As Charles Taylor analyzes Gadamer's position...

As Charles Taylor analyzes Gadamer's position, pernicious relativism is not to be avoided by aspiring to the ideal of neutrality with regard to assumptions about metaphysics, human nature, etc., but by (1) allowing for change and development in the horizons; and (2) aiming for the most comprehensive fusion of horizons; although this aim is a regulative ideal that will never reach complete universality.

As Taylor sees it, comprehensiveness is: ….an important ideal both epistemically and humanly: epistemically, because the more comprehensive account would tell us more about human beings and their possibilities; humanly, because the language would allow more human beings to understand each other, and to come to undistorted understandings.

[^2] If by comprehensiveness Taylor merely means an account that fuses together incompatible perspectives, it is unlikely that the epistemic and human advantages he seeks will be achieved. It is not a mixing of perspectives that is wanted, but a standing back from perspectives so as to be able to compare them and understand the differences in views that will result from different underlying assumptions once these are, however vaguely, identified.

The identification of underlying assumptions in another culture not only will help one to understand that culture, but it will also assist in the identification of features of one's own worldview that might otherwise go unnoticed. Gadamer uses the term "horizon" for the general framework through which one views a topic.

Horizons include what Al-Attas calls "elements and key concepts" as well as prejudices, assumptions, habits of thought, attitudes and dispositions to various emotional reactions and judgments. It includes the affective and cognitive aspects of one's outlook.

Horizons change, evolve, atrophy, weaken and strengthen, both individually and socially, and in this regard horizons are comparable to languages, especially when we speak of specialized languages, such as the language of modern rights theories, the language of internal medicine, the language of the mass media in China, and so on.