 Dilthey associates the purpose of the human sciences not with the explanation of ‘outer’ experience, but, instead, with the understanding of ‘lived experience’ (Erlebnis). In an important essay, “The Rise of Hermeneutics,” Dilthey affirms that the understanding achieved in the human sciences involves interpretation. But this means that hermeneutics, grasped as the theory of the universal validity of interpretation, does more than lay out the rules of successful interpretive practice. Hermeneutics clarifies the validity of the research conducted in the human sciences. Indeed, he ventures that the “main purpose” of hermeneutics is “to preserve the general validity of interpretation against the inroads of romantic caprice and skeptical subjectivity, and to give a theoretical justification of such validity, upon which all the certainty of historical knowledge is founded” (Dilthey, “The Rise of Hermeneutics,” Section V).