ABSTRACT
All human experience is the product of interpretation. Linguistic understanding is always the decoding, translation, or interpretation of arbitrary signs through rules of meaning and syntax. The confusion of hermeneutic universalism betrays an unseemly residual bond to the foundationalist framework, in the assumption that what is not foundational must be interpretive. Hermeneutic universalism inhabits the overlap between understanding's perspectival partiality and its active process. An alternative model is available in Wittgenstein, where linguistic understanding is a matter of being able to make the right responses or moves in the relevant language-game, and where such ability or language-acquisition is first gained by brute training or drill. Language mastery is the mastery of intelligent habits of gesture and response for engaging effectively in a form of life, rather than the mastery of a system of semiotic rules for interpreting signs.
