system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
What does Ricoeur mean when he says: understanding takes place in a non-psychological and properly semantic space?
gpt
It is important to note in this section of the present work (*Interpretation Theory: Discourse and the Surplus of Meaning*) that Ricoeur is contesting the psychologizing interpretation of Romantic hermeneutics such as one sees in Schleiermacher, who proposed that a reader must understand an author better than the author understood herself – in other words, Ricoeur is challenging the idea that one must gain a God's eye view into the author's mind in order to extricate the meaning of a text, which, in this view, is equated with 'authorial intention.'

It might be helpful to set your quote within its immediate context:

>"In conclusion, then, there is a problem of interpretation not so much because of the incommunicability of the psychic experience of the author, but because of the very verbal intention of the text. The surpassing of the intention by the meaning signifies precisely that **understanding takes place in a nonpsychological and properly semantical space**, which the text has carved out by severing itself from the mental intention of its author."

(*Interpretation Theory*, 76)

The intention of the author – the 'psychological space' – is irretrievable in any absolute sense, hence one works with the relative "semantic space" which is "carved out" in the form of a text.

Ricoeur does propose that historical-critical data do aid in interpretation – by narrowing down the possible range of meanings – yet he does not believe that authorial intention – to the extent that the reader may grasp it in any relative sense – closes the interpretation of any given text; the simple fact of the existence of the text, its being set in graphic (rather than spoken) semantics, opens it up to other possible interpretations. The possible range of meanings of a text, while both opened up and limited through historical-critical analyses, are not the exclusive property of authorial intention.