GADAMER AND COLLINGWOOD ON TEMPORAL DISTANCE AND UNDERSTANDING
Bibliographic record
Abstract
ABSTRACT In this paper, we begin by suggesting an intuitive model of time embodying a notion of temporal distance that we claim is at work in Gadamer's hermeneutics, while it is rejected in Collingwood's theory of interpretation. To show this, after a brief review of the influence of Collingwood on Gadamer and of their disagreement over the possibility of recovering an author's intention, we examine in turn their answers to the problem of transposition, upon which the philosophy of Dilthey supposedly foundered. We show that Gadamer embraced the idea of temporal distance in his solution, which consisted in claiming that the distance between an author from the past and us is filled in by tradition, which opens access to the text for us, while Collingwood considered explanations of the actions of historical agents, and by extension understanding of a text, in intentional or rational terms. Furthermore, he thought that such explanations are not causal, and that the thoughts involved in them do not stand within the flow of physical time, which is involved in any notion of temporal distance. This is why Collingwood felt entitled to anti‐relativistic conclusions about the recovery of authorial intentions, conclusions that prompted Gadamer to claim that “the dimension of hermeneutical mediation which is passed through in every act of understanding” escaped him. We then discuss the underlying notions of time at work in both Gadamer and Collingwood, showing that Ricœur had a better appreciation of the issue, since he saw that Collingwood's moves parallel, up to a point, Heidegger's critique of “vulgar time,” albeit with an entirely different result. We also point to the importance in Collingwood's thinking of his notion of “incapsulation.”
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.009 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.053 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.014 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".