In the history of hermeneutic philosophy and the empirical hermeneutical disciplines, various attempts have been made to demonstrate the distinctive nature of linguistic understanding and to mark it off against the ways in which knowledge is acquired, and the type of knowledge produced, in the natural sciences. The reasons that have been given for distinguishing between the hermeneutical disciplines, including the social sciences in so far as they deal with linguistic data, and the natural sciences have varied. In recent times Hans-Georg Gadamer and his followers have argued, based on Heidegger's ontological analysis of Verstehen as an Existenzial, that the experience of truth in the Geisteswissenschaften is independent of scientific method. More recently still, Karl-Otto Apel, a close though increasingly critical collaborator of Jürgen Habermas, has argued that while hermeneutic processes of understanding form a necessary part of all the sciences, including the natural sciences, such processes are complementary to the objectifying procedures of science.¹ In this paper I wish to focus on a somewhat different but related attempt by Habermas to show that the hermeneutical disciplines, in particular those he regards as non-objectifying critical social sciences, are necessarily distinct from the natural sciences and from any form of social science modeled on the natural sciences.