CONCEPT
Hermeneutic Asymmetry
The structural condition of human-AI dialogue in which only the human participant is genuinely transformed by the exchange—the machine contributes to the development of understanding without undergoing any development of its own.
Hermeneutic asymmetry names the structural difference between genuine dialogue and the human-AI conversation that resembles it. In Hans-Georg Gadamer’s account of the
hermeneutic circle, understanding emerges between interlocutors, not within either one: each party’s horizon of understanding is transformed by the other’s contribution, and the mutual transformation produces something neither possessed at the outset. The human-AI conversation has the
structure of iterative interpretation—vague description, approximate response, refined description, adjusted response, convergence—but not the
substance: the human’s understanding may genuinely develop through the dialogue, but the machine’s “understanding” does not. The model that begins the conversation is the same model that ends it. It processes the conversational context, weighting subsequent outputs accordingly, but it has not been transformed by the encounter with this particular human’s particular intentions. When the conversation ends, the model returns to its prior state. The concept is grounded in
Terry Winograd’s analysis of the human-AI conversation as a genuinely novel form of interaction that produces some effects of