Understanding and interpreting algorithms: toward a hermeneutics of algorithms

Abstract

This article develops a hermeneutics of algorithms. By taking a point of departure in Hans-Georg Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics, developed in Truth and Method, I am going to examine what it means to understand algorithms in our lives. A hermeneutics of algorithms is consistent with the fact that we do not have direct access to the meaning of algorithms in the same way as we do not have direct access to the meaning of other cultural artifacts. We are forced to interpret cultural artifacts in order to make meaning out of them. The act of interpretation is an action on behalf of the interpreter. However, interpreters are not free to interpret cultural artifacts in whatever way they like. Interpreters are bound by the cultural artifact and its embeddedness in tradition. Furthermore, the act of interpretation is not to recover the historicity of the cultural artifact. Rather, interpretation concerns the way we make sense of algorithms in everyday life and how they are part of a tradition. It is about living with algorithms. Understanding and interpreting algorithms are therefore a mode of existence and mode of living with and enacting algorithms.