Redescription and Refiguration of Reality in Ricoeur

Truth is attributed by hermeneutical phenomenology not only to science but also to art and literature. According to Ricoeur, its veritable bearer is the expression of experience that can take artistic and literary forms as well as scientific ones. However, truth in this sense cannot be defined as a correspondence with a ready-made reality, nor can it be reduced to any internal coherence in our knowledge of the world. What is, then, its precise meaning in this context? The two terms mentioned in the title—'redescription' and 'refiguration' of reality—indicate the two answers Ricoeur gives to this question. The similarities and the differences between these two answers are submitted to an inquiry in the following paper, which, relying upon Ricoeur, adumbrates the outlines of a phenomenological and hermeneutical approach to truth.