heelan, patrick a., 'why a hermeneutical philosophy of the natural sciences?', man and...

Man and World 30: 271–298, 1997. 271c 1997 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.

Why a hermeneutical philosophy of the natural sciences?

PATRICK A. HEELANPhilosophy Department, Georgetown University, Washington, D.C., USA

Abstract. Why a hermeneutical philosophy of the natural sciences? It is necessary to addressthe philosophic crisis of realism vs relativism in the natural sciences. This crisis is seen as a partof the cultural crisis that Husserl and Heidegger identified and attributed to the hegemonic roleof theoretical and calculative thought in Western societies. The role of theory is addressed usingthe hermeneutical circle to probe the origin of theoretic meaning in scientific cultural praxes.This is studied in Galileo’s discovery of the phases of Venus; the practice of measurement;the different theories and practices of space perception; the historicality and temporality ofscientific research communities which ground paradigm change; and the process of discovery.The paper draws particularly from the work of Heidegger. Though envisaging all science andscholarship, the highlighted theme is research in the natural sciences.

Introduction

In a recent paper on the status of studies in the history and philosophy ofscience and science studies in general, Nickles1 reported that after hopefulbeginnings there is now no agreement among scholars in these fields abouthow their fields relate to one another and to science. Babich2, in her essay onE. Mach, P. Duhem, and G. Bachelard, and Scharff3 in his study of Comte,have shown that in its formation analytic philosophy of science was shornof certain elements – historicality, community, technicity, and creativity –that were important to its distant founding fathers. It is now clear that theseelements, central to a historical, social, and technological study of science,need to be reintegrated with the philosophy of science if philosophy is to havea fair chance of fulfilling its role as a universal reflection on natural scienceand all Wissenschaft.4

Unfortunately, the problem is not just a local one particular to the multi-disciplinary study of science, but a broader and deeper one whose roots arein the prevalent “reductionist” metaphysics and epistemologies of modernphilosophy that cut across all disciplines, are presupposed by modern cul-ture’s most successful enterprise, modern science, and that, as the fruit ofthe Enlightenment, are also deeply embedded in our common language andculture.5

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Modernity, however, or its residue, is not our only problem. Physical sci-ence that sat unchallenged at the pinnacle of truth no longer does so. It ischallenged, not just by historians and sociologists of science, but by environ-mentalists, governments, religionists, humanists, and others. I must insist thatthe “challenge” to science does not claim that what science says is untrue or,least of all, ineffective, but that it must heed the demands of public account-ability like other knowledge sources, for its expenditures, procedures, ethicalnorms, privileged status as knowledge, and its publicly unexamined culturalagenda.6

For the purposes of this paper, I take modernity or the modern lifeworld tobe governed by the implicit assumption that natural science and its methodsand criteria constitute the supreme model for all trustworthy human inquiryand knowledge. I take postmodernity or the postmodern lifeworld to describethe situation where the position of universal arbiter of knowledge is vacant.

Also for the purposes of this paper, the reference corpus comprises thephilosophical works7 of E. Husserl, W. Dilthey, M. Heidegger, H-G. Gadamer,P. Ricoeur, M. Merleau-Ponty and those influenced by them, among whom, Itake Heidegger to be the key figure.8 This corpus is supplemented, however,by generally recent scholarly studies in the historical and social study ofscience, and by reflection on the practice of science mostly from the researchend of the physical sciences.

Phenomenology and the crisis of modernity

The crisis of modernity was the theme of Husserl’s posthumous work TheCrisis of European Sciences and TranscendentalPhenomenology.9 His analy-sis of the crisis explored modernity’s forgetfulness of the role of the humansubject in the constitution of knowledge in the natural and human sciencesspringing from the Galilean tradition which tended to replace nature andculture as given by the lifeworld with the mathematical models that scienceuses to study them, all with a view to manipulation and control. He placed theblame on a philosophy that was complicit in elevating the new science into therole of a universal philosophy that effectively transformed the religious andeconomic, political and international norms of Europe. In this way, Europeundertook a new mission of universal cultural Enlightenment towards the restof the world formerly claimed only by the Church, and this Enlightenmentmission drawing its divine legitimacy from God’s other book, The Book ofNature, also came to rule philosophy, Reformation theology, political life,and culture. Husserl’s solution was to draw philosophers and scientists backto the origins of Greek science and philosophy and by recollecting what hadbeen forgotten to re-establish in Galilean science the universal intellectual

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WHY A HERMENEUTICAL PHILOSOPHY OF THE NATURAL SCIENCES? 273

goals of Greek science which acknowledged the creative role of the humansubject in giving meaning to mathematical forms. Husserl would have usrecollect the ontological grounding of geometry – the mathematical mediumof Galileo’s science – in the practical activities of the lifeworld, for example,in land surveying and measurement.

Heidegger on the other hand was skeptical both of the goal of completerestoration of Greek intellectual ideals in science and philosophy, and of thehuman capacity or even desirability to recollect what was lost by scientific andphilosophical traditions as they evolved historically. The temporal nature ofthe human inquirer as Dasein (BT 27) thrown into the contemporary lifeworldand constrained by death, seemed to limit the possibilities of recollection,and to permit to Dasein no more than a limited ability and responsibilityto achieve authenticity. In all human projects handed down by tradition, thedisclosedness of Being is conditioned by layers of forgetfulness or by whatresides in the practical understanding as hidden and only partially revealed byor recoverable from the texts and techniques of tradition or from their livingexponents (BT 43).

The task before us then, as Heidegger would have envisioned it had hestraightforwardly addressed the problem of modern science, is to give mod-ern science an ontological and epistemological foundation in the contem-porary lifeworld, rather than to seek the kind of definitive transcendentalsolution that Husserl had in mind. Ironically, Husserl, himself a mathemati-cian and natural philosopher at Gottingen during those “Glorious Years” whenHilbert, Courant, Klein, Noether and others transformed modern physics intomathematical physics, was better acquainted with the high culture of naturalscience and arguably more respectful of its potential cultural agenda thanHeidegger10; yet Heidegger was more tolerant of its role as a historical andsocial medium that both discloses and conceals the Being of the contemporarylifeworld, where, as he argues, the force of theory in the scientific traditionis to transform everything into a mere resource (a “present-at-hand,” or laterGestell)11 for human projects. The contemporary challenge for contemplativephilosophical reflection will be to disclose the meaning of these projects –natural science, for example – against the background of their inauthenticityin the classical scientific tradition (DOT 46).

In modernity’s lifeworld dominated by science, the All-seeing Eye in thetriangle at the top of the pyramid looked unblinkingly on the objective world-picture that science sought to define (see QCT 133–134). In the postmodernlifeworld, there is not just one Eye but many eyes – small eyes – and theyare not arranged in any hierarchical relation. The goal of Husserl was toreplace the Eye of Science by the Eye of transcendental phenomenology.But for Heidegger philosophy as hermeneutical phenomenology was less a

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supreme Science than a reflective awareness of possibilities inherent in thetemporal Being of Dasein, always oriented towards the future and ordained torecollect its inauthentic past – using things and texts, even living mouthpiecesof tradition, as mere resources – piecemeal in new and creative ways (BT408).

