Abstract
At issue in this Zwischenbetrachtung is the approach to “empirical ontology” in science and technology studies (STS). As compared with approaches that focus on local orders of practices by means of a careful examination of the emerging order from the perspectives of all participants, “empirical ontology” displays several advantages. Nonetheless, in what follows it is accused of totally ignoring the (reflexive) facticity of the orders-in-a-state-of-creation. It is an illusion and a delusion of the champions of this approach that the multilayer portrayal of the factuality of local orders suffices to determine the plural being of entities that circulate in scientific, technological, and life-world practices. (I am referring to entities with a contextually changeable nature [hybrid entities]. Several case studies guided by the approach in question are devoted to the task of providing the empirical-ontological description of these entities.) In returning to Melvin Pollner’s conception of reflexivity, these “intermediate reflections” offer a criticism of “empirical ontology” from the viewpoint of hermeneutic realism. There is an interesting analogy between this approach and Quine’s naturalism. In a celebrated dictum of the latter, the philosophy of science is philosophy enough. The adherents to the approach I am going to critically analyze admit that the empirical ontology of practical orders’ factuality is ontology enough. To both Quine’s naturalism and “empirical ontology”, the hermeneutic realist raises the objection that the abstinence from hermeneutics prevents one from crossing the threshold of factuality, and from seeing the empirical in its facticity.
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Notes
- 1.
The temporal and spatial dimensions of the creation of local rational orders of social activities are a persistent theme in all programs that aim to make ideas of hermeneutic phenomenology useful for empirical social studies. For a long time the paradigm of perspectivalism has dominated the attempts to introduce phenomenological concepts of rationality in these studies. Alfred Schütz’s approach to the intersubjective constitution of meaningful realities is a case in point. Yet perspectivalism has proven to have significant flaws, and it has been overthrown step by step during the last four decades. It became clear that the local rational orders – whether they are homogeneous orders like those in a scientific laboratory, a factory, a school, a small-scale industry, a religious community, an artistic group, different kinds of “invisible colleges”, etc., or heterogeneous orders like those created by the shared everyday life of a small urban community or a relatively isolated emigrant community composed of members of different social origins – are not outcomes of an progressive exchange of agents’ perspectives within the network of social interaction. The conviction has gradually gained currency that the societal topos of interactive intersubjectivity does not have a self-sufficient being. In general terms, the intersubjective rationality (as manifested in a particular ethos) “takes place” within the horizons in which the interactive agents are “always already” thrown. But how is this “place” to be approached and scrutinized? It is not a fixed site that can be physically localized.
- 2.
Ashmore stresses also that Mol’s ontological approach to practices should not be read as endorsing the search for “ontics, designed and destined to replace the tired old routines of epistemics” (Ashmore 2005, 829). In my opinion, the champions of empirical ontology are not looking for a confrontation with epistemological programs. Yet, in contrast to older supporters of science-as-practice, they are guided by the view that there is no hypostatized body of knowledge separable from the epistemic practices. The latter, however, are inextricably implicated in the multiple realities that have to be studied ontologically. Thus, there is no knowledge that cannot be treated in terms of empirical ontology (in particular, the units of knowledge are no more than specific “multiple entities”), and, at the same time, there is no knowledge that can only be approached/analyzed from an epistemological point of view. The champions of empirical ontology manage to overcome the traditional opposition between theory and practice. When Ashmore appeals in his review for peace between epistemics (which is dealing with the hot side of science, with novelty and controversy) and ontics, he still commits to the traditional opposition, thereby adhering to a sort of Cartesian presuppositions.
- 3.
The moment of empathy in this reflexive participation is not to be underestimated. Against the background of Mol’s way of distinguishing between disease and illness, one is to state that the more the researcher involves her own epistemic practices in the scenario of ontic-ethnographic description, the more effectively she is able to understand the ways of “living with disease”, i.e., the particular illness as a psychosocial phenomenon (as opposed to disease as an object of biomedicine).
- 4.
In the tradition of ethnomethodology there are several interesting attempts at making the ontological dimension explicit. One is Eric Livingston’s ontological approach to the mathematical work’s life-world . However, such attempts have always been met with skepticism by those adherents of the tradition who admit that the engagement with ontology would transform the enthomethodological description into interpretative theorizing, thereby restoring a sort of theoretical essentialism (Ginev 2013a, 117–127).
- 5.
At this point I should like to reiterate a motif from my previous criticism of Hacking’s epistemology. He puts much emphasis upon the contradistinction between representing and intervening. However, being still committed to the primacy of the subject-object cut, his epistemology only makes intervening a privileged method of epistemic representation.
- 6.
I am using the expression “meta-epistemological critique” in order to emphasize that this critique is not inspired by the search for an epistemological alternative to empirical ontology. The aim is rather to uncover (by implementing reflexive-epistemological tactics) the “bad epistemology” tacitly involved in those versions of empirical ontology which insist on “empiricization without remainder”.
- 7.
