UNDERSTANDING - INTERPRETATION – EXPLICATION

The key concepts of psychological hermeneutics: understanding, interpretation and explication are described. It is offered to consider the understanding on two levels: meaning and semantic. The main characteristic of the meaning level is the reproduction of the meaning that is embedded in the text by its author. The semantic level involves rethinking, or transforming of the content of the source text into another sign-semantic system. It's shown that the text understanding on the semantic level leads to the synthesis and generation of new senses, which is going due to dialogical interaction between the author and the recipient semantic systems. The interpretation is considered as understanding of the text, "putting the sense into the text", which leads to a vision in the message of some semantic, missing in the source text. It is a mechanism of the semantic enrichment of text that is carried out by immersion into the context: personal, active, cultural. That mechanism also sets a certain interpretative frames, on the one hand, limiting the semantic space of the text, allowing to discard irrelevant senses, and, on another hand, expanding it, enriching by new understanding of message content, thus contributing to the generation and synthesis of the new senses. The main mechanism of understanding at the meaning level are cognitive operations, primarily structuring and re-structuring of textual information, and at the semantic level it is a dialogue as interaction, collision of communication partners semantic positions. The explication implies a detailed reflection not only of the perceived message but also of recipient own interpretive processes and their explication to another.