In order to implement a philosophical and hermeneutical study of thatregion which natural science discloses we need a starting point and sometools. Our Heideggerian starting point is the pre-predicative active involve-ment of circumspection with scientific objects in the lifeworld. Of tools,many are borrowed from other sources in the philosophical tradition: fromHusserl,12 the examination and critique of scientific measurement and theanalysis of perceptual things in the lifeworld. From Merleau-Ponty,13 weneed the analysis of instrumentally mediated experience, that legitimates therole of instruments in disclosing the presence in the lifeworld of scientificentities not evident to the unassisted senses but nevertheless disclosed by thepractices and extensions of measurements to be public cultural entities andperceptual things.14

Galileo and the Heliocentric system

In late December 1610, not long after he moved to Florence as the ChiefMathematician and Philosopher to Duke Cosimo II de Medici, after nights ofobserving the planet Venus with the telescope he had made, Galileo turned tohis notebook to record his observations. This he usually did in the vernacularItalian. This time, however, he wrote in Latin about what he saw: he had seenVenus in a gibbous phase. This was a momentous observation because Venus,given that it was visible from the Earth only at sunrise or sunset, would notshow gibbous phases if it orbited the Earth alone. It must then orbit the Sun.Up to the moment of that observation Galileo wrote in Italian for himselfor his local colleagues, but that night he wrote in Latin for the world andfor posterity. As Owen Gingrich surmises,15 that was the moment of his trueCopernican “conversion” when he became convinced that the heliocentricsystem was true to the way the heavens are and to the way they go. Whythen? Why not earlier? He had already collected much evidence in favor ofthe heliocentric system using his home-made telescope; he had made studiesof the topography of the Moon, its “mountains,” “craters,” and “seas”; hehad seen stars in the Milky Way and in the Pleiades that no one had everseen before, and he had discovered the moons of Jupiter.16 But assuminghe had a conversion experience that winter night, what gave it its revelatorycharacter? What did it reveal and what did it hide? What was the process ofthe discovery?

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To understand that leap, one must accept it as a revelation of the planetarysystem as it was constituted by divine exemplarily with a mathematical modelof the Cosmos; this he saw confirmed with his own eyes as “die Sache selbst”by the telescope he had made. It was for him a moment of “conversion”not unlike in many ways Luther’s “conversion” in the Wartburg when onreading Paul’s Epistle to the Romans, 1/17, his personal spiritual crisis wasresolved and his soul was flooded with peace as he came to experiencehimself as justified in God’s eyes. In his moment of personal conversion,Luther proclaimed the sufficiency of Scripture, “sola Scriptura”; in Galileo’smoment of scientific conversion, he proclaimed the sufficiency of God’s otherbook, the Book of Nature, “sola Natura.”17 Neither Luther nor Galileo meantto exclude Aristotle, Plato, or the ancient authors as sources of explanatorytheory, but what they experienced was more than a theory, it was somethingof the order of a “revelation” – for Galileo, a “natural revelation” – in whicha theory-laden experience was presented in an utterly convincing way andjoyously received.

Such a moment of “conversion” is of philosophical interest to the extentthat we can trace the historical hermeneutical circle through which the revela-tion was received. Heidegger speaks in general of questioning and discoveryas proceeding according to, what he called, the hermeneutical circle. Thisinvolves a Vorhabe or deep background of practices and language, a Vorsichtor heuristic orientation, and a Vorgriff or grasp of the solution by disclosure– a kind of revelation – of what was sought by the questioning (BT 191).Although there is not space to make the case here, I would want to argue thatwe cannot ever share or relive Galileo’s revelatory experience, because theBeing into which we are thrown is too far removed historically and culturallyfrom Galileo’s lifeworld. We cannot share his Vorhabe with regard to the roleof mathematics as God’s language inscribed in Nature, nor the logical formsof his reasoning, nor the meaning of the representational praxes he used.18 Norcan we share his Vorsicht of circular orbits, for Kepler and later cosmologistshave significantly transformed the scientific account of the planetary system.Nor can we buy into the Vorgriff of his telescopic data, for optical instrumentssuch as Galileo’s get their agenda from the common-sense eye, rather thanfrom scientific measurement. How are we then to understand the historicalevent that moved Galileo to write for posterity? We can know it as a histori-cal event, but hardly as the revelatory, scientifically compelling event that itwas for Galileo. Was Galileo wrong to entertain it as he did? Let us addressthis question in our own time from the perspective of Dasein, “thrown” intoBeing at a historical moment that was not Galileo’s: did Galileo’s revelationpresent him with ontic truth? On the one hand, Husserl for the reasons he gavein the Crisis would have discounted Galileo’s revelation as optically untrue

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and stemming from an inauthentic understanding. On the other, Heidegger,while agreeing with Husserl that the current historical circumstantiality of ourunderstanding no longer permits Nature to reveal itself to us that way, wouldhave answered that, nevertheless, (it was possible) for Galileo’s revelation tohave been indeed authentically true.

Since truth involves meaning, and meaning is not passed down to us directlybut only as transformed by many mediations, this raises the question of howwe are to understand truth and meaning. Let me start with meaning.

Meaning

Meaning is not a private mental entity but a shared social entity embodiedin language (understood always to include other language-like inscriptions,whether passive, such as road signs, or active, such as performances) and acultural environment embodying community purposes.

Perception is the part of lifeworld public experience in which things, theirrelationships and movements, are displayed as bounded objects in a perceptualspace and time.19

Meanings are not fully complete unless incorporated in a linguistic utter-ance used to affirm or deny some content that finds itself fulfilled in publicexperience.

Meanings fulfilled in public experience are not just private mental repre-sentations of something, but are by intention identical with what is presentedin experience, and they give access to the ontic and ontological20 characterof that referent under the aspect of what is in truth on this occasion given tounderstanding.21 This is sometimes put so: whatever we know experientially,we know under some “as-” aspect that connects the experientially presentedobject with human life and culture. This aspect includes but is not exhaustedby whatever can be reached by a reflective and hermeneutical study of the con-stitution of fulfilled meanings (implying a certain non-transparency of humanhabits and culture to those who live through them and with them). Husserl,for instance, typically focused on how “objects” (contents) of knowledge are“constituted” (presented to communal knowers) within “noetic” contexts ofmeaning (directed by a communal vector of inquiry). Heidegger referred tosuch objects as “ontic beings” disclosed perspectively to the “circumspectivecare”22 of the human inquirer as Dasein, “care” being his term for the waythe human being copes with the lifeworld, immersed in the “ontological”historicality of Being, and in anticipation of death (BT 435).

To the extent that language and other public expressive signs are the onlymeans through which we articulate our public world and come to understandone another, the meanings that these signs convey are construals of humancultural communities and cannot be attributed to non-human sources except

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by metaphor. Aristotelian or Platonic essences and various forms of “objec-tive realism” must then be regarded as suspect of illegitimately taking humanhistorical and cultural meanings to be ahistorical culture-independent “nat-ural” forms. This is not to say that we do not possess truth, but the truthwe possess, even scientific truth, is always mediated by human language andculture which are not outside of history.

Knowledge is handed down by the medium of linguistic and expressiveinscriptions and the cultural forms of life in which they find fulfillment.Phrases, however, that once meant one thing come to mean another with thepassage of time, for language and culture change. As historians of sciencewell know, this is as true for natural science as it is for literature and politics.Of special interest then are the circumstances of continuity and change inthe historical transmission of scientific meanings via the media of language,mathematics, laboratory praxes, and the culture of the scientific community.Meanings originating at one (linguistic, historical, cultural, geographic) siteare received/interpreted at a different and distant site. These are adopted fromtraditions of interpretation or constructed or re-constructed in keeping withthe responsibilities, constraints, and presumptions of rational hermeneuticalinquiry. One of these responsibilities is that each legitimate meaning beappropriately fulfilled in a reader’s experience.23 One of the constraints is therelative richness or poverty of the linguistic and cultural resources availableto the reader.24 One of the presumptions is that there is no single legitimatemeaning relevant to all readers of such a text no matter how close or distantthey are from the source.

