Abstract
Is it possible to have a philosophical position of realism without essentialist assumptions and residual metaphysics of presence? In this book I develop the position of hermeneutic realism as an affirmative answer to that question. In breaking in a radical manner with the “myth of the given”, the hermeneutic realist holds that there is but a meaningful reality. The articulation of meaning within practices is not imposed upon a pre-meaningful (amorphous) reality. This articulation is inextricable from reality. (Hereafter I will also use the expression “meaningful articulation”.) In the remainder the profile of hermeneutic realism will often be specified via formulating disclaimers. Here is the first disclaimer: The intrinsic meaningfulness of reality does not need an epistemic subject who intentionally produces meanings embodied in her beliefs, actions, and activities. The meaningfulness of reality preexists and conditions the formation of any kind of epistemic subject. This meaningfulness is neither subjective nor intersubjective. It is trans-subjective. The next disclaimer is that advocating the meaningfulness of reality by stressing the primacy of practices does not imply a form of constructivism. Reality is not constructed by (scientific) practices. Any form of constructivism presupposes the dualism of constructor and constructed qua a version of Cartesian dualism. (Approaches such as actor-network theory and the “empirical ontologies” in SSK are controversial attempts at deconstructing the dualist assumptions of classical social constructivism.)
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Notes
- 1.
Hereafter I use the term “facticity” in connection with the original program of the “hermeneutics of facticity ”. In the basic cases in which the term will be used in the study, this connection will be commented on and specified. The various connotations of the term depend on its relatedness to the everydayness of routine practices, the nexus of finitude and situated transcendence , the potentiality-for-being, and so on. Yet the main connotation refers to the mode of being characterized by a production of objectified factuality within practices of objectification that project their interrelatedness upon horizons of possibilities. Generally, the way in which the concept of facticity is used in hermeneutic realism is in line with Heidegger’s triple differentiation between fall, existence, and facticity. But the formulations in which the concept is used are not corollaries to the doctrine of this differentiation.
- 2.
Thus, “naturalizing” the philosophy of science in a non-objectivist manner by having recourse to the empirical-as-facticity is a completely feasible program from the viewpoint of hermeneutic realism.
- 3.
On an alternative view about recognition in objectifying scientific inquiry, see Crease (1993, Ch. 6) . In drawing on Husserl’s method of free variation and Heelan’s phenomenological theory of perception, Robert Crease tries to characterize the way in which experimentalists are “recognizing” what they describe by data models of measurements as a profile of the phenomenon they study, provided that the phenomenon is distinguished by an invariance (under transformation of perspectives). The recognition involves the belief that this invariance structures other possible profiles of the same phenomenon that can be revealed under changed experimental conditions. See also Crease (2009, 2015).
- 4.
I am leaving aside the fact that the “Verständigung über etwas” operates at each stage of objectifying inquiry. (The achievement of agreement by means of negotiations—which is a kind of Apel’s Verständigung über etwas—is the favorite subject of social constructivists.) My criticism has another focus. Apel assumes that there is—in the “productive mediation between empirical and normative reconstruction in the historiography of science”—a hermeneutic circle at work. This defense of a kind of historiographical hermeneutics concerning the historicity of the objectifying sciences is entirely under the aegis of the old-fashioned distinction between deductive-nomological explanation and individualizing understanding, as his confrontation with Popper’s third-world approach to interpretation demonstrates (Apel 1998, 224–230) . He accepts this distinction, and integrates it in the program of his “transcendental semiotics/pragmatics” . The latter—as a transcendental theory of the rational dialogue/discourse—should be developed also as a philosophy of the non-objectifying (human) sciences, thereby providing the ultimate rationale for demarcating between the interpretive and the mathematical-experimental sciences. Since there is no place for a trans-subjective (non-epistemological and non-communicational) hermeneutics in Apel’s program, the contextualizing facticity of objectifying inquiry escapes his attention.
- 5.
