 This common background suffices for the elementary understanding of everyday life. But whenever the common meaning of life-manifestations is called into question for some reason, higher understanding becomes necessary. This can occur because of an apparent inconsistency among various claims being made, or because an ambiguity that needs to be resolved. In each case we discern an unexpected complexity that requires us to shift our frame of reference. Higher understanding cannot continue to rely on the common meanings of an expression that derive from a shared local background between speaker and listener, writer and reader. Higher understanding must replace the sphere of commonality, where inference by analogy suffices, with that of universality, where inductive inference must take over. Here the human sciences become relevant by offering the appropriate universal disciplinary contexts that can help to deal with uncertainties of interpretation. These universal systematic contexts can be social or political, economic or cultural, secular or religious. When expressions can be determined to be functioning in a specific disciplinary context then ambiguities tend to disappear. Literary scholars may be able to clarify a puzzling poetic passage by showing it to contain a literary allusion to a classical work with a foreign vocabulary. Or they can perhaps clarify it by seeing it as a way of accommodating certain technical demands of the genre as such. These cases of higher understanding establish a larger context of reference.