When I think about the interplay between understanding and application as a hermeneutical-rhetorical circle its appearance and its behavior resembles the Lorenz Attractor.

Or — maybe this is just the plain old hermeneutic circle. Gadamer says of the division of interpretation and application:

Formerly it was considered obvious that the task of hermeneutics was to adapt the text’s meaning to the concrete situation to which the text is speaking. The interpreter of the divine will who can interpret the oracle’s language is the original model for this. But even today it is still the case that an interpreter’s task is not simply to repeat what one of the partners says in the discussion he is translating, but to express what is said in the way that seems most appropriate to him, considering the real situation of the dialogue, which only he knows, since he alone knows both languages being used in the discussion. Similarly, the history of hermeneutics teaches us that besides literary hermeneutics, there is also a theological and a legal hermeneutics, and together they make up the full concept of hermeneutics. As a result of the emergence of historical consciousness in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, philological hermeneutics and historical studies cut their ties with the other hermeneutical disciplines and established themselves as models of methodology for research in the human sciences. The fact that philological, legal, and theological hermeneutics originally belonged closely together depended on recognizing application as an integral element of all understanding. In both legal and theological hermeneutics there is an essential tension between the fixed text — the law or the gospel — on the one hand and, on the other, the sense arrived at by applying it at the concrete moment of interpretation, either in judgment or in preaching. A law does not exist in order to be understood historically, but to be concretized in its legal validity by being interpreted. Similarly, the gospel does not exist in order to be understood as a merely historical document, but to be taken in such a way that it exercises its saving effect. This implies that the text, whether law or gospel, if it is to be understood properly — i.e., according to the claim it makes — must be understood at every moment, in every concrete situation, in a new and different way. Understanding here is always application.

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Often, when I’m talking to people about the ideas that concern me, the other person will apologize to me for digressing, then proceed to ask me if what I am talking about could be applied to some concrete situation of concern in their life.

That is not a digression. That is the act of understanding. That is dialogue.

If the entire conversation took place in philosophical language and never left that way of speaking and reasoning, it would not be dialogue (dia– “across” + -logos “word, language, reason”), but  homologue (homo- “same” + -logos “word, language, reason”), the sort of conversation that takes place among experts who share specialized language and methods.

Dialogue has far more generative potential than homologue.

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User experience practitioners are constantly telling their clients to overcome organization-centricity. The usual argument is that you need to speak in language your customers can understand and care about. But there are even better reasons than that to know your customers (or more generally, your users or stakeholders): You might learn to see what you’re doing from a different, more productive, more compelling angle.

“We need to find ways to experiment not only with the product innovation itself, but with novel business models.  We are now looking for innovations in the interstices between different disciplines – for example, between bio- and nano- technologies. Any new model of innovation must find ways to leverage the disparate knowledge assets of people who see the world quite differently and who use tools and methods foreign to those we’re familiar with. Such people are likely to work both in different disciplines and in different institutions.”

– John Seely Brown, Director Emeritis, Xerox Palo Alto Research Center

For similar reasons pursuing understanding of marginal perspectives is valuable. Certainly it is a decent, compassionate thing to do. Sometimes it is prudent. But reckoning with marginal views is also philosophically rewarding. One comes to a deeper and richer understanding of self and world in dialogue with those radically unlike oneself.