 In On Thomas Abbt’s Writings, On the Cognition and Sensation, and elsewhere Herder makes one of his most important and influential innovations: interpretation must supplement its focus on word-usage with attention to the author’s psychology. Herder implies several reasons for this (some of which would subsequently be developed more explicitly and elaborately by successors such as Schleiermacher and Friedrich Schlegel): (1) As was already mentioned, he embraces a quasi-empiricist theory of concepts that entails that in order to understand an author’s concepts an interpreter must imaginatively recapture the author’s relevant sensations. (2) As Quentin Skinner has recently emphasized, understanding the linguistic meaning of an utterance or text is only a necessary, not a sufficient, condition for understanding the utterance/text tout court; in addition, one needs to discover what might nowadays be called the author’s illocutionary intentions. For example, I meet a stranger by a frozen lake who tells me, “The ice is thin over there”; I understand his linguistic meaning perfectly; but is he simply informing me?, warning me?, threatening me?, joking? … (3) Skinner himself tends to imply that one can determine linguistic meanings prior to establishing authorial intentions. That may sometimes be so (e.g., in the example just given). But is it generally so? Herder implies not. And this seems right, because the linguistic meaning of a formula is often ambiguous (in terms of the background linguistic possibilities), and in order to identify the relevant meaning one must turn, not only to larger bodies of text (as was already mentioned), but also to hypotheses, largely derived from them, concerning the author’s intentions (e.g., concerning the subject-matter that he intends to treat). This is a further reason why interpreters need to invoke psychology. (4) As was already mentioned, Herder implies that an author often conveys ideas in his work, not explicitly in its parts, but rather via these and the way in which they are put together to form a textual whole. It is necessary for the interpreter to capture these ideas, both for their own sake and in order thereby to resolve ambiguities at the level of the parts. (5) Herder also implies that the second half of his doctrine of radical mental difference—individual variations in mode of thought even within a single period and culture—generates a need for psychological interpretation. Why does any special need arise here? Part of the answer seems to be that when an interpreter is dealing with a concept that is distinctive of a particular author rather than common to a whole period/culture, he typically faces a problem of relative paucity and lack of contextual variety in the actual uses of the word that are available as empirical evidence from which to infer the rule for use, or usage, constitutive of its meaning. Hence he needs extra help—and the author’s general psychology may provide this. (Points (2) and (5) would subsequently be elaborated by Schleiermacher, point (4) by Schlegel.)