Hermeneutics cycle is a process of interpretation in which we continually move between smaller and larger units of meaning in order to determine the meaning of both.
Ex: You read a sentence. As you eyes move across the words, you have a first guess about what the words mean. So you start with a preliminary interpretation of the words. From that preliminary interpretation, you construct an interpretation of the sentence as a whole. With that interpretation of the sentence, you look back at the individual words and determine whether your original interpretation made sense. If not, you revise it and you then also revise your interpretation of the sentence based on this new interpretation of the words and so on. Then you go on to the next sentence, which might make you revise your interpretation of the first sentence again and so on.
Applying the hermeneutics circle brings us closer to the right interpretation, we can never know for sure that we have gotten there.
The key insight upon which the hermeneutics circle is based is the insight “Meaning is Holism”
The meaning of a whole, for instance a text, is not just the sum of the meaning of its parts. Meaning is determined by the whole as a whole, not by the part individually.
In fact the parts don’t even really have meanings if they are not part of a whole.
Ex: take the word can.
It means one thing in one sentence. I can do that and it means entirely in the sentence, I open a can of beans. The word can alone doesn’t have determinate meaning apart from its context. It only gets a specific meaning when it is placed in a sentence.
The same is true for sentence. A sentence doesn’t have meaning without its larger context.
So we see holism is all over the place.
Smaller units of meaning have their meaning only by virtue of being part of a larger unit of meaning.
Larger units have their meaning only because they consist of the smaller parts.
The second key insight is that the context which determines something’s meaning is unlimited.
The precise meaning of a word depends on a precise meaning of this sentence. But that depends on the precise meaning of the paragraph, which depends on the precise meaning of the chapter and so on.