Abstract
With the ultimate intention of seeking a kind of dialogue that facilitates personal, relational, and collective growth and may be practiced in our everyday lives, this paper examines the fundamental role of interpretation and communication in all human experience. The overall work is positioned at the intersection of Philosophical Hermeneutics and Interpersonal Communication, and begins with an ontology of human experience as the inextricable relation between the experiencer and what is experienced, contextually situated as temporal and embodied, and conditioned by the three interrelated processes of affect, understanding, and discourse as they are mediated by an unique constitutive framework. The ontology concludes with an account of meaning as an emergent feature of experience, and is followed by a proposed model of communication as a transactional process through which meaning is co-created. The culmination of this work is presented in the six principles of ‘interpretive dialogue’: an instructive account of communication through which the conclusions reached throughout the theoretical foundation may be purposefully and artfully applied to practical situations. To engage in interpretive dialogue is to encounter the Other with profound openness by recognizing the limits of one’s own interpretation, and thus allowing Truth to emerge through the dynamic interplay of varied perspectives.
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Interpersonal and Small Group Communication Commons, Philosophy Commons, Speech and Rhetorical Studies Commons