ABSTRACT

This chapter describes the development of the interpretational principle philosophies and especially in its formulations in hermeneutics, critical theory, and deconstruction. It provides the history of interpretation theory that has been no static reiteration of a formal principle. The chapter explores three principal types of interpretation theory : formal, contextual, and textual. It discusses formal interpretation theories : Kant, Edmund Husserl, Wilhelm Dilthey, C. I. Lewis, Jurgen Habermas; contextual interpretation theories: Hegel, Karl Marx, pragmatism, sociology of knowledge; textual interpretation theories: Martin Heidegger, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Jacques Derrida. The chapter shows that the phenomenon of the rise and development of different and conflicting forms of interpretation theory can be understood within the rise and development of the conflicting cognitive frames of Enlightenment and Romantic modernity. It aims to assess alternative resolutions of the conflicts within interpretation theory and to indicate the significance of a theory of interpretation in the culture of modernity.