Gadamerian Hermeneutic Philosophy and Caring Science

ABSTRACT

This paper examines the relevance of Gadamerian hermeneutic philosophy for caring science by clarifying how understanding, interpretation, and ethical responsiveness are implicated in nursing practice. Drawing on key Gadamerian concepts, including prejudice, language, dialog, and the fusion of horizons, the paper explores the ontological and epistemological foundations of caring as a relational process of coming to understanding within historically and culturally situated nurse‐patient encounters. Caring is articulated not as a discrete action or technical competence, but as a mode of being that unfolds through dialogical engagement and openness to the other. While Gadamerian hermeneutics has been widely employed within qualitative nursing research, this paper argues that its significance for caring science lies less in methodological prescription than in its philosophical orientation to understanding and application as inseparable. By examining interpretive approaches to studying caring and critically reflecting on the tendency to treat the fusion of horizons as an endpoint, the paper highlights how Gadamerian hermeneutics sustains caring as an ongoing, ethically consequential practice rather than a finalized interpretive outcome.

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“Nurse, can you help me?”

“I don't understand, I'm sorry?”

“Draw closer so you can feel me.

How will you help if you don't understand me?”

“Perhaps it's the accent you bear?

Perhaps it's the you that I see?

Perhaps it's the culture,

the history, the who you appear to be?”

“It must be my language,

Perhaps your preconceptions of me?

But I need you now,

So can't you please help me?”

Yes. I acknowledge my prejudice,

Our world and what I can now see

‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐→Our horizons have touched – I can understand thee←‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐

Hermeneutics' etymological foundation is found in the Greek language, hermeneueuen meaning to interpret and hermeneia meaning interpretation (Pascoe 1996). Therefore, hermeneutics emphasizes language and the way language operates to make the unfamiliar comprehensible. While the early history of hermeneutics was limited to theology, in the 19th and 20th centuries hermeneutics expanded to provide a philosophical underpinning/interpretive approach to natural and social sciences, and during the 20th century its concern was answering existential and ontological questions of how humans come to understand. Presently, it has evolved into a contemporary philosophy which highlights how humans experience understanding and interpretation (Pascoe 1996).

In contemporary nursing, caring is widely recognized as a central disciplinary concern (Butcher 2025; Smith 2012; Swanson 2012). Yet, caring is frequently operationalized through technical competencies, observable behaviors, or standardized interventions (Morse et al. 2012; Morse 2016). Within increasingly complex healthcare systems that prioritize efficiency, documentation, and measurable outcomes, the relational and ethical dimensions of caring risk being rendered implicit or secondary to task completion (Rolfe 2015; Watson 2018). This tension raises a critical question for nursing science: How can caring be understood, studied, and sustained as a fundamentally human (relational) and ethically responsive practice rather than reduced to tasks?

Gadamerian hermeneutic philosophy offers a distinctive response to this challenge by positioning understanding not as a cognitive procedure or methodological achievement, but as a fundamental mode of human being. For Gadamer, understanding is always historically and linguistically situated and unfolds through dialog in which individuals allow their preunderstandings to be questioned and transformed (Davey 2021; Gadamer 2004; Pascoe 1996). From this perspective, caring emerges not as a set of actions imposed upon another but as a relational accomplishment achieved through openness, participation, and mutual engagement in meaning. Caring, therefore, cannot be fully prescribed, standardized, or reduced to measurable outcomes without losing its ontological grounding as coming to understanding within lived contexts (Corcoran and Cook 2023; Rolfe 2015).

Although Gadamerian hermeneutics has long informed qualitative nursing inquiry, its implications for caring science extend beyond methodological considerations alone. A sustained engagement with Gadamer's philosophy invites nursing to reconsider how caring is conceptualized, how knowledge of caring is generated, and how interpretive understanding necessarily carries ethical responsibility for practice (Gadamer 2004; Moules 2021). By foregrounding language, dialog, tradition, and historical situatedness, Gadamerian hermeneutics provides nursing with a philosophical framework that holds together understanding, ethics, and action without collapsing caring into procedural technique or abstract idealization (Pascoe 1996; Watson 2018). Therefore, the aim of this paper is to examine the ontology and epistemology of caring from a Gadamerian perspective and to explore how interpretive approaches grounded in this philosophy both illuminate caring and orient nursing practice without reducing caring to prescriptive or procedural forms.

