From Galleberg to Galgeberg

On Prejudgments, Judgments, and the Art of Asking Questions

I was listening to the radio.

They were talking about a place in Sande, in Vestfold. I heard the name Galgeberg. It caught my attention. Galgeberg? Could the name mean that there had once been a place of execution there?

I already knew Galgeberg in Oslo, and I knew that the name there was connected with an old execution site.

I asked ChatGPT.

At first, what I was already thinking seemed to be confirmed. Galgeberg can mean precisely that: a hill or rocky rise where a gallows once stood. Such places were often situated outside the town, but clearly visible from the roads leading into it. Punishment was not merely to be carried out. It was to be seen.

Everything fitted.

Except for one thing.

The place in Sande is not called Galgeberg.

It is called Galleberg.

I am severely hearing impaired. Many consonants have disappeared for me. When I listen to the radio, my brain therefore has to fill in what my ears can no longer distinguish.

Galleberg became Galgeberg.

It was not simply a misheard sound. It became a word I knew. And because I knew the word, an entire story came with it.

Galgeberg.

Gallows.

Hill.

Place of execution.

It all made sense.

And it was wrong.

It made me think about prejudice.

The word can almost be read literally: a pre-judgment. A judgment that comes before.

But perhaps it is precisely the word judgment that deserves our attention. A pre-judgment is not necessarily final. It can still be examined, challenged, and corrected. Only when an interpretation hardens does it become something else: a judgment we no longer question.

We usually use the word prejudice negatively. A prejudiced person has formed an opinion about others without knowing enough about them. Prejudice can affect people because of gender, skin colour, religion, disability, social background, or other characteristics. It can lead to discrimination and exclusion.

But before prejudice becomes a moral judgment of another human being, there may be a simpler mechanism at work.

We do not see everything.

We do not hear everything.

And yet we fill in the rest.

I meet someone who says very little at a gathering. Perhaps I decide that he is uninterested or distant. I have noticed the silence, but I do not know its cause. He may be shy. He may have difficulty hearing the conversation. Or he may simply prefer to listen.

I have been given a few signs.

I have supplied the rest myself.

That is what my brain did with Galleberg. It filled in what was missing and created a coherent whole.

This is where Hans-Georg Gadamer becomes interesting.

In Truth and Method, he attempts to rehabilitate the very concept of prejudice. The mistake of the Enlightenment, as Gadamer sees it, was to make prejudice the simple opposite of reason. But we can never encounter the world entirely without presuppositions. We always bring language, history, experience, and expectations with us.

We always begin somewhere.

What Gadamer calls our history of effects — Wirkungsgeschichte — is already at work before we begin to reflect upon it ourselves. The history, language, and traditions to which we belong have shaped the way the world appears to us. We do not stand outside our own history and observe it neutrally. We understand from within.

The question, then, is not whether we have prejudgments in this fundamental sense.

We do.

The question is whether we allow them to be tested.

Gadamer describes understanding as an encounter between horizons. My own horizon of understanding meets something that does not quite fit within it: a text, another person, an event, or another perspective. When the encounter truly becomes an encounter, my horizon can change. This is what he calls a fusion of horizons.

Not because I abandon everything I knew before.

But because what I knew is put to the test by something else.

In a very modest way, that was what happened with Galleberg.

I already had a horizon. I knew Galgeberg in Oslo. I knew the meaning of the gallows as a place and a symbol. When I heard an almost identical place name, it naturally fell into what I already knew.

A little knowledge actually made my misinterpretation stronger.

I could have stopped there.

I could have concluded that Galleberg in Sande was an old place of execution. The reasoning was coherent, after all.

But I asked.

And here ChatGPT reappears.

What mattered was not primarily that a language model had the correct answer. It, too, could have been wrong. What mattered was that the conversation introduced another voice into my own interpretation.

You heard Galgeberg. That was the starting point.

But the place is called Galleberg.

One small correction from outside was enough for the entire understanding to have to be rebuilt.

Sometimes we need another voice in order to discover what we ourselves cannot see. Traditionally, that voice has belonged to another person, a book, a teacher, or a conversation partner. Now it may also come from a language model.

That does not make the other voice infallible.

But it can set our own understanding in motion.

For the most dangerous thing about a prejudgment is not necessarily that the first interpretation is wrong. We will all misinterpret. We have too little information, we see the world from limited standpoints, and we inevitably fill in what is missing.

The danger begins when interpretation hardens into judgment.

He is like that.

Those people are like that.

I know what this means.

Then the pre-judgment has become a judgment.

I have previously written about judgment and what lies hidden beneath it, with Heidegger, Derrida, and Caputo as conversation partners. Perhaps this essay is about the moment before judgment falls.

About what can still be opened.

Pre-judgment and judgment lie close to one another, both linguistically and conceptually. But between them there is a small space.

That is where the question can enter.

What if I heard it wrong?

What if I have seen only part of it?

What if the other person knows something I do not?

For Gadamer, genuine understanding does not primarily mean having what we already believe confirmed. Understanding requires us to keep our own view open long enough for the matter at hand — or the other person — actually to tell us something.

Perhaps, then, the opposite of prejudice is not primarily knowledge.

Knowledge, too, can be used to reinforce a mistaken belief. I had used my knowledge of Galgeberg in Oslo to make my misinterpretation of Galleberg more convincing.

The opposite is, rather, openness.

The willingness to allow what we think we know to be challenged.

Galleberg and Galgeberg differ by only a few consonant sounds. For me, those sounds had almost disappeared.

Yet the difference between them was great enough to create two different stories.

One was about an old place of execution.

The other was about how understanding comes into being.

We hear only parts. We see only parts. And yet we have to try to understand the whole.

That is the human condition.

Perhaps that is where prejudice begins.

But it does not have to end as judgment.

As long as we keep asking questions.