The humanities aim at providing a systematic understanding of human beings, their history, language, and culture. Many different theories are called upon to bring forward such an understanding depending on the subject and the discipline in question. These theories help us with the means to describe the historical, linguistic, or cultural phenomena we want to understand by furnishing us with some principles and a vocabulary necessary for reaching such an understanding. But the dominant approach for generating and justifying our understanding of human beings and their activities for a long time has been hermeneutics. As we saw in the previous chapter, hermeneutics is concerned with the process of forming interpretations, which result in understanding, as well as with the justification of the outcome of this process. This tradition characterizes understanding as insight into meaning. It may be the meaning of a sign in virtue of its linguistic or symbolic sense, or it may be the meaning of an action in virtue of its goals, or of a social institution in virtue of its function.