Philosophical hermenutics is associated with the name of Gadamer. Notwith­stanging the fact that the theory of hermeneutics was of peculiar status before his new version of it, but it was Gadamer who changed this theory in its contextual and literal form into a philosophical or existential one.
While preserving Heidegger’s central insights, Gadamer showed that the understanding of oneself and one’s possibilities as being in the world is temporal and situates historically. In other words, one’s being is historically constituted and is our understanding or knowledge too. This cognitive limitation is not merely rooted in our present situation or the extent of our knowledge so that one can hope to overcome in future. Human nature requires this and there is no way out of this. According to Gadamer, the factors which place restrictions on human knowledge or understanding are history and language. Therefore, our knowledge is always limited and relative and one cannot claim to have absolute knowledge or attain the truth in its totality. The problem raised, and the accusation directed to Gadamer, is that in case one cannot give an absolute account of truth, all the accounts can be regarded as identical and one account cannot be taken to have priority to others.
Explaining exactly Gadamer’s philosophical grounds for the truth and the cause of our limited knowledge, Brice Wachtear Hauser tries to give an answer to the question raised and show that from the principle that one cannot arrive at the absolute truth does not follow that we are all in the same position in relation to the truth and equally in a far distance from it.
In other words, although we cannot fully attain the truth, we can stand closer to it than the others.