Perhaps nothing about hermeneutics is better known than its role, or putative role, as a demarcation criterion between the natural and the human sciences. Faced with the danger of creeping scientism, social philosophers have repeatedly grasped at the idea that if hermeneutics can be shown to be both essential and unique to the human sciences, foreign or secondary to the natural sciences, then an important freedom will have been won to reject in the social realm that misplaced, alienating stance of the "neutral" investigator, and regard human beings as human once again.