I will repeatedly make use in this study of a distinction between practices’ reflexivity and practitioners’ reflexivity—a distinction that originates from ethnomethodology . Practices’ reflexivity has much to do with the creation of local orders, while practitioners’ reflexivity is what the concept of accountability refers to (Czyzewski 1994 ; Ginev 2014b). Not all ethnomethodologists are happy with this distinction, and more generally, with the way of making the issue of reflexivity a central one in the ethnomethodological work. Thus, Michael Lynch (2000) pleads for narrowing the concept of reflexivity by freeing it from critical-epistemological and emancipatory-political connotations. Lynch’s concept of reflexivity refers to “locally reflexive orders of action”. Reflexivity is “incarnated” in such orders. Yet this criticism of the extended notion of reflexivity, as it is used in critical social theory and various forms of cultural studies, attests the reasonability of the distinction being mentioned. The “incarnation” of reflexivity is due to practices’ capability to arrange and regulate their interrelatedness. This “incarnation” antecedes (and sometimes prompts) the kind of reflexivity that depends on practitioners’ epistemic virtues, cognitive skills, and emancipatory interests. My central use of practices’ reflexivity will be with regard to the reflexive entanglement of the particular practices of inquiry (and their contextures-of-equipment) with contexts of inquiry and the interrelatedness of practices.
- 6.
For an interesting criticism of Ihde’s phenomenology of the body that radicalizes the imagery of extended-bodies-in-practices, see Feenberg (2006) .
- 7.
To be fair, in the edition of Truth and Method from 1989, Gadamer (1989, 374) supplies his original elaborations with the following note: “Now, in the light of the past three decades of work in the philosophy of science, I willingly acknowledge that even this formulation is too undifferentiated.”
- 8.
Dreyfus has good reasons to draw on The Basic Problems of Phenomenology. This is Heidegger’s work in which the classical transcendental position and the kind of essentialism related to it are most consistently supported. Heidegger treats intraworldliness as a transcendental condition of the possibility for reaching the essence of things that would necessarily occur even if Dasein had never existed. It is not hard to see that, thus defined, the transcendental position is not commensurate with the ontic-ontological difference (and its transcendental dimension) as inaugurated by the existential analytic . For this reason, I believe, Heidegger relinquishes this position in his later work.
- 9.
Barbara Tuchanska (2008) suggests an excellent criticism of this view, developing at the same time a comprehensive critique of Gadamer’s conception of science from the viewpoint of the hermeneutic philosophy of science . She focuses on such basic shortcomings as the assumption that the objects of inquiry of the natural sciences are objects-in-themselves, independent of the research process; the view that the research process is performed from “nowhere”; and the belief that the quintessence of scientific rationality is objectivity as defined by objectivist epistemology.
- 10.
To a question (posed by Riccardo Dottori) of whether theoria (as a strategy of participating in the universal nous by pursuing it through phronēsis ) is also a kind of praxis, Gadamer responds that it is “the highest form of praxis” (Gadamer 2003, 35). Now this question can be specified—in a non-Gadamerian manner—with respect to the character of theoria within the natural sciences. Quite intentionally, I am again using the Greek word because I do not have in mind “theory” as a quasi-axiomatic structure with a partial empirical interpretation. I am referring, rather, to the totality of theoretical practices in scientific research whereby one constitutes meaningful objects of inquiry. The following question will remain forever open: Had Gadamer understood scientific theorizing in this way, would he have continued to insist that practical-contextual rationality is irrelevant to scientific objectivity?
- 11.
It is worth mentioning that Ludwik Fleck maintains a quite similar position regarding the cognitive autonomy of science. The prevention of science from political distortion of the research process is a central motif in his debates with Tadeusz Bilikiewicz . In countering (and ridiculing) both types of “demagogical-mythical” doctrines in the mid-1930s—the programs of “proletarian science” as subjected to the goals of planned economics, and the ideas of scientific theories in which the “spirit of a race” gets embodied—Fleck argues that the dependence of scientific cognition on cultural-historical milieus is to be sought in the ongoing configuration of Gestaltsehen and the use of rhetorical figures in linguistic descriptions of phenomena (Fleck 2011a, 329–331).
- 12.
