Hermeneutical understanding

Technology Assessment (TA) is widely understood as a necessarily interdisciplinary project. However, linguistics has only recently been mentioned as a relevant discipline. This is surprising, as there have long been calls - e.g. by Armin Grunwald - for a stronger discourse-ethical foundation for TA, involving sub-fields such as linguistic, epistemological and (discursive-)procedural criticism. The fundamentally linguistic constitution of all kinds of ideas and evaluations of the future as well as related controversies therefore offers many options for connecting with discourse linguistics, linguistic ignorance studies, language criticism or linguistics of political or science communication. In this chapter, an overview of collective attributions of (non-)knowledge is offered as a theoretical reference point. Then, a methodological setting is presented with which past, present and future references in technology debates can be examined more closely. On selected examples the applicability of these linguistic categories will be illlustrated to show their usefulness for a hermeneutic understanding within TA.