Abstract
By making use of an approach stemming from hermeneutic phenomenology, this paper explores the constitution of meaningful objects in the domain of vectorial biochemistry. At stake are both theoretical objects related to anisotropic processes of trans-membrane transport and objects of inquiry contextually ready to hand within a configuration of scientific practices. The concept of the hermeneutic fore-structure of scientific research is discussed. The domain’s formal, conceptual and experimental articulation gets fore-structured in the horizon of possibilities projected by the interrelated practices. The appropriation of possibilities constitutes meaningful objects. Some basic trends of the domain’s articulation are addressed through analyzing three aspects of interpretative fore-structuring.
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Notes
- 1.
Kockelmans strongly distinguishes his Heideggerian interpretation of the mythical understanding from the established mythological paradigms in cultural anthropology and the phenomenology of religion. The disclosure of the world’s totality of meaning within the mythical mode of Being does not demand a narrative that relates the time of the historical events to the pre-historical time of origins, or a narrative that is capable to found rites. In fact, Kockelmans’s conception is closer to Bultmann’s program of demythologization which aims at revealing the primary mythical horizon of religious imagery. It is the existential interpretation of the Holy Script that reveals this horizon.
- 2.
In analyzing the way in which Heidegger spells out the expression “to let be” with regard to scientific discovery and the formulation of scientific laws, John Haugeland reaches the conclusion that “it is little odd to say that the law of gravity was not true before Newton discovered it… And there remains the question of what to say about Einstein’s discovery that there is (was and will be) no force of gravity—just curved space-time. Does this mean that, through Newton, his laws became true, but only for a while?” (Haugeland 2007, 100) In my view, the way in which Haugeland formulates and tries to address and settle such questions indicates a naturalist treatment of Heidegger’s claim that there is (scientific) truth only so long and so far as Dasein is. Because of the situated transcendence of Dasein-as-epistemic-subject (and the finitude of all ontic knowledge) the theoretical formulations known as scientific laws are always already hermeneutically fore-structured. It is this hermeneutic fore-structuring that Haugeland does not take into consideration in his interpretation of Heidegger’s claim. An additional shortcoming of this interpretation is the avoidance of the distinction between ontic/epistemic and ontological truth. On the alternative interpretation I am going to subscribe in this essay, each scientific law is true within a characteristic hermeneutic situation that reveals and conceals the objectified world in a specific manner.
- 3.
In its classical formulation this paradigm is to be found in Heidegger (1927/1962, 188–203). The basic concepts here are the “fore-structure of understanding” and the “as-structure of interpretation.” The interplay between the fore-structure qua horizon of possibilities and the as-structure qua ongoing articulation of meaningful units takes on the form of hermeneutic circle. The hermeneutic-phenomenological analysis of a particular interrelatedness of practices (like the practices in a domain of scientific research) requires an interpretation of the way in which the hermeneutic circle operates in articulating the domain disclosed by that interrelatedness of practices.
- 4.
With regard to the catalysis of solute transport of specific molecules across lipid membranes this conclusion is drawn for the first time by Davson and Danielli (1943), pp. 72–79. This classical work is also the pioneering study of the thermodynamic aspects of the vectorial processes of cellular physiology, in particular processes running against the concentration gradient.
- 5.
Fore-having, fore-sight, and fore-conception are three relationships between fore-structure of understanding and as-structure of interpretation. In other words, they are three characteristics of the hermeneutic circle which operates in the articulation of a domain disclosed by an interrelatedness of practices. See also Kockelmans (1986).
- 6.
Rheinberger commits this claim also to a “dialectic of fact and artifact” taking place in the constitution of the scientific research’s “epistemic things”.
- 7.
There is a long history of sociological, historical, and philosophical reconstructions (case studies) of Mitchell’s chemiosmotic hypothesis and the subsequent ox-phos controversy. At the beginning of this history is Gilbert and Mulkay’s (1984) study designed in terms of a sociological discursive analysis. The significant value of this study is due to the way in which the authors make use of interviews with 34 participants in the ox-phos controversy. The historical reconstruction of Allchin (1997) presents not only the genesis of Mitchell’s hypothesis, but also a quite vivid picture of the development of the chemical theory. Weber’s (2002a, b) nice philosophical reconstructions of Mitchell’s research program and its experimental verifications (a reconstruction that takes into consideration also the problematic of incommensurability) try to evaluate the positions in the ox-phos controversy in terms of normative epistemology, whereas Prebble (2001) investigates in a highly original manner the role of the “personal knowledge and tacit knowing” (in the sense of Michael Polanyi’s conception) in the formation of Mitchell’s philosophical and scientific views.
