Linguistic spheres not monadic

Habermas writes that hermeneutics shows that linguistic spheres are never monadically shut but are, rather, permeable from without as well as from within. From without, because a language is open, and can in principle express everything that can be said and understood. its horizon therefore is in continuous expansion. From within, because linguistic agents can distance themselves from their own expressions in order to interpret them, reflect on them, etc. All this, Habermas learned from Gadamer: that language can transcend itself and thereby exhibits potential for rationality.

This in contrast to Wittgenstein. In Wittgenstein's thesis that linguistically constituted life forms were closed, as if each agent were monadically trapped in its language world, Habermas discerned traces of positivism.

(Jean Grondin, Introduction to Philosophical Hermeneutics, New Haven and London: Yale Univ. Press, 1994, 130)

Understanding and explanation

Gadamer places a premium on understanding, Habermas on explanation, while Ricoeur wants both. Ricoeur: "understanding without explanation is blind... explanation without understanding is empty." (Ricoeur, "The Conflict of Interpretations: Hans-Georg Gadamer and Paul Ricoeur," Phenomenology: Dialogues and Bridges, ed. Ronald Bruzina and Bruce Wilshire [Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1982] 307. D'Souza, DJPE 19 [2008] 177.)

Under explanation Ricoeur / Keith D'Souza include devices such as structuralism and historico-critical methods - what I have been calling 'lower blade' methods such as those taught by Henrici. (D'Souza 177)

There is a hermeneutical arc between explanation and understanding: "to explain is to bring out the structure, that is, the internal relations of dependence that constitute the statics of the text; to interpret is to follow the path of thought opened up by the text, to place oneself en route toward the orient of the text." (Ricoeur, "Discussion: Ricoeur on Narrative" 122. D'Souza 177.)