 The hermeneutical experience of truth is, therefore, governed by the “principle of history of effect” (Gadamer, Truth and Method, Part II.II.B.iv). This means that our attempts to understand are always guided more by tradition, and thus prejudice, than we are able to make explicit to ourselves. This principle, as Gadamer maintains, has important normative implications for interpretive experience. These implications follow from the fact that it is impossible to become completely self-conscious of the prejudices operative in our attempts to understand. As Gadamer puts the point in an ontological register, “to be historically means that knowledge of oneself can never be complete” (Gadamer, Truth and Method, 302). Because of this, the experience of truth leads not to self-certainty, but to the insight that we should proceed always with a Delphic self-knowledge of our limits.