1. Background

Hans George Gadamer is recognized as central to the evolution of hermeneutics and is regarded as a titan of modern hermeneutic philosophy (Korhonen et al. 2017; Pascoe 1996). Gadamer was strongly influenced by his mentor Heidegger and by extension, Husserl, the father of phenomenology/hermeneutics, leading him to address existential issues about how and why humans understand meaning (Earle 2010; Korhonen et al. 2017; Pascoe 1996). Gadamer believed that the human mind possessed a unique ability to interpret and understand through a conscious, continuous process (Earle 2010). Specifically, Gadamer believed that understanding was only experienced in and through prejudices, the universal feature of humans to interpret the lifeworld through the lens of preconceptions/preunderstandings. Moreover, he considered these prejudices as horizons of meaning that enable us to make sense of persons/events and “parts” of the linguistic experience necessary for understanding because they provide the historical reality for a person's being (Pascoe 1996). These prejudices constantly change in the course of history and thus our understanding in the light of these prejudices, as well as our understanding of meanings given to events/situations. Therefore, a vital part in understanding is acknowledging personal prejudices ‐ “The important thing is to be aware or one's own bias, so that the text can present itself in all its otherness and thus assert its own truth against one's own fore‐meanings” (Gadamer 2004, 271–272).

Additionally, Gadamer emphasized that traditions and understandings are inherited through language, dialectal and dialogic phenomena, that not only reflect human beings but enable humans to be through communal and self‐understanding (Earle 2010). Therefore, language is the medium through which we experience understanding, give meaning, and define our lifeworld. It encompasses our world just as it encompasses the conversation, the process of coming to understanding (Gadamer 2004; Rolfe 2015). Thus, mastering language is a necessary precondition for engaging in conversation because it is only when the speakers can make themselves understood that the subject matter to be understood can be discussed and agreements raised (Gadamer 2004). Therefore, coming to an understanding, i.e. agreeing on meaning, encountering humans and building a relationship, can only occur through openness, participation, and dialog – through a fusion of horizons (Pascoe 1996; Rolfe 2015). This fusion of horizons occurs when we enter the hermeneutic circle, where we move dialectically between the whole (a background of shared meaning) and the part (a specific experience within the shared meaning), and transform our understandings of a subject (Pascoe 1996). This transformation is not limited to one discipline, but the Gadamerian hermeneutic approach can inform how we view and engage with nursing and caring science.

2. Ontology of Caring From Gadamer's Perspective

The Gadamerian hermeneutic approach can inform the nature of caring as a scientific phenomenon and has influenced many caring theorists, including Sister Simone Roach and Dr. Marilyn Ray. Caring, in an ontological sense, means to be or exist in caring/as a caring person. From Gadamer's perspective, to be caring (to be understanding) is to come to an understanding, to participate in open dialectal/dialogic activity in the nurse‐patient relationship to gain understanding and knowledge (Pascoe 1996). Therefore, caring (understanding) is not only a process of experiencing/encountering a person, but a human mode of being (Roach 2002; Spence 2001). Roach (2002) saw caring and being as intertwined – “Caring is the means, the medium, the mode through which the human being is a being‐in‐the‐world” (p. 2). We do not understand because we are historians or researchers, just as we do not care because we are fulfilling a role. Instead, we care (we understand) because we are human and we care through nurturing, calling forth, expressions of our human capacity to care (Roach 2002). Though Roach (2002) was influenced more so by Heidegger when developing her 6 Cs of caring, she shares Gadamer's perspective that each person must participate in the caring relationship, as both are nourished by the bond of caring. Care, like understanding, is not unilateral. In the nurse‐patient relationship, both participants are transformed by caring, in caring, just as their understandings expand and increase.

Moreover, as Gadamer expressed, we cannot understand a person outside of the context of their being. Ray (2016) views this as a transcultural awareness, understanding, and choice which is central to the process of transcultural caring inquiry – how we know transcultural care, understand it, and be culturally competent nurses. To care means to care within the scope of our prejudices by continuously seeking understanding about the nature of our beliefs and values, how our culture is transmitted from one person to another, how we care for our patient within his culture/beliefs/life world, and enabling choice making through the nurse‐patient relationship (Ray 2016). As Gadamer (2004) addressed, conversation is not about imposing a force and dominating this relational process to achieve a goal. It involves authentic, open dialog. Therefore, in caring communication, the nurse does not take over the conversation with their opinions but facilitates the choices of the patient by understanding the fullness of transcultural caring. As the nurse‐patient relationship occurs and we relate to one another, new understandings emerge (our prejudices evolve while assisting us in expanding understanding) (Spence 2001; Ray 2016). Therefore, as we are constantly in the process of understanding in dialog with the patient, we obtain a transcultural consciousness, an appreciation for the culture and subjective truths/reality of the patient and of ourselves (Ray 2016). We premise our communication on the Gadamerian approach of ensuring that there is a shared meaning, a common language, and awareness of cultural symbols and rituals between the nurse and the patient through review of our preunderstandings so that we can demonstrate caring (Ray 2016).

