Antepredicative intelligibility and theoretical derivation

It is well known that Martin Heidegger, through hermeneutic phenomenology, approached the question of meaning by interpreting this construct as a pattern of ante-predicative intelligibility, in which theoretical-scientific processes are rooted. Around the argument that theoretical structures are reductive modifications of phenomena that come from the original experience of meaning, the philosopher sought to elucidate how theoretical modes are realised in a kind of derivation in relation to hermeneutic structures. In developing his discussion of how meaning is constituted and made explicit to us through and around the prior structure of understanding, Heidegger actually discovered a structure of presuppositions that anticipates the meaningfulness of the world. This means that whenever we ask about the meaning of a state of affairs, be it a text, a work of art, a law, an object field belonging to a scientific domain or different events in our practical lives, we don’t start from point zero, but we ask this question on the basis of a previously unveiled significance, which guides us in our contact with what we seek to understand.