The success of any interpretation of Hegel’s philosophy hinges on how Hegel’s contradiction talk is cashed out. Gadamer’s account of the dialectic suffers from “too literal” (p. 25) a reading of contradiction talk in Hegel, which construes him as committed to the existence of true contradictions, or dialetheias. But, as Redding has argued correctly, Hegel was no dialetheist.
Arguably Hegel's use of the term “contradiction” is much more appositely thought of as an iconoclastic abstraction from the law of non-contradiction as applied in making immediate judgements on the basis of sensory deliverances. And, his aim in using that notion is to argue that inferences drawn from sensuous experience are radically under-determined by any conceptual norms governing their possible interpretations. So that, no set of conceptual norms can ever safeguard interpretations of sensuous experience from all possibility of error.
Furthermore, Gadamer takes the peculiar view that Hegel thought genuine philosophical explanation demands that demonstration can only be conducted in “live discussion.” Not only is this a very odd claim, it’s also arguably a misreading of Hegel’s view that truth can only be secured in the analysis of the process whereby inquiry is conducted; where, by process is meant the dominant suite of practices in the inquiring community. It is not, as Gadamer takes it (ibid.), that all utterances remain open to gerrymandering and “eristic exploitation” due to their inherently contradictory nature but that all utterances are generically undetermined by the conceptual frameworks in which they occur.
“[A]dequate formulation of the truth is an unending venture” (p. 33) but not because things in themselves are contradictory as Gadamer holds, but only because no matter what conceptual norms we subscribe to it is impossible in the long run to not fall into error. A theory, giving determinate content to the target of theoretical analysis, can never exhaustively describe it because the total number of facts about any phenomena is near infinite while theories are articulated and applied by intellectual faculties which are themselves finite. Thus, every determination is defeasible in that the cognizance of new information can negate the subject of cognition, or negate what is predicated of it; this occurrence Hegel calls determinate negation.
Another problem with Gadamer’s reading is his lack of sensitivity to distinctions between Aristotelian term logic, and modern sentential and predicate logics. This is probably why he finds Hegel to be actively pushing a thought to self-contradiction, and why he takes “contradiction” to be “a method of speculative logic.” As argued above the role of contradiction as a teaching aid for Hegel works to expose the wound of reason, namely the indeterminacy of categories of the understanding, or Verstand, for which he suggests Vernunft or intuition is the only available band-aid.
The lesson here, as Brandom has argued, is to understand Hegel to be recommending a more modest and realistic protocol for understanding fortified by openness to intuition, or Verstand mediated by Vernunft: get rid of contradictories experienced at each stage of inquiry; and, abandon any fixed idea of the appropriate destination of inquiry, as we cannot know what it should be given the indeterminacy of our theoretical claims.
Failing to unpack these consequences of Hegel’s logical commitments, and specifically their epistemological and ontological consequences, constitute Gadamer’s more significant failings in this work, compared to his other more feeble oversight: misattributing credit for the invention of propositional logic to Aristotle [it was invented by Russell in the 21st century].
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