The Art of Fair Interpretations

Why we must become more discerning interpreters of the facts of our lives

Anna Katharina Schaffner

This article was originally published as a The Story Solution Substack on 25//11/25

I have recently come across the term ‘ethical hermeneutics’ – a moral commitment to fair, balanced interpretations. Ethical hermeneutics invites us not automatically to ascribe the very worst intentions to a person’s words or actions, but to listen and observe with an open yet discerning mind, remaining just and curious. In our polarized times, we often do the exact opposite. We form a judgement about someone (i.e. that they are racist, misogynist, cruel or dumb) and then we look for evidence to support our assumption. We jump on pieces of information that confirm our preconception, and disavow any information that might challenge it. This is confirmation bias and cognitive filtering in action.

In other words, we form stories about somebody in our minds, and if the reality of that person does not correspond to our story, we don’t adjust the story but the person. We do this in ingenious, often highly creative ways, for we like nothing less than having to change our stories because of our inherent dislike of cognitive dissonance. Cognitive dissonance involves having to change our mind, and this takes mental and emotional effort. And it can be unsettling, for it deprives us of certitude, which we crave more than ever in a world that seems so confusing and fast-changing.

This interpretative tendency is pretty obvious in the political arena, but it is also operative in our inland empires. How so? In my work with countless coaching clients, I have found that so many of us come up with the most unfair, biased and often cruel interpretations of the facts of our own lives. We are awfully unethical interpreters of our own actions, past and present, often assuming the very worst intentions. Many of us run on bad stories about ourselves – that we are dumb, ugly, bad, flawed, lazy, useless, unloveable, and we tend to arrange the facts of our lives to fit with this story.

If we hold toxic self-stories, we always arrive at the same biased conclusions – x happened to me because I am profoundly unloveable. Or y keeps happening because I am so stupid. People will always abandon me because I am a bad person. I will never make it because I am just not confident enough. These stories put us into a negative trance, our very own cognitive filter-bubble. They direct our attention, and they render any more nuanced interpretations of what happened and keeps happening to us impossible.

If we run on toxic stories of that kind it is as though our worst political enemy looks at the facts of our lives, filtering for faults and failures, and then spins a fake news story designed to shame, discredit and hurt us.

But the good news is that we can become fairer and more nuanced interpreters of our own lives. Ethical hermeneutics is a skill that we can learn. It involves becoming aware of our various cognitive biases, redirecting our attention, and considering new interpretations that go beyond what we normally think and assume. Just as we owe it to others, I think we also owe the courtesy of aiming for fair interpretations to ourselves.

Image: Nastia Petruk @Unsplash