There are then many legitimate meanings depending on what the readerknows about the distant source, its language, and ambient culture, and onthe reader’s linguistic abilities, interests, and cultural ambience.25 Like ahammer or any piece of equipment, a text can be used successfully for severalmeaningful cultural purposes. As in the case of the hammer, for each usefulpurpose there are lifeworld criteria as to how well it performs this purpose. Theuses are not arbitrary, for nothing but nonsense would be gained by arbitraryuse, but this does not imply that there is just a single legitimate meaningfuluse. Once again, as in the case of the hammer, there may be a conventionalpriority of uses with “ownership” set by cultural tradition – hammers forconstruction, scientific results for scientific research communities – but noone use or “ownership” need go unchallenged either by logic or by experiencenor should any one use become the sole property of just one interested group.26

Rational hermeneutic inquiry acknowledges the existence of traditions ofinterpretation that give to today’s readers and inquirers a culturally privilegedversion (shaped to the goals of the linguistic and cultural environment ofthe community with special “ownership” rights in the subject matter) of

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past sources.27 Kuhnian paradigms are examples within the sciences of suchtraditions of interpretation.

In addition to meanings construed on the basis of a common traditionof interpretation (with its presumption of continuity), other meanings canbe legitimate that are independent from any presumption of the existenceof a continuity of meaning with the source through a common tradition oflife, action, and interpretation. Such discontinuities of meaning within thesciences are exemplified by Kuhnian “revolutions” in which old paradigmsare replaced by new ones.28 In the work of hermeneutics, however, a radicallynew meaning need not expel the old, because each, though different, may bea valid historical and cultural perspective. Indeed, despite some sense ofdiscomfort, we often find in the sciences the old flourishing side by side withthe radically new, quantum mechanics with Newtonian mechanics (thoughthese are formally incompatible with one another), statistical thermodynamicswith phenomenological thermodynamics, an so on. Each acting within its ownhorizon of research purposes is in dialogue with confirming or disconfirmingdata through its own empirical processes of testing and measurement.

In summary, hermeneutic method is a process – and difficult work it canbe – done by a current inquirer who is challenged to construct a contem-porary meaning for a distant source event, such as, for example, Galileo’sobservations on the phases of Venus, originating in a different linguistic andcultural environment and possibly at a different geographic place and histor-ical time. This method is called the method of the hermeneutical circle (seeBT 191). Interpretative work of this kind is clearly historical, cultural, andanthropological, multidisciplinary in character and in need of a philosophicalfoundation which hermeneutical philosophy (to be taken up below) tries toprovide. In this work lies the significance and power of hermeneutic methodand hermeneutic philosophy for the history and philosophy of science. Andnot just for these, but also for understanding how quantitative empirical meth-ods function in science to give meaning to empirical contents, in particular,how measurement equipment plays a double role creating both theoreticaland cultural meanings, and how theory-laden data depend on the successfulpublic self-presentation in measurement of the measured entity as a publiccultural entity.

As a prelude to our attempt to address these topics further we need toconsider the nature of philosophical inquiry.

Philosophical inquiry

Inquiry for Husserl and Heidegger begins when some real expectation basedin experience fails and we are curious to know why, and look for an answer thatwill enable us to fulfill our failed expectation, or failing this, to go around the

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problem or alternatively to transform the context re-assessing if need be ourgoals. For Husserl, eidetic phenomenological analysis explores the invariantboundaries of an imagined experience that is subjected to imagined variationsof approach. Both see inquiry as connected with a breakdown of intelligibility– for Heidegger when action fails in the world (BT 409), for Husserl whenthe noetic structure of the imagination fails.29 Husserl’s approach is morelogical, conceptual, and abstract while Heidegger’s is more existential andaction oriented. It is then to Heidegger’s philosophy that we will turn almostexclusively for an account of hermeneutical philosophy.

To understand scientific inquiry hermeneutically, we begin with Heideg-ger’s analysis of the genesis and process of any inquiry (BT 95–107). Hedirects his attention to what happens when in the middle of a task, a tool, say,a hammer, breaks. To cope with the situation, we ask ourselves, perhaps forthe first time in our lives, what kind of thing is a hammer, for we want to finishthe job, and for this we need a replacement or maybe a temporary substitutefor the hammer, and if we can’t finish the job, well! . . . We begin by a studyaimed at finding a theory for the physical specifications of a hammer – thisinitiates a study that has theoretical and practical dimensions – then we lookfor something that fulfils these specifications, and when we find it, we try itout. Does it work? If it does the job – if the theory is fulfilled in experience– we are satisfied for the moment. We may still need a new hammer, butfor the moment the job can go on. But if the trial fails, we next revise thetheoretical specifications in the light of the previous outcome and try again,modifying the conditions of the experimental trial if necessary. If this leadsto another failure we repeat the process with a revision of the previous theoryin the light of the new understanding gained from past results followed, bya new experimental trial modified to take account of the previous failures.This phase is repeated until we have a physical theory that works, or if wefail, we give up the search for something to replace the broken hammer andre-assess our options (getting the job done in a different way, say, by hiring acarpenter or turning to a different technology), or we just fold our tent for thetime being.

This process of inquiry is hermeneutical because it is a search for a theoret-ical meaning to be fulfilled in experience. The process has a repetitive pattern,from theory to experience, then back to theory . . . and so on. Analysed in thisway, the process is one of the hermeneutical circle. Many are confused by theword “circle” taking it to mean “return to the starting point,” but that is notwhat it means. The “circle” of hermeneutics indicates the repetitive cyclingbetween theory and experience from which comes the progressive characterof the inquiry. Some prefer the term “hermeneutical spiral” which indicatesboth the cycling and the progressive character of the process. Every inquiry

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then moves in a forward spiral toward a resolution as governed by a consciousif revisable goal.

Theoretical understanding

By focusing his discussion initially on equipment and the like, Heideggermakes a special and highly critical point about theoretical understanding.30

Since the characteristic goal of all scientific or scholarly inquiry is theoreticalunderstanding, it is important to understand what theory does. Theory, asin the case of the broken hammer, is always connected with some piece ofequipment – not excluding words, sentences, and representations – designedto fill some social or cultural function. Theory-making arises then out of somepublic need and the requirement of learning how to fulfil that need. This isHeidegger’s functionalism (see BT 408–415). He would remind us that, whenpresented with a real piece of equipment, say, a hammer, we must realize onthe one hand that the physical theory of a hammer does not assign to it anexclusive or “objective” essence, for that which can function as a hammercan function in other ways too, as door stop, nutcracker, etc., and on the otherhand that old shoes and wooden mallets can also be used to hammer nails (seeBT 115). All real tools or equipment are (as Heidegger says) no more than amere resource31 unless they are in actual use or designated for use, when theyare dedicated (or designated) resources. Equipment is a dedicated resourcewhen it is pragmatically related to the fulfillment of its role within a culturalfunction-as-meant (see BT 410). The distinction is significant because onlydedicated resources belong to the furniture of the lifeworld and so have onticstatus.

These distinctions are reflected in the use of words. The sentence, “I wanta hammer,” can be used in a theory-laden32 context where the sentence refersto the physical structure that makes hammering possible, or in a praxis-laden context where the sentence refers to something that is in actual useor designated for use in construction. Words and sentences about tools orequipment take on different meanings according to whether they are used inone or other of these contexts.

