Today, the hermeneutic enterprise in modern human and social sciences refers to the interpretation and understanding of written and spoken discourse as well as human behavior. It cuts across various disciplines, such as linguistics, literary analysis, philosophy, (social) psychology, psychiatry, sociology, and anthropology. Although the School of Alexandria in late antiquity performed interpretation, it was not until the Renaissance and Reformation that hermeneutics as a discipline came to the foreground. Four branches of human science lie at the basis of hermeneutic thinking: theology, philology, jurisprudence and philosophy. In the 16th century a number of protestant theologians, such as Flavius, Luther and Melanchton, considered the Scriptures as insufficiently understood. A linguistic and hermeneutic training was proposed as a remedy. At about the same time, the interest in classical texts from antiquity gave rise to a number of philological methods dealing with the reconstruction of the original — or more truthful — version of a text. Third, the interest in Roman Law, especially the study of the Code of Justinian, ultimately lies at the basis of legal hermeneutics, which developed together with philology. Finally, following Aristotle’s analysis of logic in his essay On Interpretation, the Enlightenment philosophers of the 18th century tried to develop hermeneutics as a general method for all fields of knowledge based on interpretation. This philosophical approach deals with the foundations of philosophy itself and, consequently, of all science. Their approach can be seen as a forerunner of the universality claim of 20th century philosophical hermeneutics (cf. Mueller-Vollmer 1985; Habermas 1971). In the 18th and 19th centuries, hermeneutics as biblical exegesis had a considerable influence on philology, to such an extent that those systems of interpretation became the methods of, first, classical philology, and later, philology at large. It is clear that the origins of hermeneutic thinking are firmly rooted in the study of texts, be they of theological, philological, legal or philosophical origin. The basic problem in all of these cases is the same, namely what makes an interpretation correct and/or objective and by what standards can this be measured? Since understanding is basically a referential process — something is understood by comparing unknown to known ‘things’ — there is a dialectical interaction between the act of understanding and the ‘thing’ to be understood. The notion of ‘objectivity’, as used in the natural sciences, gets a different meaning here. This problem is known as the hermeneutical circle. The logical contradiction which seems to be entailed by the hermeneutical circle is overcome, first, by emphasizing that logic in itself cannot account for the process of understanding and, second, by presupposing that elements of intuition and some kind of foreknowledge is part of all acts of understanding.19th century philologists were deeply affected by hermeneutic thought and method. 20th century mainstream linguistics though had little or no interest in hermeneutics. However, although the link is rarely made explicitly, traces of hermeneutic thinking are to be found in traditions as divergent as Saussure’s structuralism, Sapir’s linguistic anthropology, some trends in cognitive linguistics, and most clearly in conversation analysis. Saussure’s student and disciple Bally, concludes that incorporating expressive and affective language use, clearly belonging to the parole, in the study of the langue, this requires a new field which he calls stylistics (cf. Bally 1965), a field which adopted the elements of hermeneutic thought which Saussure’s theoretical position could not handle. Edward Sapir could be argued to be the first linguist(ic anthropologist) who incorporated and promoted hermeneutic ideas in his approach. Although Lakoff does not mention hermeneutics in introducing his experiential realism, cognitive processes are hermeneutic in nature in the sense that experiential realism cannot be reached without the interpretation of the surrounding world. But by far the most obvious hermeneutic approach in current linguistic practice is to be found in research on conversation analysis.