ABSTRACT
The previous chapter argued that, on Hans-Georg Gadamer’s account of language, meaning is irreducibly occasion-dependent. There can be determinate meaning only when language is embedded in some wider situation. If this is so, however, then how is it possible for hearers or readers who occupy a given situation to understand a speaker or author from a different one? This chapter aims to answer this question by articulating Gadamer’s account of the ‘ideality’ of meaning. Meaning is ideal, on Gadamer’s account, insofar as it is capable of detaching itself from the original situation in which it was expressed and embedding itself in the situation of the one who understands it. Language is capable of doing this when, and to the extent that, it realizes the sort of structured, vocative whole that Gadamer calls a ‘text.’ On Gadamer’s account, then, the meaning of a text never exists apart from some determinate context, but there is no one context to which it is bound. Meaning exists in and through the indefinite plurality of situations in which it is understood. In this way, the ontology of meaning is akin to that of works of performing art, which similarly exist in and through their different performances, and exist only there.