Returning to the cultural praxis-laden perspective, what is the meaning ofthe hammer in this perspective? It is what ties a thing – the hammer – toconstruction or building projects. This is different from its meaning in thetheory-laden perspective for this latter relates to its specifications as a tool and“explains” the thing qua hammer by specifying the conditions under whichit can be the host of the cultural meaning of a hammer. There are then twomeanings in dialogue, a theory-laden meaning and a cultural praxis-ladenmeaning. The theory-laden meaning makes sense only if the real hammer ispraxis-laden within the function of construction.

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Despite the fact then that (hammer-) theory “explains” (hammering-) praxis,the language of theory and the language of praxis belong to different butcoordinated perspectives. Coordination does not imply, however, that thereis a one-to-one correlation between the two perspectives.33 The reason is:the (hammer-) theory-ladenness of a “hammer” is just a mere possibilityof serving as a real hammer (it could alternatively serve as a nutcracker),and the (hammering-) praxis-ladenness of the “hammer” in the context ofconstruction could be served by means other than the use of hammers.

Theory and praxis are coordinated but not bound. On this account, theorycan inaugurate revolutionary changes at the practical and cultural level; forinstance, theory-based research has made available new plastic constructionmaterials that can be shaped into complex ready-made units by moulding,bypassing the need for carpentry and hammers. Reversing the argument,practical inventions can inaugurate revolutionary changes in theory, such aswhen the practical development of steam power in the nineteenth centurycalled forth a new calorific science, thermodynamics.34

Moreover, when new measurement-based technologies are added to thelifeworld, scientific terms, such as “temperature,” can be introduced intoeveryday descriptive language where it names a new cultural entity, a “pro-duct” of science. Such entities are endowed with non-theoretical, practicallifeworld meanings which can be used to create, designate, employ, and con-trol new classes of equipment, for example, thermometers, in the lifeworld.With the help of these increased resources, it is possible for the old culturalenvironment to be “revolutionized” in significant ways. In the quattrocentoduring the Italian Renaissance, for example, perceptual space came to besubjected to universal measurement and to analysis according to the princi-ples of the newly discovered mathematical perspective; in this process publicspace was transformed from one with variable, local geometries into onewith a single Euclidean geometry, thus preparing the way for Galileo and theCopernican revolution.35

In any case, if some identifiable thing is theory-laden, then an “explanation”is at hand laying out the conditions why it can play a particular socio-culturalrole, but a theoretical “explanation” falls short of explaining whether, andor if so why, this thing is in fact playing that role or has been designated toplay that role. “To be theory-laden” then always implies an implicit culturalhypothetical, “provided the real (individual, historical) explanandum has beenchosen for the appropriate role.” Otherwise “to be theory-laden” implies nomore than “to be a mere resource,” – and this no more entitles it to be includedin the furniture of the world than every old shoe under the category of hammer.

What kind of entity then is a hammer as a dedicated resource? It is a publiccultural reality, a physical reality constituted by a socio-cultural meaning. It

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has a theory-laden meaning that conceals (renders tacit/implicit) but does notreplace (say, by a reductive move) the cultural perspective of construction andits practical underpinnings in architecture and engineering. Also, the culturalperspective of construction practices conceals (renders tacit/implicit) but doesnot replace (say, by a reverse reductive move) the theoretical instrumentalperspective of the hammer.36

Now, to the extent that nothing – or almost nothing – in our experience iswithout a human purpose, everything in our experience bears some resem-blance to a tool or instrument. We can have then (at least) two perspectiveson (almost) anything: a praxis-laden cultural perspective and (subject to thesuccessful completion of a scientific inquiry) a theory-laden explanatory per-spective. It may even play roles in multiple socio-cultural functions. But foreach such function, we could inquire – of course, with no guarantee of suc-cess – the corresponding specifications that would constitute a theory-basedscientific account or “explanation” of the thing within its cultural function.

Measurement

These conclusions have important consequences for understanding measure-ment in the praxis of scientific inquiry. They illuminate the binary valenceof empirical “facts,” a degree of complexity not given by the usual empiri-cist accounts.37 The process of measurement in science fulfils two differ-ent but coordinated functions. It presents the object-as-measurable, this isthe praxis-laden cultural function. And it takes the data from the presentedobject, this is the theory-laden data-taking function.38 These are the binaryvalances of scientific data. The data-taking is usually called “observation”;but there is no “observation” without the prior preparation and presentationof the object-as-measurable as a system open to the data-taking process. Themeasuring process in a well designed experiment then does both jobs. Pre-senting the object and recording the data are ontologically one but involvetwo perspectives, a praxis-laden cultural one (which belongs to the strategyof experimental culture in laboratory environments) and a theory-laden (orexplanatory) one. These two perspectives can be logically, semantically, andpragmatically distinguished (see BT 409–410).

Consider the theory-laden perspective. Since it is the function of theory tooversee the experimental design, the ontic referent of theory as such is themeasuring process viewed from the construction or engineering or technicalpoint of view. When standardized off-the-shelf models of measuring apparatusare available, they do their job automatically by virtue of their theory-ladenstructure. It is experimental design then that is formally theory-laden.

Consider the praxis-laden cultural perspective. Experimental observationsare public cultural events praxis-laden in the scientific culture of the laboratory

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and deriving meaning from a research program. They also come “dressed”in sensible “clothes” provided by the experimental strategies used. Underthis analysis, experimental observations should not be called semantically“theory-laden” – this should be reserved for experimental design39 – butsemantically praxis-laden like all dedicated or designated cultural objects ofthe lifeworld presented as fulfilling experience.

Consider the data – or better, the “raw data” or “proto-data.” They belonghypothetically to the theoretical perspective of measurement but affirmativelyto the cultural perspective of some lifeworld forum. Such a forum could be, forexample, scientific research strategy or the research “narratives” that Rouse40

speaks about. They could also extend to technological applications, finance,political power, religion, art, or other aspects of general culture. Only in suchlocal fora are the data real – given “in truth” as die Sache selbst. There thedata can witness to the presence of individual scientific entities, say, electronsor atoms, as public cultural realities in one or more of these fora where theycan take on the value of dedicated resources and comprise part of the localfurniture of the world. In any such local forum, the meaning of both the dataand the scientific entities they exhibit is bivalent, emulating the relationshipbetween real hammers and real construction projects. Beyond such localfora the “raw data” or “proto-data” are not data at all;41 and they are to beconsidered as no more than functionally meaningless marks (non-entities,junk, etc.). In this respect, they share the indeterminacy of (positivism’s)sense data.

In summary: so-called “theoretical entities,” such as, for example, atoms andelectrons, are not theory-laden without qualification, they are first explicitlypraxis-laden (as public cultural entities) in the world of measurement-basedscientific research or its cultural applications and only on that conditionare they theory-laden, and then only implicitly. Theory refers directly to theinternal structure of the processes, particularly measurement, through whichthe “theoretical entities” enter the public domain.

Truth

Heidegger embodied this duality of meaning in his choice of the Greek term,alethia (literally “uncovering”) for truth (BT 256). It signalled a change inthe notion of truth from the classical model of full transparency to humanunderstanding,42 towards one of only partial, practical, or contextual trans-parency (see, for example, BT 58–63).43 Let us pause to reflect on the historyof this change.

