Nineteenth-century hermeneutics assumed that understanding a text correctly required the interpreter to switch off their own age and prejudices: work methodically enough and you reach the author's intention. In Truth and Method, published in 1960, Hans-Georg Gadamer reversed the assumption.

On his argument the interpreter's historical position is not the obstacle to understanding but its condition. We always approach a text with an expectation, a fore-understanding; Gadamer calls these *Vorurteil*, prejudice, using the term's negative ring deliberately: the Enlightenment has a prejudice against prejudice. Understanding proceeds as our fore-understanding is tested and corrected by the text. Our horizon and the text's are not two sealed worlds; where understanding occurs there is a *fusion of horizons* (Horizontverschmelzung). Nor is a text's meaning limited to its author's intention — every new reading is part of the meaning the text carries.

The 'method' in the title is therefore ironic: Gadamer objects to the natural sciences' conception of method being taken as the only road to truth; before a work of art, a legal text or a historical event, truth appears in dialogue rather than by applying a rule. The book was argued over through the 1960s: Habermas objected that ideology too can be handed down as 'tradition'; Derrida found the idea of dialogue too conciliatory. Hermeneutics is nonetheless the shared ground today of a wide field, from legal interpretation to literary theory, from historiography to translation studies. Where Gadamer parts from Dilthey is clear: understanding is not reconstructing the past as it was but speaking with it from the present.