English
The hermeneutic circle serves for all those who raise a claim to the methodological autonomy of the human sciences with regard to the natural sciences. In this paper I check the soundness of this argument. It is argued that the hermeneutic circle is neither a genuine ontological problem nor a logical problem and consequently that it cannot lend legitimacy to the claim of autonomy of the human sciences. Rather, it is shown that it is an empirical problem, which has long been studied using the tools of the empirical sciences.
Keywords
- hermeneutics
- naturalism
- understanding
- Verstehen