Western philosophy has not had much to say about listening or receptive communication until fairly recently, and listening research has tended either to follow the trends of the speech communication field or to be directed by speech science or the pragmatics of the working world. A study examines the process of understanding and interpretation presented in the area of hermeneutics and interprets it for researchers of listening. The twentieth-century hermeneutic and phenomenological philosophers, Schleiermacher, Dilthey, Heidegger, Ricoeur, and Gadamer are scrutinized for their contributions to listening research and for indications of paths to follow in future investigations. Listening, the receptive dimension of discourse, is generally a "place" of primary mediation between conversants in discourse; the listener participates in the mediation of meaning--and hence of the situation. The listener metaphorically sits at the doorway between self and other, aware of and creating both worlds. Thus, the concept of a productive listening process is derived from hermeneutics. Research should look at communications in terms of what happens in the interpretive process, how linguistic meaning is shaped, and what this tells us of human actors. (NKA)