People everywhere and always have lived in a socially, linguistically repre-sented, action-oriented world in which what a thing is must be derived from

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what it comes to mean within human life. This is what Husserl, Heidegger,and Schutz called “the lifeworld,”44 and for which W. Sellars coined the term“manifest image of the world.”45 Within this perspective, many things arefirst grasped as having fixed essences dedicated “by nature” (as it were) toa single function. Such was the opinion of Plato and Aristotle, Aquinas andDescartes, Bacon and Newton, and it is a view still held by many philosophersand scientists today.

With the advent of modernity, however, the world changed, adopting asits defining characteristic an inquiring theorizing scientific spirit (see DOT46; WCT 8; QCT 133). This opened the season for scientific inquiry intowhatever is given in human experience, not just hammers, but also politicalsociety, perception, food, athletics, emotions, love, and even religion, allare taken as possible subjects for scientific studies. Whenever a successfulscientific study is made, a theory is fashioned based on a set of explanatorytheoretical parameters that explains some thing or event taken under (as-having) a particular socio-cultural meaning. Modernity took its metaphysics,not from the lifeworld, but from this set of parameters and embraced it as theindependently objective real, to know which was “truth.”

This, as Husserl, and Heidegger saw, was a radical mistake.46 As in the caseof the hammer, the theoretical set of parameters addresses just one aspect ofthe real exemplars, the explanandum, namely, the aspect that was chosen forexplanation. Other aspects of these exemplars are overlooked; they are over-come by forgetfulness. Moreover, in the search to explain the explanandum,the theorizing process soon discovers the extent to which the explanandumfunction can be taken over by different artifacts from the exemplars studied.One (surprising?) outcome of this process is that it shows: what makes thisor any real hammer to be a hammer – or what makes this or any real thing inhuman experience to be what it is perceived to be – is not a defining essencebut a movable contextual set of properties that can be found or engineered inmany different ways in many different physical hosts.

In summary: the truth about things in the lifeworld is: their meanings are notessential but cultural (and historical) and disclosed by implicitly theory-ladenpraxes which, when (after successful scientific inquiry) their theory-ladennessis made explicit, can be re-engineered with a consequent transformation ofcultural meaning. This cycle of meaning change can and does repeat itselfendlessly within the historicality of Being (see BT 29) as the examples usedin the paper show resulting in a diversity of new perspectives and a possibleloss of some of the old ones through (inevitable) cultural forgetfulness. Thetheoretical, however, cannot logically or ontologically be separated from thecultural, and modernity made the mistake of assuming that this could bedone.47

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Technology

Heidegger feared that, to the extent that explanatory theorizing scientificinquiry is successful, it turns the focus of philosophical inquiry away from“meditative thinking” about the lifeworld as the cultural arena for human lifefulfillment and away from meaning and meaning change, toward “calculativethinking” that envisages management and control, a regime in which every-thing is treated as merely replaceable resources within Gestell, the assumed“objective” frame of “reality” (QCT 3–35; DOT 46).

This is not to deny, however, that great benefits can and do flow from sci-entific theories, not just in tradition-bound domains, such as, for example,agriculture, diet, and shelter, but in every domain from health care to astron-omy, even to human fertility and sexuality, for there is no domain that cannotbe addressed and transformed by the applications of science. Nevertheless,Heidegger foresaw that such changes could have a human cost, for they affectthe way cultural life teaches people to be human and communicates to themthe sense of the wholeness, integrity, and goodness of the world, the self, andhuman communities. Changing the traditional vehicles for the transmissionof these core meanings inevitably changes how people regard themselves,their personal destinies, their neighbors, and the world around, with conse-quent risks of cultural instability in all these areas.48 Whether and with whatconsequences science is changing our culture is the domain of sociology andcultural anthropology.49 In summary, for the reasons just given hermeneuticalphilosophy must be a salient feature of the philosophy of science, even of thenatural sciences.

Illustration: Vision vs. optical measures

The intimate relation between the theoretical (or explanatory) and the cultural(or the perceptual) can be shown in our experience of perceptual environmen-tal space(s). I will show that we perceive our environmental space accordingto two incompatible structures, one non-Euclidean and the other Euclid-ean. These two structures present the same perceptual objects in differentspaces and with different meanings. Non-Euclidean cultural objects are relat-ed directly to diverse sensory agenda (much like the “affordances” of JamesJ. Gibson);50 Euclidean cultural objects are related directly to diverse publicagenda (involving, at one level, practical goals encompassed, say, by archi-tecture, and at another, mythic goals associated with community goals) andprompted by the omnipresence in the urban environment of universal rigidspatial measures. In keeping with the analysis made above, non-Euclideancultural objects are nevertheless implicitly Euclidean because theory-ladenwith respect to measures based on universal rigid spatial rulers.

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Figure 1. Muller-Lyer Display. Top line is perceived to be both (i) shorter than bottom lineand (ii) more distant than the bottom line.

Figure 2. Scientific Analysis of M-L Display in geometrical optics shows that (i) and (ii) arenot compatible with a Euclidean space of vision.

The display in Fig. 1 is the familiar one associated with the Muller-LyerIllusion, but it will be used here to illustrate a different story. The displaycan trigger in a viewer the perception of many different visual configura-tions. Among these none is uniquely right, but among them some are moreinteresting than others for the purpose at hand. Among them is (at least) onethat violates the structure of Euclidean geometry, Euclidean space, and geo-metrical optics. The top line in Fig. 1 (equal by measurement to the bottomline) can appear to be both shorter than the bottom line and farther from theviewer. Unlike the standard M-L Illusion, this is a three-dimensional visualconfiguration.51 Such a configuration can be analysed by geometrical optics;this assumes that visual space is Euclidean and that light travels in straightlines in this space. Figure 2 shows that in a Euclidean visual space the moredistant line must be the longer one, which contradicts what one sees. Thevisual configuration described above is then incompatible with the principlesof geometrical optics. Now if any doctrine embodies the physics and meta-physics of natural philosophy, geometrical optics does. How is it that despite

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what science says about the world we nevertheless sometimes see differently?Some will reply that the non-Euclidean visual experience must be a visualillusion, a 3D form of the M-L Illusion presumptively caused by a breakdownof the visual system.

The case, however, is not so easily explained away. Shapes such as the onedescribed are not as infrequent in visual experience as one may believe.52

Common-sense language about shapes, places, and space was in historicaltimes profoundly non-Euclidean. Euclidean criteria began to permeate thescientifically motivated elite only in the 14th century. There is an ancienthistorical tradition in the West for which Aristotle and Plato are witnesses53

that metaphysical and even visual space are not Euclidean.Even today it is not hard to experience non-Euclidean vision. Consider

the following experience described by Rudolf Arnheim,54 which is generallyreplicable. He enters a large Gothic Church. The interior is architecturallycomposed of a nave bounded by two parallel rows of arched bays separatedby columns of equal height, completed by an apse in which the bays arecontinued until they meet the end wall behind the altar. Arnheim notes thathis immediate unreflective (pre-predicative?) view of the interior of the churchhas dual values and he sees both simultaneously. On the one hand he can seetwo rows of equal arched bays bounded by columns of equal height marchingin parallel straight lines down the nave of the church, and on the other handhe can see two rows of unequal bays and columns curving inwards toward animaginary meeting point behind the altar with the bays and columns gettingsmaller in size with distance from the viewer.

