Vittorio Hösle, Intentionalism, and Understanding Understanding

Abstract

Abstract Vittorio Hösle’s 2018 book, Kritik der Verstehenden Vernunft: Eine Grundlegung der Geisteswissenschaften (“A Critique of Understanding Reason: The Grounding of the Humanities”) provides an ambitious and systematic treatment of human understanding that is important for legal scholars and others. In it, he addresses questions like the nature of mental acts, how they are expressed and grasped, the complex relationship between authorial intention and understanding, what conditions are necessary for understanding to succeed, and more. His account also touches directly on legal interpretation and speaks to a number of contemporary jurisprudential puzzles. Part I of this essay provides a grand tour of Hösle’s theory of understanding, as well as his specific treatment of law. Understanding, as he defines it, is focused on the attempt to indirectly recreate a past mental act though the medium of author’s physical manifestations of meaning (often language). Yet, given his intentionalism, Hösle’s treatment of legal interpretation lands in a surprising place. Though he continues to insist on the importance of the lawmaker’s original mental acts and the difference between questions of meaning and truth, he also recognizes several reasons why it could be undesirable for legal decisions to be strictly bound by the lawmaker. Part II of this essay turns to how Hösle’s theory might inform current debates about legal interpretation by applying it to three recurring puzzles for intentionalist theories: (1) the problem of the inartful author; (2) whether there is anything interpretation (or understanding) “just is”; and (3) the nature of group intentions. As to the first puzzle, Hösle connects “meaning” with the author’s original mental act(s) even if the attempt to communicate this meaning on a specific occasion misfires. Yet Hösle also grants that, from the reader’s or hearer’s perspective, understanding necessarily relies on currently available evidence. Concerning the second puzzle, Hösle suggests the phenomenon of indirectly attempting to recreate the mental acts of another (i.e., “understanding”) just is something that occurs in the process of legal adjudication, whatever you call it. But it does not follow that adjudication should (or can) always be bound by this understanding. For the third puzzle, the manner in which Hösle conceptualizes group intention and “works” suggests that only openly shared aspects of the lawmaking body’s plan count as part of the group’s intention. For this reason, especially in the context of works accomplished by a group, his intentionalism shares at least initial similarities with public meaning originalism.