On a thesis that is closer to Dilthey’s idea of “productive nexuses” (Wirkungszusammenhänge) than to Heidegger’s ontology, facticity and factuality are the two modalities of the empirical. The hermeneutic realist holds that the production of procedurally objectified factuality is only achievable in the facticity of scientific inquiry. By implication, if objectified factuality is addressed as being contextualized within the continuity of facticity, then factuality ceases to be an actual presence, and its being is revealed but in the possibilities of a domain’s articulation. It is this continuous production of contextualized factuality within the facticity of objectifying inquiry that requires the implementation of the methodology of double hermeneutics . Without devising an integral hermeneutic circle that unites the interpretive study of the production of objectified factuality and the proper interpretive circularity of facticity studied, the factuality would be captured only as a manifold of discrete elements. In employing double hermeneutics, the hermeneutic realist is after the phenomenological unity of producing-factuality-within-facticity. It is this unity that—while contextualized—resembles Dilthey’s “productive nexuses”.
- 13.
This claim stands in stark contrast to Heidegger’s existential conception of science. For Heidegger, scientific practices are objectifying regions of inquiry, but they cease to articulate the world meaningfully. To put it bluntly, while constituting thematic objects, scientific practices are de-worlding the meaningful reality. The existential conception of science developed in Being and Time is in line with the phenomenological tradition of sharply opposing the pre-objectified (pre-thematic, prepredicative) world to the objectified world of science. The hermeneutic realism, by contrast, holds that scientific objectification is only achievable within a new horizon of reality’s meaningful articulation. This horizon is projected by the interrelated scientific practices. To sum up, scientific practices in their interrelatedness are not de-worlding but re-worlding the reality of meaningful articulation. (I unfold this claim as criticisms of the existential conception of science in Ginev (2011a, 1–22; 2015a, 181–197).)
- 14.
Thus considered, the interrelatedness of practices is a usual object of study of all programs dealing with culturally patterned forms of everydayness. However, here again one has to differentiate between studying it as factuality and as facticity. The facticity of a culturally individualized everydayness is the meaningful articulation in its capacity to enable interpretative fore-structuring of what is situated in it. The procedural objectification of such everydayness as factuality—say, within the scope of the sociology of everyday life or the social geography of routine regimes of spacing and timing—is doubtless a feasible task. But this objectification precludes one from comprehending the empirical-as-facticity. The argument for this claim follows a well-known line of reasoning in hermeneutic phenomenology : The world as ever transcending horizon—irreducible to the totality of what is ready-to-hand and present-at-hand within-the-world—can never be conceptualized as a theme of positive-empirical research. At first glance, this line of reasoning is in a conflict with empirical research programs that aim at studying the interpretive worlds of life forms as distinguished by their ethos and habitus. Understanding a culturally distant world and interpreting what is going on within the horizon of this world is a scientific strategy often deployed in programs of cultural history, phenomenological sociology, and cultural anthropology. This strategy is successful in identifying, describing, and conceptualizing the life forms articulated within the world-horizon. Yet, in making the life forms objects of inquiry, the adepts of the strategy decisively refrain from studying how the world is situationally transcendent in enabling the regimes of life forms’ temporalizing and spatializing . Accordingly, they take the intended objects of inquiry to be already temporalized and spatialized. Following this strategy, one operates with interpretive factuality, but not with facticity. The hermeneutic realist argues that the interpretive research of life forms within their world-horizons can be extended to cover the issues of how the world is transcending in temporalizing and spatializing what is within-the-world. (For a nice unfolding of this claim with respect to the quest for a new identity of geography as scientific discipline, see Zahnen 2015 )
- 15.
For the status of the hermeneutic philosophy of science between Heidegger’s hermeneutics of facticity and Misch’s hermeneutic logic , see Ginev (2011b, 45–64).
- 16.
To be sure, the admission that practices have a teleological character rests on sound intuitive assumptions. Conceived of as factuality, a practice consists of acts that are following a rule in achieving a goal. Together with the entities that the acts manage to enact (make ready-to-hand) and organize environmentally, the practice forms a contexture-of-equipment in which operators like “in-order-to” and “for-the-sake-of” determine the direction of activity. Conceptualizing practices as rule-following acts inherent in goal-oriented conduct implies the picture of teleologically ordered acts. However, this picture is about action and activities, and not about practices. Assuming a teleological framework of conceptualization is perhaps suitable for developing a theory of action, but it is, as I will argue in this study, ineligible for the construction of a theory of practices.
- 17.
