The Meaning of Understanding in Paul Ricoeur’s Text Hermeneutics

The purpose of this thesis is to show that Paul Ricoeur’s theory can be interpreted as an educational theory as it is regarding its explanation about text hermeneutics. Text is one of the most important concepts in hermeneutics, but the issues concerning it are not confined to a specific academic field; rather, they are related to the very act of understanding the world. Ultimately, explaining how we understand texts is equivalent to explaining human experience of the world itself. Ricoeur began addressing the problem of text from the issue of discourse, where meaning in language begins, and he considered the distance that arises between language and meaning here to be the starting point of hermeneutics. Texts are the medium where this issue is most vividly expressed. By understanding texts through the path of semantic autonomy they open up, humans acquire an understanding of the world, which in turn broadens the horizon of self comprehension. Ricoeur shows us the educational significance of hermeneutics by explaining the meaning of text interpretation through this depth semantic approach.