Ethnomethodological and Hermeneutic-Phenomenological Perspectives on Scientific Practices

On the view that “practices” is solely a word for the individual formations of habit, see Turner (1994: 115-123).

A third approach to scientific practices that gets rid of essentialism and reificationism offer some versions of the feminist philosophy of science. On the complex relationship between this approach and the two analyzed in the present paper see Ginev (2008).

McHoul (1998) goes on to draw parallels between the ontico-ontological difference in heremeneutic phenomenology and Garfinkel’s difference between ethnomethodology and formal sociological analysis. To be sure, however, from the viewpoint of hermeneutic phenomenology both programs are only “ontic enterprises”.

On the role of the concept of self-understanding in the hermeneutics of the natural sciences see Eger (2006: 89–100).

The following papers are documenting the initial situation in the hermeneutics of science: Kisiel (1976), Kisiel (1979), Heelan (1975), Kockelmans (1979). In the 1990s at stake in the hermeneutics of science were particular scientific practices (like experimentation in the first place). Among the most important hermeneutic studies of this kind are Eger (1995), Crease (1995), Heelan (1994), Heelan (1997), Kockelmans (1997).

See in this regard also Lynch (1991).

In fact Livingston’s main aim is an ethomethodological inquiry into the various stages of proving mathematical theorems (a Gödel’s theorem, a Euclidean theorem, and the way physicists derive the divergence theorem by preserving the physical interpretation of the mathematics).

See, for instance, Hacking (1992), Rouse (1996), and Longino (2002).

One should not ignore, however, the following remark of Lynch and Bogen (1994: 75): “While strong empiricist tendencies [in ethnomethodology] are not necessarily incompatible with Sacks’s prescriptions for a natural science of human behavior, they are curiously at odds with the ethnomethodological conception of science that initially inspired Sacks and subsequently has been developed by ethnomethodological studies of practices in the natural sciences and mathematics”.

Heelan’s argument for hermeneutic realism is based (1) on an analogy between reading a text and reading an instrument, and (2) on the assumption that a standardized instrument of scientific research can define the perceptual profiles of a scientific entity. On this argument, the physical system of signs in scientific research is a function of standard instruments and paradigmatic circumstances. See Heelan (1983a).

Yet the rejection of this autonomy does not imply a dismissal of science’s cognitive autonomy. Quite on the contrary, hermeneutic philosophy of science provides one with stronger arguments for advocating this autonomy than the arguments suggested by scientific realists. On this philosophy, scientific research constitutes its cognitive autonomy by projecting horizons of specific possibilities, creating thereby a distinctive mode of being-in-the-world. See Ginev 2006: 14-26.

See on this point Ginev (1999).

In fact, this is an extended formulation of the well known dictum of philosophical hermeneutics that we are living always already in an interpreted world.

See in this regard Heelan (1983b).

For a further development of this approach to mathematical (formal) reasoning, see Livingston (2008: 11–20).

See in this regard Livingston (1987: 119-22).

See in this regard Lynch (1992a: 244).

The gestalt is at once constituting the relevant background practices and organizing these practices. Each of the two components – background practices and projected gestalt – involved in this circularity makes available what is necessary for the other. The accusation of circularity is the main point of David Bloor’s criticism of Livingston’s approach to the proving process in mathematics. In advocating the cognitive sociology’s explanatory approach, Bloor (1987: 350) argues that the ethnomethodological “account we have been given of how objective structures are supposed to emerge from local, work-site practices in fact takes us round in an uninformative circle”. In laying the claim that this circularity can be transformed into an “informative circle” without committing a kind of explanatory essentialism and determinism, the champions of hermeneutics of science are able to oppose both the sociology of scientific knowledge and the ethnomethodology of scientific practices.

In ascribing to the open horizons of possibilities a trans-subjective character, the adherents to hermeneutic phenomenology are legitimizing the concept of trans-subjectivity as a concept irreducible to that of inter-subjectivity. As a hermeneutic phenomenon trans-subjectivity refers to the interpretative circle between projecting and choosing-appropriating-actualizing possibilities, while inter-subjectivity is most of all associated with maintaining the intrinsic order of reproducible practices. In contrast to the hermeneutic phenomenon of trans-subjectivity, inter-subjectivity (as implicated in the order of rule following) is a purely descriptive-empirical phenomenon. In hermeneutic phenomenology, trans-subjectivity connotes in the first place the world’s horizonal transcendence of the empirical subjectivity. Since the transcendental reflection on the hermeneutic circularity of being-in-the-world starts out with focusing on the “transcendence of the world,” one should assign a transcendental status to trans-subjectivity. Yet it is not an independent transcendental instance. Trans-subjectivity expresses rather the transcendental dimension of the interrelatedness of practices when the constitution of meaning is at issue.

Exercising such a criticism would be a violation of Garfinkel’s postulate of “ethnomethological indifference”: The description of the immanent reflexivity involves abstaining from all judgments regarding adequacy, value, importance, or success of members’ accounts of their methods for creating order.

Ethnomethodologists get rid of the idea that a semiotic analysis of the “textual production” (texts, scales, graphs, diagrams, etc.) within the life-world of a scientific community can recover or reproduce the transformation of the lived work into stabilized knowledge that transcends the contingency and indexicality of particular practices. Following Garfinkel’s approach to the “natural accountability of the life-world,” they deny the presupposition of an identity between semiotic elements and the performative implications of those elements. Instead of formal-semiotic analysis of science’s sign systems, the ethnomethodological treatment of the “life-world pair” in mathematics I already mentioned seeks to demonstrate the practical equivalence between literary representations and lived work.

How to read Wittgenstein’s later work is at issue of an interesting exchange between Bloor and Lynch. It seems as if both authors agree that the basic difference between cognitive sociology and ethnomethodology depend entirely on the ways of construing this work. In rejecting the internalist approach to rule-following behavior suggested by Lynch, Bloor (1992: 273) argues that “the internal relation between rule and application is a social relationship. What is more, it is a relation that is clearly analyzable using precisely the conceptual apparatus that ethnomethodologists affect to dismiss”. Bloor’s reading of Philosophical Investigations brings him to the conclusion that Wittgenstein refuted ethnomethodology before it was even born. Lynch (1992b) opposes the “sociological reading of Wittgenstein” by showing the Wittgenstein’s account of language games is not a causal statement about rule following. (See also Kusch 2004.) A champion of hermeneutics of science might respond to this exchange by arguing that regardless of whether Philosophical Investigations are read in a sociological or an anti-sociological manner, it is the very Wittgensteinian framework that is too narrow for giving account of rule-following behavior.

For the very idea of double hermeneutics as it is employed here, see Ginev (1998).

See in this regard Malpas (1997).