This claim is to be extended to elementary linguistic distinctions and practical orientations—both of them playing a crucial role in the scenarios for methodical reconstruction. Elementary linguistic distinctions and practical orientations presuppose horizons of interrelated practices. When the champions of methodical constructivism study the groundedness of science’s theoretical concepts in such distinctions and orientations, they take the life-world to be not a horizon but an inscrutable ground. Accordingly, they deny the possibility for developing a theory of life-world . Such a theory would violate their principle that theoretical knowledge cannot go behind life, which implies that all methodically guided cognitive constructions in science are refining stylizations of “that which has always constituted the practical life-world” (Lorenzen 1987, 5) . In hermeneutic realism, if the expression “theory of life-world” is only the alternative designation of the theory about the constitution of meaning within practices, then there is no threat of entering a vicious circle when grounding methodical reconstructions of science’s theoretical constructions on such a theory. In so doing, one would rather commit the search for “methodical order” to the hermeneutic circularity (of meaning constitution) in which the construction of order is always already situated.
- 18.
Moreover, attempting to recover the sedimented layers of meaning promises a life-world’s grounding of the objectifying cognitive structures which have veiled the primary meanings constituted within the finite horizons of pre-scientific experience. It remains an open question as to whether, for Husserl and his followers, this recovery could have retroactive consequences for the structure of objectification in scientific inquiry. An affirmative answer would imply the possibility of moving from a phenomenological critique of science to a phenomenological-critical philosophy of science (Ginev 2008a).
- 19.
In claiming that scientific inquiry discloses and articulates reality anew, the hermeneutic realist does not try to neglect the genetic ties with the life-world’s experience. However, since these ties are not based on a continuation of the constitution of meaning, they have to be investigated not in terms of “genetic phenomenology”, but as a subject of disciplines such as cultural history of scientific practices, history of concepts (Begriffsgeschichte), history of ideas, or (not necessarily Foucauldian) archaeology of scientific knowledge. Lorraine Daston coins the term “applied metaphysics” when referring to the historical studies of objects that in their coming into being, existence, and passing away have been oscillating across the boundaries of scientific domains and non-scientific areas of social practices. Applied metaphysics deals with the history of scientific objects and migrating entities (possibly becoming hybrid, natural-cultural entities) and is committed to what Bruno Latour calls “historical realism ”. In so doing, this metaphysics places the genetic ties between non-scientific practical experience and various kinds of scientific inquiry in diverse cultural-historical spaces without looking for a continuity of meaningful constitution. Applied metaphysics “posits that scientific objects can be simultaneously real and historical” (Daston 2000, 3).
- 20.
Theodore Kisiel (1997, 71) is right when he stresses that Rouse’s conception of scientific practices “eschews the banner of hermeneutics” and instead proposes to examine scientific-technological work by using different sorts of case studies. As a result, the phenomenological subject of the constitution of scientific domains is turned into the empirical inquiry of practices.
- 21.
Pierre Bourdieu’s “logic of practice ” as based on the concept of habitus serves much better the tenets of hermeneutic realism than the theories aiming at the objectification of practices as discrete factuality. My point is that the concept of habitus is commensurate with the hermeneutic circling of practices in which reality becomes disclosed. According to Bourdieu (1990, 54), once internalized in the form of schemes of perception, thought, and action, the habitus ensures the continuity of practices and their constancy over time more reliably than all formal rules and explicit norms. In the course of this study, I will show that some approaches to practices in ethnomethodology are also in line with the tenets of hermeneutic realism.
- 22.
For an attempt to advocate interpretive internalism by using models of self-organization, see Krohn and Küppers (1987) . The point of this attempt is that scientific research is not passively adjusted to various social milieus. Science actively constitutes its milieu.
- 23.