Moreover, caring is dynamical: the whole is in the part and the part in the whole (Ray 2016; Ray 2025). This is reminiscent of Gadamer's (2004) hermeneutic circle, which involves movement between the part and the whole. Through dialog, we experience a widening of the whole as it is informed/shaped by perspectives that form new associations to a subject matter and add to the interconnectedness of the world (Corcoran and Cook 2023). Therefore, conversations between a transcultural nurse and patient within their relationship, the transcultural inquiry (part), enable both nurse and patient to move towards a deeper and nuanced understanding of care (whole) for the patient (Corcoran and Cook 2023; Ray 2016).

3. Epistemology of Caring From Gadamer's Perspective

Then how can we come to know or understand caring through Gadamerian hermeneutics? Gadamer helps us come to understanding through the fusion of horizons, as it is the historically‐culturally produced preconceptions that influence how we interpret phenomena (Gadamer 2004; Spence 2001). Therefore, having a limited horizon as nurses means we are not seeing far enough; we are overvaluing what is familiar to us. This is seen in stereotyping, wherein we may treat people of color based on our prejudgments. We ultimately assume we understand all people of color without concern for the cultural/traditional differences unique to each group – unique to those from the Caribbean, unique to those from different countries within the Caribbean ‐ Trinidad and Tobago versus Jamaica versus Guyana versus Cuba. Alternatively, limited horizons may be reflected through complacency derived from the “mundane” continuous care of the same patient in home health. In this case, we may overvalue familiarity and become unaware of actual deficiencies in care because we are accustomed to our patient. Gadamer (2004) emphasizes that while our horizons may be limited, they are ever‐changing (because our prejudices are not static, i.e. history and culture are not stagnant but evolutionary). Therefore, to understand caring through Gadamerian hermeneutics is to have a fusion of horizons between the patient and nurse, to have the patient's perspective and the nurse's perspective come together through language and conversations, and to allow for “the ever‐present possibility of coming to new understandings” (Spence 2001, 625). It is through the consideration of other possible prejudices and the recognition that our understandings can change that we can unearth which prejudices inform our nursing practice, our understanding of caring, and our nursing actions that reflect caring.

Therefore, the sources of knowledge for caring science through Gadamerian hermeneutics are conversation and language. Corcoran and Cook (2023) highlight that dialog grounded in Gadamer's philosophy is the logical process of questions and answers, though it is not an interrogation between the nurse and patient where the nurse's opinions are forced on the patient. Instead, it is the “process of coming to an understanding…[where] each person opens himself to the other, truly accepts his point of view as valid and transposes himself into the other to such an extent that he understands not the particular individual but what he says” (Gadamer 2004, p.387). Therefore, the hallmarks of knowing caring are listening and mutuality. Moreover, as language and conversation are logically intertwined, to know and understand caring requires recognition of the power language holds in carrying meaning and interpretation. What care means to the patient and nurse may be different. Likewise, pain, wellbeing, illness, and fear may all have different meanings to a patient based on the potential contexts of the patient's caring/health experience. From Gadamer's perspective, to know and understand caring, we must see the patient in his social, cultural, and historical contexts; we must have a dialectic of reciprocity through language (Tembo et al. 2023). We cannot care if we cannot establish the whole, the shared meaning, as it is this understanding of context that enables us to see the parts, the individual needs/preferences of our patient. Conversations help us unearth prejudices related to the meaning of a diagnosis for a patient and their potential to impact interpretation and shift meanings (Corcoran and Cook 2023). Thus, hermeneutical conversation, the previously described dialogic process of coming to an understanding, is one methodology consistent with this way of knowing and understanding caring.