- 8.
Mitchell indicates that Malcolm Dixon in his 1941 lecture course at Cambridge had presented for the first time the notion of group transfer as a spatial migration of a donor group to an acceptor group. For Mitchell, however, Dixon had been not committed to the view of a vectorial mechanism of group translocation. Nevertheless, the very vectorial representation of diagrams of enzymes had been of great importance for Mitchell’s orientation toward vectorial chemistry. (See Prebble and Weber 2003, 35)
- 9.
Initially, it was a hypothesis that mitochondria ejected protons and that proton gradient drives ATP synthesis. It had been introduced as an explanatory mechanism of the coupling of electron transport to phosphorylation. What was challenged by this hypothesis was the view that transport and metabolism were essentially separate processes. As an experimentally verified theory the chemiosmotic one concerns the process of energy conservation in mitochondrial and bacterial respiration and in photosynthesis. Its main cellular object of inquiry is the inner membrane where is the site of the enzyme ATPase for ATP synthesis. It is important to be indicated that chemiosmotic theory was regarded by Mitchell as a special case of nowadays is called “vectorial metabolism.” Yet Prebble (2001), 447 is right when stressing that “the notion of vectorial metabolism is given its most fulsome treatment almost concurrently with promulgation of the chemiosmotic theory.” The linkage between the coupled reactions catalyzed by two osmoenzymes depends on the electrochemical potential gradient generated by one reaction and consumed by the other.
- 10.
- 11.
Hermeneutic phenomenology of scientific research is to be distinguished from the studies of the hermeneutic pre-understandings of individual scientists. Prebble (2001) provides an excellent example of such a study in which at issue are Mitchell’s philosophical pre-understandings as tacit knowledge. The author manages to show how the philosophical concept of fluctoid underlies as a tacit element the development of Mitchell’s formulation of the chemiosmotic hypothesis and its verification as a theory. The hermeneutic fore-structure of scientific research has a trans-subjective status, and accordingly cannot be regarded as belonging to the personal knowledge. Fore-having, fore-sight, and fore-conception are not to be attributed to the tacit (including collective) knowledge as well.
- 12.
Another aspect of the text’s openness is to be spelled out in terms of Rheinberger’s conception where the semiotic aspect of constituting “epistemic things” in scientific research is presented as constant creation in the research process of inscriptions, traces, and graphematic articulations. In this perspective, textualazing amounts to creating not a codified text, but a textual whole of traces—production of traces within the deferring spaces of representation engendered by the configuration. Thus, the text is intimately related to what Rheinberger calls a tracing game. For him, in scientific research there is a permanent replacement of any presumed signified by signifier (Rheinberger 1997, 104). What is read in a certain space of representation takes its meaning not from things that are beyond the research process but from what is read in other spaces of representation. Within a configuration of scientific practices as readable technologies the potentially endless production of traces becomes foreseeable. It is this fore-sight that makes the totality of what gets read in a configuration a relatively homogeneous (but by no means a structurally codified) text. Following further Rheinberger’s characterization, it is a text without “referent” and without assignable “origins.” Furthermore, it is a text that is doomed to be radically recast and re-contextualized in new configurations of scientific practices.
- 13.
A theoretical object is projected upon a horizon of research possibilities when the ongoing actualization of these possibilities in various contexts of research contributes to visualizing contextually the properties ascribed to the object by the respective theory.
- 14.
Actually, the interpretations of the dualist nature led to articulation of objects of inquiry that transcended the scope of the domain of vectorial biochemistry. Allchin (1997, 22) is absolutely right when reaching the conclusion that however strong the domain of vectorial biochemistry became emancipated, “Mitchell’s alternative theory and experimental gestalt did not wholly eclipse all aspects of the chemical hypothesis or its domain. Many of the findings that initially led biochemists to search for the intermediates were ‘composted’ into other areas of research practice or domains that are not addressed by the chmiosmotic model.”
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Ginev, D. (2014). The Articulation of a Scientific Domain from the Viewpoint of Hermeneutic Phenomenology: The Case of Vectorial Metabolism. In: Babich, B., Ginev, D. (eds) The Multidimensionality of Hermeneutic Phenomenology. Contributions to Phenomenology, vol 70. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-01707-5_2
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