From such experiences Arnheim argues that human perception can bemultiplivalent and has the capacity to see the church (in this case) in twoways: in a common-sense/non-Euclidean way and in a scientific/Euclideanway. The experience just described seems to show that there are at leasttwo possibilities latent in the fore-understanding of visual space.55 But letus suppose for simplicity’s sake that we are dealing with just two spacesand two semantics of space each with its meaningful praxis. One space is acommon-sense space resulting presumably from a bio-cultural constitutionof visual space that is the carrier of the noetic agenda of unaided sensoryobservation. This is the space and language within which one would addressa question such as, “How does the architectural design focus ritual attentionon the altar and its symbolism?” The other space is the space of scienceand geometrical optics based on scientific measurement; this is the carrier ofthe noetic agenda of the standard measuring process. This is the space andlanguage within which one would address a question such as, “How does thesize of the bays compare with one another and with, say, those of WestminsterAbbey?”

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With these fore-understandings, we can now approach hermeneutically theprepredicative situation just referred to. The two spaces and languages areaffirmatively cultural (however, with different noetic agenda) and praxis-laden(however, dependent on different bodily and technological equipment). Butthere is no one-to-one translation between the two languages because the fore-understandings interfere with one another in their exercise. By that I meanthat vision, while responding simultaneously to its non-scientific Vorsicht(with its set of humane bio-cultural cues) and its scientific Vorsicht (with itsequipmental metric-oriented cues), could be so distracted as to fail to developa single totally coherent perception of the church space. “Die Sache selbst”of such vision is double-valued, according to a kind of visual UncertaintyPrinciple and complementarily analogous to the more famous structures inquantum physics that carry these names.56

There is a further question that will not be addressed here: what philosoph-ically reasonable conditions (within the purview of hermeneutical philoso-phy) would give logical consistency to this multiplicity of perspectives? Theanswer is that the two complementary languages must be partially orderedby statement inclusion within a complemented non-distributive lattice (orQ-lattice).57

Implications for the philosophy of science

Hermeneutic philosophy treats science (or in general, all scholarship) asa form of human culture constituted by inquiry and the search for mean-ing. Meanings emerge into public expression from the pre-predicative pre-categorized understanding of the lifeworld, characterized by historicality,circumspection, facticity, and temporality. This is the level of understandingshaped by human action and its goals, and where meanings spring from tra-ditions and from free moral choices. This is the place where inauthenticityresides within and among communities of researchers,58 where scientific par-adigms are embraced only to be rejected later on, where technologies playtheir part in transforming human culture, and above all, where a multiplicityof cultural and scientific perspectives are – if at all – harmonized. This impliesthe priority of culture to theory, or human goals to theoretical knowledge.

Since all scientific and scholarly inquiry embarks on a project whose goalis to construct an explanatory theory about a starting point that is anchoredin the cultural life of people, the discovery process is always constrainedby the condition that a meaningful relationship at least to public scientificculture be maintained throughout the inquiry.59 Hermeneutic philosophy isparticularly concerned with the dangers of forgetting this nexus. The socialstudy of science and its cultural anthropology serves then as a useful corrective

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by focusing on the cultural meanings implicit in and directive of the activescientific community.60

What is needed is a philosophy of discovery that shows how theory-makingis both promoted and constrained by this condition.61 In discovery the role ofmetaphor is fundamental.62 The history of science is full of such exam-ples, from billiard balls, elastic bands, aethers, mechanical devices, andmolecular bench models, to computer simulations, harmonic oscillators, ten-dimensional spaces, and concepts of God’s role in Nature.63 Nor is it possibleto come to understand modern physics or biology without passing throughstages of metaphor. As in the search for theory, so in its application, theoreticalinstruments apply to real situations in socially negotiated ways, often usingmetaphors, because they function of necessity in a cultural milieu that, beingpraxis-laden, does not need or support unlimited univocity or precision.64

While we do not ask of a philosophy that it contribute to the successfulpractice of science, science continually throws up metaphysical questions thatdivide the scientific community and constrain or limit its energies in a worldof finite resources. For example, at the margins of the very large or “macro-scopic” and the very small or “microscopic,” light could be thrown on thedifference between relativistic and quantum measurement which are “meso-scopic” processes (see below for an illustration). Like measurement, so alsodata as the outcome of measurement are mistakenly understood unless takensimultaneously in relation to theoretical explanation and cultural scientificpraxis.

From the epistemological point of view, interdisciplinary studies of scienceby the disciplines of history, philosophy, sociology, cultural anthropology,linguistics, and discourse analysis, etc. are deeply troubled by their inabilityto communicate among themselves; a common platform in a hermeneuticphilosophy of science might ease this situation by disclosing the differentagendas of these disciplines taken as perspectives within the postmodernlifeworld.

In the social, psychological, and neurobiological sciences, confusion be-tween the theoretical and larger public cultural issues abounds to the detrimentboth of science and of public confidence in science.

On the ethical, religious, and political front where hermeneutic methods arestrongest, the current questioning of scientific practice by public agencies andmedia makes it highly desirable for scientific institutions to be able to give abetter account of science’s public role as the principal agency of theoreticalknowledge within a culture that has its own goals but is in great need of suchknowledge.65 For this end, a philosophy that reasonably supports the princi-ple that scientific entities, even those not perceptible to the unaided senses,function (with the help of instruments) as naturalized parts of the furniture

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of the lifeworld is highly desirable, because explanatory scientific entitiesthen acquire a public cultural meaning and become a common possession ofsociety.

On special issues, the basic “mysteries” of the quantum theory need tobe elucidated, among which are the constitution of physical space and theproblems of locality and causality, measurement processes and the role of thesubject, and the paradoxes of macroscopic quantum phenomena as illustratedby Schrodinger’s Cat, the EPR Paradox, and Bell’s Inequality.

Illustration

Considerable interest has been reawakened by some recent experiments inthe “Schrodinger Cat Paradox”.66 The current version is based on new andvery refined experimental techniques that use single photons, electrons, andatoms, to research the conditions under which the Superposition Principle (andits consequence, Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle), the core of quantumphysics, is applicable to individual objects in the environment. We are pleasedto learn that the experiments did not in fact include cats and, moreover, thata cat is far too large and complex to be susceptible to the uncertaintiesof superposition. So far the experiments have detected superposition waveeffects that stretch only to a distance of about 80 nanometers around a singleberyllium atom of size about 7 nanometers – but they confirm that such effectsare real at these dimensions. Such experiments confirm then that when an atomor a photon, for example, is not being measured, it can be “represented” (and“representing” is a symbolic tool used in knowing and not limited to pictorialways of understanding) as a “closed” system by a coherent wave function thatis understood to mean that it can act and be found beyond the range of placesconnected environmentally with the observer.67 Only when measured, doesit become localized at a particular place in the environmental space (alwayssubject, however, to the limits of the Heisenberg Principle). As localized itis no longer potentially active beyond the environmental place where it isfound, and this condition is “represented” by the loss of coherence of itswave function. Such a property as just described calls into question 1. theclassical view that the measurer and the measured share the same a priorispace and time; enough has been said above to cast doubt on this assumption;2. (taking “information” to be, not data, but the symbolic representation ofdata) the difference between “information” transport (within a closed system,i.e., under isolating superposition conditions) and energy transport (within asystem open to interactions, leading to the “collapse of the wave packet”);and 3. the distinction between macroscopic and microscopic which seems tobe a function not just of size or “quantity” but also of cultural use, such as, forexample, a thing’s use as a measuring instrument. All of these understandings

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turn on a hermeneutical analysis of space, time, quantity, measurement, data,information, and other topics connecting theory and praxis. In addition, but inan even more fundamental order, there is discovery; this is the moment priorto theory making or use when Dasein is open to new possibilities of meaningwithin the lifeworld. Hermeneutical philosophy gives this moment a certainprivilege.