One should stress the significance of taking interpretive internalism into consideration when discussing the subjects of legally relevant scientific knowledge. Though this knowledge is assumed to be authentically scientific, it is always extra-scientifically re-contextualized, thereby becoming unavoidably interest-laden knowledge. Sheila Jasanoff (1997, 209) observes that willingness to accept a particular scientific knowledge as providing testimony for the courtroom “amounts to an expression of confidence in the institutions and practices that produced it.” Yet the criterial base of this confidence reflects only the interests of the parties in dispute. (The law’s view of what constitutes authentic scientific knowledge is an artifact of the legal system’s contingent ability to interrogate scientific communities.) There is no longer any scientific knowledge in the courtroom (as in any extra-scientific space of institutionalized social life). There is only knowledge isolated from the facticity of scientific inquiry. This isolation is the reverse process to that of internalizing themes, values, and goals in the articulation of domains of inquiry. According to another important observation of Jasanoff’s, courts produce the bulk of their scientific testimonies not from established (standardized) scientific knowledge, but from fragmented, contested, and fluid theoretical constructions and experimental results. The view of interpretive internalism states that not only the production of knowledge but also its withdrawal from the process of inquiry and designing as standard scientific knowledge take place within the interplay of scientific practices and possibilities for doing research. Courts very often—by ignoring science’s interpretive internalism—usurp the prerogative of scientists to decide what has the status of standard scientific knowledge.
- 24.
Thomas Crump (2001, 346) is absolutely right when observing that the environments of “the old Cavendish Laboratory at Cambridge and Los Alamos belong to different worlds.” Yet the need for arranging instrumental environments is what remains constant in the transition from classical (small-scale) science to Big Science. The search for a detection of gravitational waves as predicted by general relativity is no exception. The technology measuring movements in identical gold-platinum cubes caused by gravitational waves as it is installed on LISA Pathfinder arranges its own instrumental environment and contexture-of-equipment that is located in a circular orbit at an altitude of 1450 km.
- 25.
Some constructivists of the Erlangen-Konstanz school radicalize this role of the instruments for experimentation, and argue that the commonplace view that technology is applied natural science has to be reversed: natural science is applied technology. According to them, only when the scope of the natural scientific experience is strongly determined by the technological infrastructure of measuring, experimenting, and constructing phenomena does scientific inquiry begin to deploy the techniques of “idealizing stylization”. On that account, technology is not a particular sphere of social life or a particular “symbolic form” (in Cassirer’s sense). Technology is a dimension of the teleological essence of human existence and culture (Janich 2015 ).
- 26.
However, one might raise the question as to how an intra-active phenomenon “embraces” the causal intra-actions constituting it. Is this “embracement” to be attributed to a “global causal effect” created by all relevant intra-actions? Or is there a non-causal intra-action that elicits the synergy of causal intra-actions? This strategy of questioning can be continued in the following manner. For Barad, (1) the intra-active phenomena are not predetermined by dichotomous differences (like the subject-object one) that preexist them, and (2) the causal intra-actions taking place in them produce differences that are always contextualized. In combining (1) and (2), one confronts two questions. Is the force of contextualization to be derived from the causal intra-actions? Or should one admit that this force operates in a non-causal manner?
- 27.
Against the first assumption, the hermeneutic realist argues that the primary place where reflexivity comes into prominence is not the inquirer’s cognitive activities, but the interrelatedness of scientific practices. (Ascribing reflexivity solely to the inquirer as epistemic subject is also not in full harmony with Barad’s post-humanist agenda.) The second assumption is wrong since it unjustifiably binds reflexivity to the physicalist notion of reflection. In criticizing the models of reflexivity in the Strong Program , Barad misses the opportunity to approach non-physicalist (in particular, hermeneutic) concepts of reflexivity. It is no accident that she suggests another physicalist notion, that of diffraction, as an alternative to reflexivity: The non-representationalist “diffractive methodology”—i.e., the methodology which looks for differences within entangled states—has to replace the reflexive methodologies. This requirement is simply a corollary to Barad’s naturalist attitude.
- 28.
I am using here the term “supervenience ” in a manner similar to that in which analytical philosophers use it in characterizing the relationship (say) between moral properties and natural properties, or between mental characteristics and physical characteristics. In this context, altering something in the regime of meaningful articulation of a scientific domain necessarily alters something in the procedural objectification of that domain. Changes taking place in the former necessarily entail changes appearing in the latter, granted that the relation of entailment does not exhaust the relation of supervenience. If formulated as a necessary condition for having a relation of supervenience, the entailment of changes is possibly met by the relation between articulation within scientific practices and objectification through procedures. Yet several analytical philosophers show that the relation of supervenience is a non-symmetric relation. By contrast, the relation between meaningful articulation and procedural objectification is presumably symmetric: A change in the meaningful articulation of a phenomenon supervenes on a change in the regime of its objectification.
