Understanding the Meaning of Meaning: Origin, Concepts, and Methodological Approaches to Hermeneutics
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Abstract
This paper intends to present the origin, concepts, and methodological approaches in the study of hermeneutics – semantics, semiotics, logical analysis, ontology, and phenomenology – in order to explain the workings of language in human experience. The question of being is the most important question in the whole of philosophy. In parallel, the question of meaning is the most fundamental when it comes to hermeneutics. The research aims to respond to the question of being by means of understanding language. To be able to answer this question, the paper will elaborate the philosophy of language of Ferdinand de Saussure, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Edmund Husserl, and his successor at Freiburg, Martin Heidegger. Hans-Georg Gadamer found a way of explicating hermeneutics in which he asserts that truth is beyond method. Paul Ricoeur grafts this assertion to phenomenology through the narrative theory. This paper argues that there is no singular method of understanding the meaning of meaning because the truth makes itself manifest in its different ways of unfolding.
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