The standard, liberal problematic of understanding the other turns on how successfully we are able to suspend our prejudices about him or her. Instead of this, Gadamer suggests that interpretation and understanding are precisely a matter of foregrounding one's expectations or foreconceptions, and seeing which are borne out, in an open-ended and playful process of dialogue. This shift undercuts the standard hierarchical arrangement of (interpreting) subject and (interpreted) object, and revalues alterity, for the encounter with difference is precisely what broadens our horizons and enriches our consciousness.
However, Gadamer has been criticized for emphasizing continuity, understanding, and the productivity of prejudices to the point of robbing us of the possibility of critique. In this paper I defend Gadamer against these allegations, by elucidating the subtlety of his account of the relationship between tradition and reason, history and critique. Yet I also argue that he underestimates the significance of a certain type of interpretive moment: that of breakdown or rupture. If it is true, as Gadamer claims, that all understanding is interpretation, and that all interpretation calls upon our (historical) conceptual inheritance, then what safeguards us against the possibility that sexist or racist meanings will continue to ground understanding? The answer, I argue, is the fact that those meanings are received differently by people in different social positions. Drawing upon the insights of feminist epistemology, I develop the idea that a properly critical hermeneutics is one that allows for, even fosters those moments of breakdown or schism in which marginalized members of society receive as "strange" what is otherwise accept as familiar.