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Comment by jawarner | Hacker News Reader

It seems buried here:

> Perhaps this accounts for the widely-reported sense of unreality that plagues so many of us.

The idea is that interpreting content on the Internet leads people to become more self-conscious about how they interpret reality, which causes it to be less "real."

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Prefacing that I am not a philosopher, but I think that hermeneutics would reject the idea that "real" and "reality" can exist outside of the interpretation that people have of something that has happened. To an extent, real and reality is the same and one with its interpretation. You get into these weird spots where two people could experience the same event, interpret it in different ways, leading up to two different "realities" of the event. I don't know enough to know how this would be reconciled within hermeneutic epistemology, but that's something interesting to keep in mind.

But isn't "determining the one true actual meaning of a thing" the entire point of hermeneutics? Or rather, hermeneutics is a technique for objectively determining what something does _not_ mean, which is incompatible with the idea that reality doesn't exist outside an interpretation.

I honestly don't know. I am not well read in hermeneutics to have any sort of opinion on it.

It looks like Stanford's encyclopedia of philosophy [^1] might have a good introduction on the intersection of truth and hermeneutics. A quick skim of that section appears to fuse together ideas from aesthetics, ethics, and linguistics to build a conception of truth that is not based in traditional positivist epistemology. Again, I am not a philosopher so I don't really know what I am talking about.

[1]: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/hermeneutics/#ContHerm_1

Yeah same here, just wondering.

Detecting wrong answers doesn't tell you anything about how many right answers there might be.

There only has to be one objectively wrong answer to show that it's not all subjective, which is the point under discussion.

I have to say, hermeneutics is something our western culture has become catastrophically bad at. When the failure of postmodernism became apparent (truths unfortunately must be shared to take any corporate action in society), we seem to have reverted directly back into a Nietzschian nihilism, every group only exists as a means to power. This has begun to erode traditional modernist western ideals which the postmodernists seemed to allow: offensive speech isn't necessarily wrong, interpretation and truth are two sides to the same coin, etc.

> we seem to have reverted directly back into a Nietzschian nihilism

Alternately, we seem to have fulfilled his prediction that this would come to pass in 100-200 years, and would erode the ideals held by the Western mindset.

TBC: Not intending this to be read as a fatalism, merely that his concern was less with nihilism itself, and more with its effect on future society and people.

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