As I pointed out, Marres’s position is by no means an exception. As a rule, empirical studies of ontology tacitly admit a difference between ontic description and ontological reflection. Mol is seeking the difference between the ethnographic description of the “multiple body” (and other multiple entities) and the constitution of multiplicity. She makes the case that if one begins to study the interferences between the enactments of multiple entities (such as atherosclerosis and sex difference), then the complexities start to grow exponentially (Mol 2002, 151). The growth of complexity is precisely the theme of the ontological reflection.
- 8.
In the Heideggerian tradition of hermeneutic phenomenology , empirical ontology (i.e., studies of domains’ ontic structures) is dichotomously opposed to ”transcendental ontology” (existential hermeneutics of the meaning of being). It is the methodology of double hermeneutics that manages to overcome this dichotomous opposition. Regardless of how significant the difference is, there is no cleavage between both types of ontology. Both types work in concert. The unfoldment of an interpretative description (and narrative) of multiple entities enacted in a multiple reality of concerted practices requires a cooperation between empirical studies of ontic orders in the making and ontological reflections about the integrity of a specific mode of being-in-the-world.
- 9.
Cultural studies will often address the genesis and the circulation in practices of hybrid entities . Yet, like empirical ontologies, cultural studies does this in a purely factual manner without taking into account the ways in which the ontological difference between factuality and facticity operates in the constitution of hybrid objects.
- 10.
The phenomena observed and measured in this artificialized reality are saved (by meteorological theoretical scenarios) as quasi-natural events that are registered by long-term weather statistics. Thus, a climate forcing induced by human activities is “discovered” through taking measurements of variables like soil moisture, temperature, flora distribution, or salinity.
- 11.
Arguably, climatological objects of inquiry – more specifically, those creating (and created by) climatic changes – are nowadays among the most discussed hybrid entities distinguished by a “natural-artificial origin”. It would be worthwhile to carry out a special study of the constitution of climatological “texts” in which – by means of re-contextualizing traditional objects of inquiry – one tries to objectify factors of climate change related to human activities as mingled with natural causes (such as solar radiation and volcanic eruptions) of these changes. In describing and measuring climatic changes through data models, one is not obliged to look for a clear separation between natural variability and human-technological interference (e.g., emissions of greenhouse gases and aerosols). It is the theoretical scenario that by saving phenomena captured by these data models one should establish the role of the interference mentioned. As a rule, the scenario “decides” what is to be treated as an anthropogenic factor of changes. Yet the theoretical scenario remains indifferent to the central subject of climate’s artificialization : how the ways of “enacting” artificialized natural entities – that subsequently are multiplied due to various sorts of feedback – are artificializing climate systems (including the global climate system consisting of the atmosphere, oceans, land, and continental glaciers). Needless to say, the objectified factuality re-naturalizes the multiple enactment of artificialized natural entities.
- 12.
The observation that pollution enhances the concentration of hygroscopic particles is not an observation about the artificialization of a climate system. It is only an observation of how the respective natural system reacts to external interventions by enhancing the amount of intrinsic feedback. (More than half of the predicted warming will not be caused directly by greenhouse gases but by feedback like the reduction in the fraction of incoming solar radiation reflected back to space as snow and ice cover recede.) The naturalist extension of textualizing the domain of nephology cannot capture the “enactment” and multiplication of hybrid entities like the unwittingly artificialized clouds. It only objectifies artificially induced climatic changes. Capturing the artificialization of climate systems should go much further than ending with the registration of these changes.
- 13.
The unwitting formation of artificial clouds chiefly consists in the increased number of nuclei and the tendency toward inhibiting the rainfall caused by smaller droplets, thereby increasing the lifetime of the average cloud cover on Earth. Studies of climatic changes that conceptualize the “unwittingly artificialized clouds” constitute the special kind of “texts”. These studies show that the artificialized clouds are unwillingly “enacted” in climate systems as new absorbers and emitters of terrestrial radiation. Anthropogenic sources of cloud condensation nuclei (like automobile emissions, the burning of vegetative matter, and industrial combustion products) do not create but “enact” unwittingly artificialized clouds. In another formulation, these are sources of turning natural clouds into anthropogenic aerosols within natural climate systems. To reiterate, several processes and phenomena taking place in this situation can be contextualized by integrating new research practices and forming new contexts in the domain of nephology. The “enactment” of anthropogenic aerosols in climate systems is an artificial process that can be – on the level of theorizing – “naturalized” by means of proper textualizing within the newly formed contexts. A case in point are the studies modeling aerosol influences on precipitation by following “pollution tracks” as viewed by satellite imagery. Such tracks are exhibited not only by warm clouds, but also by clouds in areas where ice precipitation processes are prevalent.
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Ginev, D. (2016). Intermediate Reflections: Reflexivity in Scientific Inquiry and Empirical Ontologies of Hybrid Objects. In: Hermeneutic Realism. Contributions to Hermeneutics, vol 4. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-39289-9_3
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