In order for genuine dialogue and understanding to take place, we must approach the other with openness.

Openness forms a moral bond, and includes taking the other seriously and learning from them.

Scientific, psychological, and sophistic approaches to the other involve closedness, distance, and domination.

This post is Part 4 of a series.

In this series of posts, I’ve been introducing Hans-Georg Gadamer’s conception of human understanding as an open-ended process of dialogical “play” between human beings — a back-and-forth communicative movement in which dialogue partners come to a shared grasp of some subject matter of our world. In my last post, I highlighted the ethical conditions of genuine dialogue and understanding, showing that there are certain ethical commitments and ways of approaching our dialogue partner that we must fulfill if we are going to develop a shared understanding.

First, we must take seriously what the other has to say as a “claim to truth” from which we can learn. We must approach the other with respect and a good will to understand, rather than trying to silence them, refute them, or make them believe our own point of view. We must also be ready and willing to risk our own prejudgments, have them tested and challenged, find out that our prior beliefs were incomplete, narrow, or wrong in some way, and revise them based on what we learn from the other. And, finally, we must be willing to lose ourselves in the conversation and let the subject matter and its truth be our guide, rather than attempting to direct or manipulate the outcome.

Gadamer refers to this approach as “openness to the other.” It is an approach that forms a “genuine human bond” or moral connection between human beings, which he contrasts with three approaches that have become quite popular in our culture, but are problematic in various ways. I’ve labeled them the scientific, psychological, and sophistic approaches to the other. These approaches destroy the moral bond, degrade dialogue-play, and cause the process of understanding to break down.

The Scientific Approach to the........

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