Gadamer on Saying and Meaning Taylor Carman Barnard College What is it to understand what someone has said or written? That simple question opens onto a labyrinth of often surprisingly heated debate concerning the theory and practice of hermeneutics. Gadamer is often criticized for having deviated in a confused and confusing, some have even said pernicious, way from common sense and proper conduct by denying that the intentions of authors either constitute the meaning of what they say or provide an authoritative criterion by which their texts ought to be read and understood. 1 Here I want to defend Gadamer’s account of textual understanding and interpretation against some of those objections, which I think rest on misunderstandings not only of Truth and Method, but also of what it is to say, to mean, to intend, and to interpret. Gadamer offers a profound and sophisticated account of the nature of linguistic understanding, one that acknowledges the essentially plural and perspectival character of interpretation while at the same time respecting the transcendence of texts beyond the horizons that necessarily situate readers who approach them from a historical distance. More specifically, what Gadamer says about the nature of reading and writing is, contrary to what his critics maintain, both plausible and innovative in its critical exposure of a widespread, perhaps universal illusion or temptation to regard meaning as a fixed, objective property of texts, inscribed in them much as the shapes of the words themselves have been impressed upon the page, rather than as a function of the dialogical relation between speaker and listener, author and reader. Gadamer is right, I shall argue, that meaning is not a fixed, objective property of texts, but is more like the relation between an object and how it looks from a multiplicity of perspectives: no single perspective is uniquely correct, and all can in principle claim to reveal the object itself, in one or more of its many aspects. The passages in Truth and Method that have aroused the most consternation tend to be those in which Gadamer denies two common but dubious assumptions: first, that the meaning of a text is determined by the intentions of the person who wrote it; and second, that the text’s meaning is what those in close historical