- > once the fabricated object leaves the factory, there is the way in which it will design the actions of its users, according to the inherent delimitations of how it can be used – here we can think of equipment, appliances and other functional objects as having ‘horizons of use’,
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- > We have already encountered the hermeneutic circle – in the example of using a machine tool wherein knowledge comes to be inscribed by being with the ‘designing-being’ of the tool, this in turn modifying the being of the tool user. To complete this circle a third step is added – interpretation – in which the ‘designed being’ of the user acts back upon the tool or the material being worked on, with the effect of modifying or improving the process. This ushers in the possibility of learning and change. In general terms, the hermeneutic circle is a way of explaining a structural condition of being-in-the-world. It operates in all kinds of situations, from everyday coping to more formal acts of interpretation such as historical enquiry or the reading of literary texts, which is where it first surfaced as a philosophical concern. As we have seen, Heidegger gives primacy to the significance of Dasein’s pre-ontological understanding of things – the understandings that come from being-with-things and with others rather than from introspection or from conscious acts of interpretation. Yet the commonsense model, inherited from traditional philosophy, is that interpretation comes before understanding, that it is the means toward understanding. Heidegger reverses this: ‘Any interpretation which is to contribute to understanding, must already have understood what is to be interpreted’.15