ABSTRACT

Meaning is always coming into being through the 'happening' of understanding and understanding always happens within certain contexts, the hermeneutic understanding is an open-ended process, which can never achieve finality. It is always open and anticipatory. In fact, both Thomas Kuhn and P. Feyerabend have somehow experienced hermeneutic understanding in their encounter with incommensurable texts. To put the point more precisely, mutual hermeneutic understanding is possible in abnormal discourse. The occurrence of a complete communication breakdown between two P-language communities indicates that cross-language understanding occurs in abnormal discourse. The failure of the projective approach in abnormal discourse only shows that the process of understanding is not yet finished, which needs to be completed by approaching the aliens in a different way. As a solution to the failure of understanding in abnormal discourse, the adoptive approach to understanding faces many problems.