- 29.
Here I mean the distinction between the “context of constitution” and the “context of justification ” as it is introduced and championed in Ginev (2000, 60–69).
- 30.
But vice versa, a requisite of the circulation of representational devices in the process of inquiry is the mutual compatibility of practices and their reflexive capacity to form contextual configurations.
- 31.
The different representational devices are characterized by different degrees of plasticity in making comprehensible signs already produced by a readable technology. Thus, Roger Krohn (1991) makes it clear that statistical graphs as a representational device reemploy the researchers’ powers of visual perception and pattern recognition, which facilitates the creation of models. Statistical graphs belong to a large class of scientific visuals (diagrams, drawings, maps, photographs, etc.). An open question that deserves a separate study is the question of whether there is in the articulation of a wide range of scientific domains a tendency toward amplifying the role of visuals in the circulation of semiotic representations.
- 32.
With regard to his criticism of (scientific) realism, Rorty (1991, 63) argues that realists insist on the idea that the object of inquiry has a context of its own, a context that is privileged by virtue of being the object’s rather than the inquirer’s. For Rorty, privileging such a context provides the broadest criterion for realism, a criterion that unites champions of scientism with non-ethnocentric anthropologists and literary critics who still believe in structuralism. Interestingly enough, this criterion is formulated in terms of a distinction that echoes the Cartesian dualism , namely the distinction between the object’s context and the inquirer’s context. The epistemological behaviorist (being a pragmatic antirealist) sticks to the inquirer’s context, i.e., the context in which what exists is whatever the contextually generated beliefs hold true for.
- 33.
There is a kind of Derrida-like “economy” operating on various levels of the domain’s meaningful articulation and abolishing any allegedly invariant structure of meaning (and/or allegedly static presence of meaning). Defined by means of the “economy of differences”, meaning (of particular items like measurements, observations, diagrams, data models, theoretical concepts, etc., as well as of whole “texts”) is always “absent presence”.
- 34.
To claim that there is, in the articulation of a scientific domain, nothing outside the textualizing intercontextuality amounts to defending a realism about the facticity of inquiry, since reality-as-facticity—as disclosed, in particular, by the facticity of inquiry—projects the totality of its meaning upon this intercontextuality .
- 35.
By contrast, the constructive empiricist argues that all (non-theoretical) scientific practices must be considered as a continuation of the theory construction by other means. Assuming that the theory construction is situated within scientific practices would rule out the implementation of empirical adequacy as a criterion for a successful way of saving observable (and unobservable) phenomena. Notoriously, the search for empirical adequacy in constructive empiricism goes hand in hand with the semantic view of scientific theories. Van Fraassen (1980, 64) clearly avers that some models of a scientific theory are specifiable with regard to their empirical adequacy as “candidates for the direct representation of observable phenomena.” This kind of representation is still in the spirit of representationalist epistemology . My point is that—despite van Fraassen’s efforts to subject the search for empirical adequacy to the logic of the hermeneutic circle—the irremovable remainder of this epistemology is due to the intratheoretic enclosure of the process of inquiry. (For this criticism of constructive empiricism, see Ginev 2011a, 37–40.)
- 36.
Let me say that in this perspective the factuality of the immediate contextures (as objectified, for instance, in sociological terms) is not to be confused with the objectified factuality (experimental data and measurements) as obtained within the particular contextures.
- 37.
Speaking in terms of a hermeneutic social theory, the cultural life forms articulated within an ontologically self-sufficient interrelatedness of practices are characterized by ethos and habitus. Yet these are not socio-psychological characteristics. Ethos and habitus rather refer to the way in which the life form creates its kinds of intersubjectivity , its typical “thingness” (Sachlichkeit), and its mode of historicizing that constitutes authoritative tradition. Ethos and habitus are ontological characteristics of the way of being as situated transcendence .
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Ginev, D. (2016). Introductory Chapter: On the Very Idea of Hermeneutic Realism. In: Hermeneutic Realism. Contributions to Hermeneutics, vol 4. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-39289-9_1
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