Conclusion

Returning to where we began in this paper, the import of historical, social,and political studies of the practice of science was shown by the late ThomasS. Kuhn, who gave paradigms and scientific revolutions their names. Hefailed, however, to give a good philosophical account of these entities or ofthe process of discovery.68 A full philosophical treatment capable of makingsense of these phenomena could be made within the horizons sketched in thispaper. Such is badly needed for the sake of bringing the history and philosophyof science together with the social and cultural studies of science.69 This wouldprovide elements for a better public appreciation of what is certainly one ofthe greatest institutions of our society.

A final word: the principles laid out above stress the fact that science’sso-called “theoretical entities” are naturalizable in the lifeworld throughmeasurement and become public cultural and perceptual entities; althoughimplicitly theoretical, they are not defined by theory but by a cultural praxis.A philosophy that accepts these principles can call itself a new empiricismand claim the good will of those today who carry forward the revolution thatGalileo brought about.

Notes

1. Nickles (1995).2. Babich (1994b).3. Scharff (1995).4. The frustration of philosophers with the problem of realism vs various forms of relativism,

historicism, conventionalism, etc., is the theme of Earman (1992).5. I mean, in particular, the view shared by most contemporary forms of empiricism, realism,

and conventionalism that true knowledge is the possession of accurate objective represen-tations of the known, preferably expressed in scientific “facts” and “formulae.” See, forexample, Pickering (1995), for an insightful criticism of this view and his performance-based image of science.

6. For the last mentioned, a discourse analysis of the language of science – a new methodwithin linguistics – comes to some not-surprising conclusions; see Montgomery (1996),chapter 1.

7. See list of references for some relevant works by these authors.

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8. See, for example, the works listed of Babich, Buckley, Crease, Dreyfus, Grondin, Guignon,Heelan, Kisiel, Kockelmans, Markus, Okrent, Poggeler, Richardson, Rouse, Scharff, andSchutz. The best commentaries on Heidegger’s work are those of Richardson, Kockelmans,and Poggeler. For a good introduction to many of the topics of this paper within the contextof the works of Husserl and Heidegger, see Buckley (1992). On the topic of a hermeneuticsof natural science, see the exchange Markus (1987) and Heelan (1989).

9. Husserl (1970). Nietzsche was the first to challenge the authority of scientific Reason inhuman culture; see Babich (1994) for a study of Nietzsche’s philosophy of science.

10. See Heelan (1987).11. QCT 3–35. Gestell is translated by “a framework” (within which we operate unreflectively).12. See Husserl (1900/1970) and (1952/1989) and Heelan (1987).13. See Merleau-Ponty (1962), (1964), and (1968).14. Heelan (1983/1988) argues that scientific entities such as, for example, electrons and atoms,

can be disclosed directly in measurement as perceptual entities. Kockelmans (1993) doesnot go so far but takes their presence to be shown indirectly by signs. In other respectsKockelmans’s view is indistinguishable from mine.

15. As recounted to me by Owen Gingrich, Professor of Astronomy at Harvard and a historianof science, who has been studying the note books of Galileo.

16. He named them, “Medicean Planets,” no doubt to earn favor with Duke Cosimo II, for hewanted the appointment of Chief Mathematician and Philosopher at the Tuscan court.

17. See Heelan (1991).18. See Galileo’s Assayer, in Drake (1957), pp. 237–238; also see Crombie (1994), pp. 543–

626, on Galileo’s use of mathematics, logic, and representational constructions.19. For the possible plurality of perceptual spaces, see Heelan (1983/1988). For Heidegger,

acts of perception always presuppose abstract categorical content which provide a kindof theory (or a cluster of theories), as Heidegger sees it, about what can be found inexperience by a community of historical perceivers. But these conceptual categories, likeall theories, merely disclose a possibility, and a historical possibility at that, of onticity(being a thing in the life-world). The focus of Heidegger’s interest then is not formallythe historically conditioned perceptual world, but Dasein’s forgetfulness of Being with itshistoricity, temporality and authenticity/inauthenticity that make life-worlds possible (cf.,BT 89). This does not mean, however, that hermeneutical philosophy can discard interestin perception, it means only that categorized perception does not disclose the ultimateground of understanding. In all our perceivings we need to discover the ultimate structures– circumspection, historicity, and temporality that shape the milieu of Being into whichDasein is thrown.

20. The terms “ontic” and “ontological” are used in Heidegger’s sense; “ontic” applying toany distinct categorical being in the world, “ontological” signifying the background ofBeing in which human life is lived and which defines what people are as Dasein orBeing-in-the-World antecedent to all descriptive categories.

21. This is what Husserl and Heidegger call the return to “die Sache selbst.” This is, asit were, a return to the Cartesian Cogito with a new and critical look. Husserl’s returnbrought forth the Cogito cogitatum as a correction of the Cartesian Cogito, and therebyintroduced contextuality into the analysis of experience. Heideggger probed deeper intothe Cogito to discover the role of fore-understanding – this is the active inquirer workingwith circumspective care within experience before categories are formed or used to assertwhat is disclosed in experience. This is the hermeneutical pre-predicative dimension ofthe Cogito cogitatum as “die Sache selbst.”

22. “Circumspective care” means the interested wariness with which we try to cope withexperience and which Heidegger in BT takes to be the human inquirer’s – Dasein’s –fundamental attitude toward the world.

23. The process of hermeneutic inquiry involves on the part of the receiver/interpreter whatHeidegger calls the Vorhabe (or background) and Vorsicht (clues to meaning) beforemoving to the Vorgriff (data or outcome) of the inquiry. The clues to meaning can spring

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from many sources – analogies, models and, of course, the traditions of the researcher’sdiscipline. See BT 191 on the “hermeneutical circle.”

24. For the term “alchemy,” our current resources may be poorer than the past; for the term“disease,” our current resources may be richer – or, at least, different.

25. See, for example, Nickles (1995) for the difficulties that philosophers and historians ofscience have in understanding one another.

26. There is a vibrant and copious cross-disciplinary literature about historical, religious,ethical, political, and other cultural meanings of topics ranging from Big Bang Cosmologyto ethical and environmental aspects of science. Contributors include both scientists suchas, for example, Stephen Hawking, Steven Weinberg, Paul Davies, and Richard Dawkins,and non-scientists such as, for example, ethicians, historians, sociologists, and culturalanthropologists of science, and feminists.

27. Such traditions of interpretation tend to possess a rigidity of interpretation and an inau-thenticity that has to be overcome for the growth of knowledge; cf. BT 29.

28. Paradigm revolutions are also associated with the temporality of Dasein and human com-munities, see below. Also cf. BT 424–425.

29. See Husserl (1948/1973), pp. 340–356.30. For the purposes of this paper, I take “theories” and “categories” to be reflexively defined

abstract objects such as scholarship and science provide; they have more or less clarity,more in physics than in biology, and more in biology than in the human sciences.

31. “Mere resource” is usually translated by “present-at-hand.” Heidegger’s terms are “Vorhan-den,” and later “Gestell.” Okrent (1988), p. 74, translates it as “the extant (non-quipmental,natural beings).” Mere resource is opposed to dedicated resource which translates Heideg-ger’s Zuhanden, the difference being in a social choice.

32. For the notion of “theory-ladenness.” see Hanson (1961), pp. 19–30, and its source inDuhem (1914/1954), Part II, chaps. IV and VI. Among commentaries on observables astheory-laden, see also Heelan (1983/1988), pp. 202–204, and Fjelland (1991).

