“hermeneutics: Movement in the philosophy of science, according to which the task of the human sciences is to elucidate the structure of the social institutions underlying behavior. Thus the aim of linguistics, as one human (and therefore ‘hermeneutic’) science, is to elucidate the rules of language, seen as rules that constitute such an institution.”
Excerpted from: Matthews, P.H., ed. The Oxford Concise Dictionary of Linguistics. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014.
