from a descriptive hermeneutics, in which values and assumptions about the world are "bracketed," to a critical hermeneutics, in which the readings of texts are taken to be value laden and the nature of those value systems are taken as problematic. The philosophical base for critical hermeneutics comes from Marxist thought, as Deetz and Kersten (1983) explain:

Even though hermeneutics and Marxism might agree that existing social, economic, and political arrangements are constructions, hermeneutics would seek to explain how they were constructed and how their coherence is maintained; Marxism would seek to examine the conditions making the construction necessary and whose interests are served by their maintenance (p. 150).

50. For a critical theorist like Habermas, the interpretation of meanings within a pre-existing social and power structure of the kind posited by Marxism, always constitutes a case of "systematically distorted communication" (McCarthy, 1978, p. 190). Thus, not only are meanings distorted by the value-laden nature of ourselves as historically situated beings, those meanings are also systematically distorted in the interests of a prevailing power structure. In a critical hermeneutics, then, the systematic nature of this distortion must be revealed and acted upon. It is not enough to describe things as they are in an uncritical fashion. Hermeneutics must become an agent for change. As Deetz (1982) argues:

[Hermeneutic] insight, though interesting, is never sufficient... Whereas insight undermines the realist assumption that things are as they appear, every individual implicitly and every psychiatrist explicitly knows that insight into what things mean and how they are formed is rarely sufficient for change. Interpretive research, to be useful, must become critical (p. 139).

51. How is critical hermeneutics employed in communication research? Two examples will be offered to show how a critical hermeneutics is being used in the analysis of communication.

52. The idea of critical hermeneutics in communication is still relatively new and is often misinterpreted with respect to the dominant epistemology of realism in communication study (Deetz, 1978). However, critical hermeneutics is being increasingly employed in the study of organizations and especially, organizational cultures (see Deetz, 1982; Deetz and Kersten, 1983). The adoption of the "organization as culture" metaphor is seen as a move away from traditional realist approaches to the study of communication, with its emphasis on concepts such as communication flow, hierarchy, effectiveness and control (Putnam, 1983). However, a critical approach to interpreting organizational cultures entails an examination of the prevailing power structures in which such cultures are formed and which, inevitably, those cultures serve to maintain. The work of Mumby (1987, 1988), for example, adopts the critical theory of Habermas and Giddens as a means of interpreting the existence and maintenance of organizational cultures, and the nature of organizational sense-making, in terms of power structures and ideology.

53. In mass communication, the work of Stuart Hall takes an explicitly Marxist perspective in its analysis of mass media messages (Hall, 1977). What Hall attempts to show that is that the manner in which mass media messages are encoded and interpreted are done so with respect to a prevailing ideology. Thus, although a mass media message can have potentially meanings, there is associated with a "preferred meaning" which comes with it via the ideological codes we have available to interpret it. Hall (1977) refers to this as the "ideological effect;" the manner in which dominant ideological codes are able to frame our interpretations of mass media events and messages. These ideological codes are inherently linked to the interests of a dominant ideology. Hall is able to extend this argument to all kinds of media messages, including radio news (Hall, 1981a), newspaper photographs (Hall, 1981b), and newspaper reporting (Hall, Critcher, Jefferson, Clarke, and Roberts, 1981).

54. From these two examples, we can see that a critical hermeneutics is an approach that is very different from traditional hermeneutic approaches. Critical hermeneutics takes nothing for granted. In fact, it is the taken for granted nature of understanding that is the object of study and, in particular, where that knowledge comes from. Hermeneutics stops at the point of saying that knowledge and understanding is historically and socially bound. Critical hermeneutics continues where traditional hermeneutics leaves off, by embarking on an examination of those social and historical conditions which make understanding possible. The Marxist approach to this project may seem troublesome to those brought up in the capitalistic ideologies of the West. But if American communication studies is not prepared to explicitly question the way it accounts for the world, if it is not prepared to see beyond "scientific" and "objective" ways of seeing, if it is not prepared to become aware that there are other ways of reading texts that, by virtue of its historical situation, make sense "only if read this way," then it is blinding itself to the complex nature of the social world and how understanding is possible within it. As hermeneutics critiques realism for limiting and reducing our understanding of human experience, so critical theory critiques hermeneutics and realism for regarding understanding in terms of "the ways things are."

55. In conclusion, hermeneutics and critical theory is not an uneasy alliance; it is one that is fundamentally necessary to both in their endeavor to explain the historical, social, and political nature of understanding.

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