ABSTRACT
This chapter explains and defends a thesis that is central to Hans-Georg Gadamer’s hermeneutics but which has received relatively little scholarly attention: the claim that language is irreducibly occasional. ‘Occasionality’ is Gadamer’s term for context- or situation-dependence. To say that all language is essentially occasional in his sense is to say that the meaning of every linguistic expression depends for its meaning on some wider context in which it is embedded. Because this occasionality goes all the way down, the meaning of a sentence can never be cashed out in terms of some context-independent entity like a proposition. Thus, contra Edmund Husserl and others, for Gadamer meaning can never be rendered fully explicit. The chapter argues that this thesis marks a central point of agreement between Gadamer and the tradition of ordinary language philosophy that was first inaugurated by Ludwig Wittgenstein’s later work. Both Gadamer and the ordinary language philosophers point to occasionality as a central reason why the quest for an ‘ideal’ or ‘logically perfect’ language is misguided. The chapter ends by examining how Gadamer moves from the irreducible occasionality of language to the claim that language is essentially metaphorical.