33. These two perspectives result in two ways of speaking, two context-dependent languages,about the same thing that are related among themselves within a lattice structure whichincludes a least upper bound (lub) and a greatest lower bound (glb) as well as complements.See Heelan (1983/1988), chaps. 10 and 13, where this thesis is presented. See also BT, pp.405–415.

34. See BT, p. 29.35. See Heelan (1983/1988).36. The socio-cultural meaning then is not something that can be dropped, like slag from

ore when a metal is refined, but essential to the intelligibility of the meaning. For anunderstanding of cultural meaning, see Geertz (1973) and (1983).

37. Empiricist accounts of measurement are legion; many of them have purposes that are notstrictly philosophical but methodological. Philosophers of science have also written onmeasurement but mostly from the viewpoint that empirical measures are grounded onideal, objective, and realistic values. For a hermeneutic view on measurement and data,see Heelan (1989). For its background in Heidegger, see BT, pp. 408–415.

38. In physics, these are sometimes called “preparation” or “measurement of the first kind”and “observation” or “measurement of the second kind” respectively.

39. It is also applicable to the representation of, what is called a “closed” system, that is,one that is not interacting with its environment. The notion of a “closed system” needsfurther analysis within this context – as indeed does its counterpart, “open system”; suchan analysis involves also a study of the space/time notions of “body,” e.g., a body’s “spatialboundaries,” its “size,” “mass,” “quantity,” etc. and how the notions of “macroscopic” and“microscopic” apply. Some of these have been partially addressed in recent literature,e.g., see Needham (1996) and the references he gives, but these studies are against aphilosophical background that is object- and concept-oriented. None of these analysesaddresses satisfactorily how the meaning of these terms relate to a body’s use, particularly,in measurement.

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40. Rouse (1996), p. 27 and in chap. 9.41. There is an alternative strategy, the researcher may re-evaluate the interpretative context

of the experiment and pursue another goal. For a more detailed study of data, see Heelan(1989), also (1983/1988).

42. Such as the Tarskian notion of truth.43. Polanyi says the same in different terms: the explicit meaning conceals a tacit meaning;

see Polanyi (1964), pp. x–xi.44. See Husserl (1954/1970), Schutz (1973), and BT 91–94.45. See Sellars (1963), p. 6. In contrast to taking the lifeworld as the touchstone of reality,

Sellars took the “scientific image” to be that touchstone.46. Pragmatism, however, takes an ambiguous stand preferring not to see it as a radical mistake.47. These conclusions prepare the ground for Babich’s reading of Nietzsche’s philosophy of

science (Babich 1994a) in which she explores with elegance Nietzsche’s perspectivalismor musical “concinnity” in relation to truth, morality, and the critique of science.

48. Contrast the views of Robert Bly and Gianni Vattimo about the post-modern effects ofthe dismantling of Enlightenment culture. As David Bromwich wrote in a review of theformer in The New Republic, September 9 & 23, 1996, “. . . progress for [Americans]means almost exclusively technological improvement . . . But all the new tools a peoplemaster cannot assure their generous use. Technology travels a different road from politicalstability, moral well-being or aesthetic achievement. . . .” (p. 34).

49. Cf. Geertz (1973) and (1983).50. See Gibson (1979).51. Incidentally, I believe I was the first to point out the depth dimension in the M-L Display.52. See Heelan (1983/1988), especially chap. 5.53. Consider that Plato and Aristotle approved of the use of (what we would call) “Euclidean”

measures for carpenters. But for the heavens and beyond, there is a different story. “It istherefore evident,” as Aristotle wrote, “that there is also no place or void or time outsidethe heaven,” De Coelo. Plato seems in the Timaeus to hold the same view. Since for bothwriters perceptible things and the space itself – whether conceived in terms of place or thevoid – ended at the finite heaven, and so space cannot be Euclidean because Euclidean isnecessarily infinite in extent.

54. Arnheim (1974), p. 266.55. In point of fact, the problem is more complex since there are several scientific spaces,

Newtonian, Relativistic, etc. and a plethora of visual spaces.56. See Heelan (1996).57. Heelan (1983/1988), chaps. 10 and 13. The author intends to revisit this topic in another

work.58. See, for example, the work of Mara Beller on scientific rhetoric; her studies of the diversity

of scientific and philosophical viewpoints among the founders of quantum mechanics, e.g.Beller (1996), confirms the account given in Heelan (1965).

59. Science and the philosophy of science, however, have generally forgotten theory’s connec-tion with a cultural explanandum. This might not have been so if explanation had not beenconfused with a more precise and accurate description or “picture”; cf. QCT 133–134 on“world picture” and “representational thinking.”

60. There are many fine empirical studies of the natural sciences from the perspective of socialstudies and cultural anthropology. Like the philosophy of science, however, many ofthese studies are also marred by reductionistic and positivistic inclinations. Rouse (1996)correctly sees that there must be a connection between the cultural studies of science andthe philosophy of science; it is not so evident that he has grasped correctly what thatconnection must be.

61. An excellent study that can be recommended is Crombie (1994).62. See Fiumara (1996), also Hesse and Arbib (1986).63. See Feher (1988) for an interesting historical discussion of the last mentioned case. In other

work, Feher addresses the surprising absence of references to current hermetic literature

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in Galileo’s work which indicates that Galileo, unlike Newton, deliberately set aside orconsigned to “forgetfulness” a large part of the then-current scientific literature and praxisin order to establish his “new sciences.”

64. Cf., for example, Beller (1996) and Heelan (1965). Some brief reflections on the limitsof precision: the chaos situation in physics is an anti-Cartesian phenomenon that ariseswhen the unlimited precision of a theory in mapping inputs and outputs breaks down (failsin relation to the cultural scientific goal of control), as when small changes in practiceproduce large and uncontrollable outcomes. Perhaps, a like anti-Cartesian phenomenonoccurs in dialectical discourse when unlimited clarity is pursued to a point where theoverall cultural point of the discourse (better understanding? ideological control?) is nolonger attainable. On the side of the social studies of science Latour (1987) seems to bemost aware of this impasse.

65. Witness the current “science wars” and the lamentable misunderstandings on all sides.From the science side, see Horgan (1996), Gross and Levitt (1994); from the sciencestudies side, see Social Text, Spring/Summer 1996 and Lingua Franca, May/June andJuly/August 1996. For one account of the underlying tensions, see Dorothy Nelkin’s“What Are the Science Wars Really About?” in the Chronicle of Higher Education, July26, 1996, p. A52, and the responses it generated, for example, in the Sept. 6 issue, pp.B6–7.

66. See Monroe et al. (1996) and Braginsky and Khalili (1995). According to Science, thisis an animal rights version of the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen Paradox (or the EPR Para-dox) thought up by Erwin Schrodinger who was my erstwhile teacher at the School ofTheoretical Physics, Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies.

67. I take “place” to mean somewhere definite in the practical environment of a researcher;the term “space” is usually taken in a global, objective, and theoretical sense.

68. Hoyningen-Huene (1993) is an excellent study of the work of T.S. Kuhn.69. See Nickles (1995) for the impasse in the history and philosophy of science. The relevance

of a new and contemporary study of Nietzsche to the questions discussed in this paper isvery well articulated in Babich (1994a).

Abbreviations used in the notes for works of Heidegger: BT for Being and Time; DOT forDiscourse on Thinking: Translation of Gelassenheit; WCT for What is Called Thinking; QCTfor Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays. Numbers, e.g., BT 27, are to pages inthe English edition.

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