Additionally, hermeneutic interpretation is another methodology consistent with this way of knowing and understanding caring. Born from Gadamer's philosophy, it focuses on the meaning and understanding of texts (Korhonen et al. 2017). Hermeneutical text interpretation uses dialog as its main tool for discovering, transforming, and developing new knowledge and understanding of phenomena, in this case, phenomena related to caring. The meaning of any concept/construct/content changes with time, so this method involves analyzing the etymology of a concept and interpreting the classical/historical texts about the concept to discover, rediscover, and/or deepen the comprehensive understanding of the concept (Korhonen et al. 2017). For example, a key concept of caring science is ethics, and phenomena of interest to nursing include the ethics of technology in caring science. Hermeneutical text interpretation of Gadamer's texts reveal the knowledge of ethics (human good, harmony of life, and respect of human dignity) as the core of caring and that it permeates through technology as virtue (well‐advisedness), phronesis (the practical, unique wisdom seen in treatment and service), and arête (the wisdom and knowledge to take responsibility and choose to do good and care “wholeheartedly seen in the art and skill of technology”) (Korhonen et al. 2017).

4. Studying Caring Based on Gadamer's Perspective

Although Gadamer himself did not articulate a research methodology or method to systematically direct how we achieve a fusion of horizons, his work has provided many nursing scholars with the perspective and a range of interpretive approaches in nursing inquiry. One influential example is the Gadamerian‐based nursing research method developed by Fleming et al. (2003). This method involves five steps: (1) deciding upon a research question, (2) identification of preunderstandings, (3) gaining understanding through dialog with participants, (4) gaining understanding through dialog with texts, and (5) establishing trustworthiness. Through its design, nursing scholars can address the most fundamental challenge of qualitative research, ensuring that the findings accurately reflect the reality of the participants and remain imbued with the crux of Gadamerian philosophy. This crux is a reconciliation of an objective meaning and the multiplicities of understanding hued by tradition, history, and language, through the dialogical fusion of horizons between the interpreter (nursing researcher) and the interpreted (sources of knowledge). This reconciliation might reveal how the verbal and nonverbal actions of a midwife interplay with available resources to create a complex experience for midwives delivering stillborn children (de los Ángeles Linares‐Gallego et al. 2025), uncover insights into parents' experiences in the neonatal intensive care unit (Yildiz and Besirik 2025), or even unveil the qualities needed by healthcare professionals when providing dignity‐preserving care for Nepalese persons living with dementia (Tranvåg and Shrestha 2025).

Other scholars have adapted or combined hermeneutic approaches to suit diverse contexts of inquiry while remaining grounded in Gadamerian philosophy, such as Alsaigh and Coyne (2021), who combined Fleming et al. (2003) and Ajjawi and Higgs (2007) to develop a new framework to guide Gadamerian hermeneutic phenomenological research. These methodological approaches are not proposed as superior techniques, but as expressions of a philosophical stance toward understanding and caring. As such, differentiations lie mainly in the domains of inquiry, the sources of knowledge used for analysis, such as transcripts from focus group interviews, participant interviews, video recordings, and field notes from observations, and the types of data analysis completed, such as interpretive, content, or conversation analysis (Costa 2026; Karlsson et al. 2019; Palmér et al. 2022; Thorkildsen et al. 2024; Wu 2021; Yen et al. 2021). From a Gadamerian perspective, methodological variation is less significant than philosophical congruence. What truly matters is whether inquiry remains faithful to the dialogical, historical, and interpretive conditions of understanding (McCaffrey et al. 2022).

Nevertheless, while the Gadamerian approach for qualitative inquiry is not novel, and many nursing scholars have successfully used this hermeneutical approach to advance nursing science, exploration of the benefits and limitations of using Gadamerian methods to expand the discipline of nursing has been placed on the back burner, in lieu of doing the research. However, it is critical that we understand the benefits and limitations of the Gadamerian approach to recognize its possible value for reshaping how we interpret and practice caring.

4.1. Benefits of the Gadamerian Approach and Caring Science

Rather than producing prescriptive directives for caring actions, Gadamerian interpretive methods cultivate phronesis, practical wisdom, which is essential for moral and relational judgment in nursing practice. In Gadamer's philosophy, “understanding always involves something like applying the text to be understood to the interpreter's present situation” (Gadamer 2004, 306–307). Through participatory conversations, reflective spaces, attention to alterity, and close‐up views, hermeneutic principles have the capacity to strengthen how we investigate phenomena based in real‐world practice (McCaffrey et al. 2022). When applied to caring science, interpretive findings do not function as procedural instructions but instead reshape how nurses perceive, interpret, and respond to unique clinical situations. As such, a further benefit of Gadamerian interpretive methods lies in their formative influence on nurses' ways of being in practice and their insistence that understanding carries an ethical responsibility.

