A hermeneutics of scientific practices and the concept of “text”

In defending the primacy of perception, Merleau-Ponty (2007: 89) takes for granted a wrong view about the perceived world in scientific inquiry. For him, this world is a collection of objects. He seems to ignore the conception of hermeneutic phenomenology developed in the 1920s, according to which science is a particular mode of being-in-the-world distinguished by the capacity of objectifying thematization of the word. This thematization is carried out through (what Heidegger calls) a “mathematical projection of nature”. The thematically objectified world is by no means a collection of objects. It is rather a structure that remains invariant with respect to a certain group of formal transformations. From a Heideggerian point of view, the perception-within-scientific-practices is a dimension of the mathematical of nature.

The alternative I am going to suggest has important points of contact with Robert Scharff’s (2006, 2012) critique of post-phenomenology. Yet, there are essential differences in emphasis. Scharff main point of criticism is expressed by the following observation: “It seems to be Ihde’s most frequent tendency is to depict language and cognition not so much as dimensions of embodiment in the wider sense of cultured embodiment but as cultural phenomena that ‘build upon’ perceptual embodiment proper” (Scharff 2006: 137). In trying to specify the critical focus of post-phenomenology, Scharff strives for abolishing Ihde’s “body-perceptual/cultural-linguistic cut”. This is also my intention, but—unlike Scharff—I would like to realize this intention by means of integrating practice theory into hermeneutic philosophy of science. Accordingly, my criticism is concentrated on the post-phenomenology’s negligence of the role played by configured practices in the transition from perceptual embodiment to “cultured embodiment” taking place in scientific inquiry. It is the configurations of practices that prevents one from addressing language and cognition as built upon perceptual embodiment.

The question resonates the debate on whether the structure conceptualized by a theory of mathematical physics is dependent on fundamental physical objects that possess intrinsic identities. Regardless of the important differences between the parties in this debate—scientific realists and structural realists—all participants defend essentialist positions. (It is a controversial issue of whether van Fraassen’s position of structural empiricism is an exception in this regard.) In insisting on the primacy of contextualization, the hermeneutics of natural science is, by contrast, a radically anti-essentialist approach to scientific inquiry. Neither the mathematically conceptualized structures nor the fundamental objects possess essences (essential identities) beyond the process of inquiry as a contextualized reading process. Nonetheless, the version of the hermeneutics of science I will present here prioritizes in a sense the structures. As will be shown, the reason for this is the unavoidability of semantic interpretation in reading theoretical objects.

The philosophers of the Erlangen school of methodical constructivism provide an alternative argument for the cultural praxis-laden meaning of scientific measurements. By developing proto-theories, they argue that originally the measuring instruments are constructed within practices of the lifeworld (in Husserl’s sense), and their modes of operation are accorded with Euclidean metrics. Proto-theories aim at scrutinizing pre-scientific contexts in which “practical knowledge” is produced. The methodical order of constructing scientific knowledge is grounded upon practical knowledge. By the same token, the assumptions for the design of scientific instruments are rooted in pre-scientific (lifeworld) contexts. However, technoscience’s progressive effacing the distinction between lifeworld practices and practices of scientific inquiry brings the constructivist principle about the lifeworld genesis of scientific instruments to naught.

Scientific practices-laden meaning is neither reducible to theory-laden meaning nor describable in terms of cultural praxis-laden meaning. To be sure, all scientific practices take part in theory construction. But the configurations of scientific practices in normal-scientific inquiry are by no means restricted to the process of theory construction. At the same time, all scientific practices are a sort of sociocultural practices. Yet, the configured practices in normal-scientific inquiry always open their own horizon of possibilities, which makes them different in kind from the rest of practices constituting the totality of cultural praxis.

Husserl’s phenomenological critique of science introduced the strong opposition between meaning-producing lifeworld and objectifying science deprived of the constitution of meaning. In rejecting this opposition, interpretive internalism admits that configured scientific practices are capable of not only objectifying the phenomena under study, but also of making these phenomena contextually meaningful. In other words, practices of scientific inquiry achieve both the objectification and the meaningful articulation of reality. Interpretive internalism disputes the split of reality into pre-scientific lifeworld of meaning and scientifically objectified reality deprived of meaning.

Van Fraassen summarizes the semantic view in the following manner: Science represents empirical phenomena (captured by data models) “as embeddable in certain abstract structures (theoretical models), and those abstract structures are describable only up to structural isomorphism” (van Fraassen 2006: 305). This is the kernel of structural-empiricist picture of science as a strategy for “saving phenomena”. The very disclosure of a scientific domain reveals a leeway of possibilities for specifying a family of theoretical models that in its turn indicate how to specify “empirical substructures” (the minimal algebra of the data models) as candidates for a representation by means of instruments of observable phenomena (van Fraassen 1980: 64). Under this assumption, a scientific domain can semantically be regarded in terms of the state–space approach. This approach stands entirely on a par with the insistence on a constant (re)contextualization of scientific inquiry.

Normal scientific inquiry is always a conservative and tendentious enterprise. Scientific community is committed to certain “prejudices”—corresponding to the fore-having, fore-seeing, and fore-grasping of scientific inquiry—that support the belief in the existence of the respective theoretical objects. Guided by these prejudices, scientific community tries to visualize the theoretical objects in any particular context. Only by means of the tenacious commitment to prejudices can scientific community engage itself in an incremental articulation of a scientific domain that excludes revolutionary transformations. The kind of conservatism that is inherent in normal-scientific research consists in scientific community unwillingness to change the hermeneutic situation in which the domain of inquiry is disclosed, meaningfully articulated, and objectified.

A characteristic hermeneutic situation on the part of scientific community consists in the basic presuppositions shared by community’s members. The divergence of sub-communities following discrepant blueprints for a domain’s articulation is due to the incommensurability of such presuppositions.