No one reads a text with no method at all. Hermeneutics is what happens when the method gets made explicit instead of left invisible.
Reading always involves interpretation, even when it doesn’t feel like it: a reader brings assumptions about genre, context, intent, and historical distance to a text before a single sentence is understood. Hermeneutics is the field that takes this seriously as its actual subject — not “what does this text say” but “what set of rules and assumptions makes any reading of it possible or defensible in the first place.” A foundational 20th-century treatment argued that understanding is always historically and culturally situated: there is no neutral, assumption-free reading of any text, only more or less self-aware ones.
That’s the explicit stake in this essay naming “rules of interpretation” as one of the foundational-layer decisions alongside the taxonomy and the canon — a knowledge system doesn’t just need texts, it needs a stated method for reading them, or an unstated one will do the job invisibly instead.
Source: Gadamer, H-G. (1960; English translation 1975), Truth and Method.