4.1.1. Beyond the “Fusion of Horizons”

And so, while use of the Gadamerian approach for nursing research has the potential to enrich our understanding of phenomena relevant to nursing (the human‐health experience), utilizing this approach as just a means of generating themes to reach a fusion of horizons (a new understanding) is a myopic viewpoint when caring itself is boundless, transcendent (Watson 2018). It is not enough to stop at the themes, and stagnate the discipline by restricting findings to paper, while ignoring what happens after this fusion of horizons. We must take our new understandings to nursing practice, or at the very least, develop models to shape how we care, as seen with Yen et al. (2021). If not, we risk an epistemic closure contrary to the ongoing, ethically responsive mode of understanding perpetuated by Gadamer (2004).

Moules (2021) describes this as a hermeneutic practice wherein the interpretations arising from Gadamerian hermeneutic research are both born from “an obligation to allow understanding to make a difference in the ways nurses address suffering” and compel nursing practitioners “to reflect on practice, suspend certainty, and be open to the possibility that there might be better ways to practice with different results” (381). From this perspective, understanding and application are inseparable, and the interpretive findings from Gadamerian‐based nursing research do not function as clinical rules but instead reshape how nurses perceive situations and recognize meaning based on context (Corcoran and Cook 2023; Moules 2021). Therefore, interpretation is not a passive cognitive act but “rather a living, oxygenated, and actively responsive experience” that obligates the knower to respond differently in practice. (Moules 2021, 385). Consequently, interpretive methods offer benefits not only in what nurses know about caring but in how caring dispositions are cultivated and sustained. As such, Gadamerian inquiry advances caring by strengthening nurses' capacity for reflective judgment rather than narrowing practice to technical competence alone.

4.2. Limitations of the Gadamerian Approach and Caring Science

Yet, while Gadamerian interpretive methods offer significant benefits for understanding and advancing caring, their philosophical commitments also introduce important limitations that must be critically considered to avoid overextension or uncritical application in caring science. As with all qualitative inquiry, an essential limitation is its subjective nature, primarily because of the issue of biases and their potential to influence data collection, analysis, and interpretation (Ahmed 2024). However, from a Gadamerian perspective, subjectivity is not conceptualized as a methodological weakness to be eliminated but as an ontological condition of understanding. As Aho (2021) expresses, “Unlike the natural sciences, hermeneutic understanding is not … focused on ocular certainty, objectivity, or the reduction of human suffering to physical and biochemical causes” (178). While this viewpoint enables nuanced and contextually grounded understandings of caring, it simultaneously limits the extent to which Gadamerian findings can support claims of generalizability, prediction, or procedural standardization, which reflect the positivist perspective that continues to dominate hierarchies of evidence in nursing practice (Rolfe 2015).

Still, this venture that purports empirical validation and a singular truth as scientifically supreme is a myth (Chinn 1985). Gadamer (1996) refutes this entrapment with “the experiment” by emphasizing health as “a condition of being involved, of being‐in‐the‐world, of being together with one's fellow human beings, of active and rewarding engagement in one's everyday life” (113). Therefore, reframing this mindset of health as “absence of pain or the proper functioning of bodily organs and nervous systems” establishes the patient as an irreducible whole that exists as a relational complexity rather than an object to be fixed, and the effort to achieve scientific objectivity is contrary to truly understanding what matters most to the patient (Aho 2021, 188). As such, the goal of Gadamerian‐based nursing research cannot be a singular, objective truth/description of caring related to a particular phenomenon of interest, as “any piece of hermeneutical research to claim a definitive outcome would be to be guilty of bad faith” (Gadamer 2004, 73).

A further limitation lies in the centrality of the interpreter within Gadamerian inquiry. Because understanding is always mediated by the researcher's historically and culturally situated preunderstandings, Gadamerian interpretation depends heavily on reflexivity and philosophical competence. Although this acknowledgment of prejudice aligns with Gadamer (2004) claim that prejudices are conditions of understanding, it places significant demands on researchers to articulate and critically engage their assumptions. In their critical review of Gadamerian‐based nursing studies that used the Fleming et al. (2003) method, Fleming and Robb (2019) found that many authors cited Gadamerian hermeneutics without adequately demonstrating philosophical congruence or methodological rigor. This lack of critiques of Gadamerian research methods used to advance nursing science risks inconsistent or superficial application, as they demonstrated for their own method. Although McCaffrey et al. (2022), in their endeavor to explore methodological salience among hermeneutic research in health sciences, argue that effective hermeneutics is the result of philosophical commitments and lived practice, not through strict methodological adherence. This point is affirmed by Aho (2021), who stressed that “hermeneutic understanding is not grounded in a method”. Still, reflective practices need to be sufficiently developed so that interpretive inquiry can reproduce dominant professional or cultural assumptions about caring rather than disrupt them.

