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Deals with the hermeneutic work of Hans‐Georg Gadamer. It analyses the development of hermeneutic thinking, the focus on language, the critique of the Enlightenment and positivism, the role of dialogue in ethics and politics, and finally reviews the critical debates between Gadamer and Habermas. It maintains that Gadamer's approach offers profound insights into how we might reconceive of political theory in the future.

Insight is needed, in particular, into the variability of meaning and processes of meaning change. This chapter considers the ‘hermeneutic circle’. Together with the theory of knowledge and cognitive development set out in Chapter 6, this theory of meaning and meaning change provides the inspiration and the basis for a general theory of discovery, to be developed in Chapter 9.

The term ‘problem of coordination’ had appeared in Mach's writings on mechanics and thermodynamics; was salient in the discussion of the relation between mathematical and physical geometry that extended from the 19th century into the 20th; and came to special prominence through the writings of Schlick and Reichenbach when logical empiricism was beginning to break with the neo-Kantian tradition. The questions What counts as a measurement of (physical quantity) X? and What is (that physical quantity) X? cannot be answered independently of each other, which brings up the famed ‘hermeneutic circle’. This chapter examines this apparent circularity by focusing on the one hand on its more abstract consideration by Reichenbach, and on the other hand the practical response in history examined by Mach and Poincaré, with the conclusion that pure or presuppositionless coordination is neither possible nor required.

This chapter presents a summary of the topics discussed in the preceding chapters. These include learning and innovation, evolution and institutions, situated action, hermeneutic circle, heuristic discovery, cycle of (dis)integration, innovation systems, and management of learning.

The conclusion undertakes two key tasks. Surveying the case studies of the previous three chapters, it argues that reification can be understood as a coherent phenomenon, affecting the course of international theory across the decades. It then develops a series of concrete methodological research practices to check or critique it: operationalizing the notion of sustainable critique developed in the introduction. To that end, it uses the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as an example, showing how a sustainably critical research project would be undertaken in that context, and considering how such a project might contribute to both elite and popular policy discourses.

What is the empirical content of a theory? If a theory is identified with one of its linguistic formulations, the only available answers allow for no non‐trivial distinction between empirical and non‐empirical content. The restriction of such a formulated theory to a narrow ‘observational’ vocabulary is not a description of the observable part of the world but a hobbled and hamstrung description of its entire domain, still with non‐empirical implications. Viewing a theory as identified through the family of its models––the structures it makes available for modelling the phenomena––yields a new approach. The distinctions so made are illustrated with Newton's physics, absolute versus relative motion, nineteenth‐ century ether theory of electromagnetism, and quantum mechanics. A hermeneutic circle in the interpretation is noted, and the theory‐independence of the observable/unobservable distinction maintained.

The chapter outlines the tension between readers’ explorative inferences and the constraints of the text’s probability design. It foregrounds the ways in which the artificial nature of the designed sensory flow of the literary text, as conceived through predictive processing, invites readers to pursue multiple configurations of precision while reading. Furthermore, it suggests that these explorative inferences also account for different reading experiences when readers take up a text multiple times. The chapter then turns to discussions of readers’ horizons of expectation and the hermeneutic circle. In conversation with these earlier models of reader response in historical contexts, the chapter discusses probability designs’ invitation to flexibility, but also the resistance that they offer to readers’ sense-making efforts.

This chapter explains the basic philosophical concepts and features of the interpretive turn, including: meaning holism, the hermeneutic circle, self-interpretation, the social background, and contingent causality. Sociologists, economists, political scientists, psychologists, and other social scientists can no longer afford to ignore philosophy. This is because philosophical reflection is needed in order to decide the concepts and forms of reasoning that are appropriate to a given domain of empirical study. Interpretive philosophy ought to govern the approach social scientists take to research and what kinds of study they favor. This will be contrasted with some of the fundamental philosophical assumptions found in naturalist approaches to social science.

This chapter starts with an examination of the hermeneutic circle, and it is argued that, though there is a good sense in which such a circle does exist, nevertheless language provides us with a way in to the interpretation of works. The discussion then moves on to the so-called intentional fallacy, and it is maintained that provided authorial intention is understood in a constructive sense, it is not fallacious to identify the meaning of a work with what its author intends it to mean. Constructive intentions do not determine meaning, but they do determine which words an author utters, though in practice the constructive nature of the relevant intentions makes this less useful as a means of settling textual difficulties than might appear. Allusion, too, is a matter of authorial intention only in the constructive sense, that is, we attribute intended allusions to an author only if that is what we judge to be the right interpretation of his work.

This chapter treats of deconstruction, which is distinguished from linguistic idealism. It is argued that deconstruction, unlike the linguistic idealism that the book favours, takes an implausible anti-realistic approach to both truth and meaning. Derrida’s conception of understanding is criticized in the context of an exposition of Wittgenstein’s rule-following considerations. There is a discussion of the confusion between mention and use that is so prevalent in literary-theoretical works, and the curious reversion of deconstructionist critics to a Cartesian privacy about the mental. It is argued that the idea that readers are in dialogue with texts ignores the fact of the fixity of works and their meanings before readers read them: the business of establishing the text curtails some of the wilder flights of deconstructionist imagination. The procedure of fixing the text is illustrated from Horace, and the chapter concludes by showing that this process involves the hermeneutic circle, though not in a problematic way.

In the chapters that follow, the third-order probability design is developed. The third-order probability design revolves around how expectations about second- and first-order predictions are developed through structural patterns yielded by genre (III.1), textual gaps and shadow stories (III.2), and intertextual references to unfamiliar texts (III.3). The final chapter of the section, then, traces the tension between flexibility and constraint in probability designs.