Others...

Others, like Habermas, have argued that Gadamer's theory gives too much authority to tradition. However, the greatest criticism of Gadamer's hermeneutics is the charge of relativism. Gadamer has responded to the charge, as have others on his behalf, and these responses have elicited further criticism.

It is not my purpose to review the debate, although I will say that the criticism seems more fittingly applied to certain interpretations of Gadamer's work, like Rorty's, than to Gadamer's own views. A number of further developments in hermeneutic theories are also not directly relevant to the purpose of our inquiries, such as the debate over communicative ethics, and the relation between hermeneutics and genealogy.

Gadamer retains Dilthey's distinction between the natural sciences and the Geijtejwijjenjchaften, while a number of more recent hermeneutical studies have convincingly argued that the natural sciences are as much involved in interpretation as the social sciences.[^3] What is relevant to the project of Islamic social sciences and the more general sacralization of the sciences, is the application of hermeneutics to the social sciences.

Just as the project of the Islamization of the sciences is contentious because it is associated with rival ideological positions among Muslim thinkers, so, too, hermeneutics is contentious because of the rival political and broadly philosophical positions taken by its advocates.

It is my purpose to try to bracket such issues as much as possible in order to consider how what Al- Attas called "elements and key concepts" of Islam may form a basis for interpretation to be employed in the social sciences. So, I will use the term hermeneutics in the very general sense of the study of interpretation, whether or not this study conforms to the views of Schleiermacher, Gadamer, Ricoeur, or anyone else.

Furthermore, the thinking of the major contributors to hermeneutic theory is also a matter of some controversy, especially in the case of Gadamer. I will assume in what follows that various points made by Gadamer in the development of his hermeneutic theory may be accepted without accepting the pernicious forms of relativism that have been attributed to him. [^1]: This is suggested by Aristotle's work, Ilepl 'Epµ1vsim; or Peri Hermeneias, known by its Latin name, De Interpretatione.