  Gadamer’s conversation on aesthetics paints its bolder themes: art is interrogative by nature, artworks work through a disclosure of meaning, disclosures of meaning establish art’s cognitive status, the cognitive content of art is partly intelligible and partly enigmatic, and artworks are always open to re-interpretation. These are, however, not free-standing arguments. Gadamer’s position is hermeneutical not because of an underlying thesis which goes unremarked but because it is informed by a constellation of various arguments which shape the central position. To the broader arguments we now turn.