Interpretive experience involves judgment about which aspects of our prejudices remain valid and which have become invalid for matters of concern to us now

While the influence of Habermas’s objection is extensive, Gadamer has mounted rejoinders on behalf of his philosophical hermeneutics (see “Reply to My Critics”; see also “What is Practice? The Conditions of Social Reason”). The thrust of Gadamer’s argument is, first, that it is actually Habermas’s position, not his own, that remains uncritical, since it is naïve to believe in the possibility of a basis of critique that is somehow not subject to the authority of tradition. And, Gadamer stresses,