Abstract

What is the meaning of “meaning”, hermeneutically seen? How does the philosophical hermeneutics of Hans-Georg Gadamer relate to the different types of meaning that are at hand in other branches of philosophy, such as sentence meaning within analytic philosophy, uttered meaning within speech acts theory and the communicative/dialogical meaning of formal/transcendental pragmatics? The comprehensive framework of Gadamer’s hermeneutics forms the horizon of understanding of this paper, and of specific interest is how these different types of meaning relate to the hermeneutic framework. Can a hermeneutical sense of meaning be elaborated in contrast to these different senses of meaning? Or, can these different types of meaning, in a certain sense, also be seen as compatible with the wider hermeneutical framework of meaning?