Practical and institutional constraints also limit the application of Gadamerian approaches to caring science. Hermeneutic understanding unfolds through sustained dialog, iterative interpretation, and openness to being transformed by the other. These processes allow for “one's own assumptions [to be] overturned, rather than suppressing them in the name of neutrality, only to be guided by them surreptitiously,” and as such, require time, relational continuity, and interpretive skill (Zimmermann 2021, 13). However, the culture of healthcare environments and academia among the health sciences is often structured around efficiency and measurable outcomes, leaving limited space for dialogical reflection (Karlsson et al. 2019; Rolfe 2015). This tension may restrict the feasibility of enacting Gadamerian insights in everyday nursing practice, particularly in settings characterized by high acuity, staffing shortages, or managerial imperatives that prioritize task completion over relational engagement. However, evidence from philosophical hermeneutic research in nursing management challenges the assumption that organizational constraints necessarily preclude the enactment of Gadamerian insights in practice. Yen et al. (2021) demonstrated that hermeneutic interpretation can remain viable and impactful even within complex, high‐pressure healthcare environments through their study of nurse managers' learning facilitation practices in the acute care setting. They developed a practice‐oriented model that “offers a framework that can guide self‐reflection and generate ideas for future practice” (Yen et al. 2021, 2582), illustrating that Gadamerian insights may be operationalized through reflective leadership, relational pedagogy, and contextual responsiveness. Rather than requiring the absence of institutional constraints, this work suggests that Gadamerian hermeneutics can function within conditions of managerial responsibility, time pressure, and accountability, supporting caring practices that are both interpretive and pragmatically attuned to real‐world nursing contexts.

Lastly, Gadamerian inquiry resists prescriptive conclusions, which may be perceived as a limitation within a discipline often expected to generate actionable interventions or best‐practice guidelines. Interpretive findings do not result in standardized techniques for caring but instead orient clinicians toward reflective judgment and contextual responsiveness (McCaffrey et al. 2022; Moules 2021). Recent nursing scholarship has noted that interpretive and hermeneutic approaches privilege practical reasoning over procedural closure, thereby challenging dominant expectations for linear knowledge translation in health care (Damsgaard 2021; McCaffrey et al. 2022). This orientation can be unsettling for audiences accustomed to clear procedural answers and fixed outcomes (McCaffrey et al. 2022; Rolfe 2015). Nevertheless, hermeneutic nursing research consistently emphasizes that understanding carries ethical consequences rather than methodological finality. As Moules (2021) underscores, hermeneutic understanding “is not a passive event” but one that obligates practitioners to respond differently in practice. Empirical hermeneutic studies further demonstrate that nurses experience this openness not as indecision but as ethical responsibility grounded in attentiveness, relational judgment, and moral responsiveness (Damsgaard 2021). Thus, the absence of prescriptive certainty reflects a core commitment of caring science: to honor the irreducible complexity, relational depth, and moral weight of human caring encounters within situated practice contexts.

5. Conclusion

Gadamerian hermeneutics is organized around the central idea that we are continuously interpreting the world and aims to explore what it means to understand and interpret human experiences. This philosophy informs the nature of caring as a scientific phenomenon by providing the viewpoint of caring as coming to an understanding through open dialog, the acceptance of prejudice as integral to understanding, and a fusion of horizons as the means to create a shared meaning within the hermeneutic circle, the nurse‐patient relationship. However, the fusion of horizons is not an endpoint. To treat it as such risks a narrow‐minded understanding of interpretation and may stagnate the discipline by arresting caring at the moment of insight rather than allowing understanding to inform ongoing praxis. In contrast, Gadamerian hermeneutics calls nursing to remain open to the ethical responsibilities that emerge through understanding. Gadamerian inquiry advances caring science not by resolving complexity, but by sustaining the interpretive work that caring itself continually demands.

Funding

The author has nothing to report.

Ethics Statement

Ethics approval was not required for this article as no human participants or animals were involved.

Consent

The author has nothing to report.

Conflicts of Interest

The author declares no conflicts of interest.

Data Availability Statement

Data sharing not applicable to this article as no datasets were generated or analyzed during the current study.