Abstract
Although a “text” could primarily be recognized as a complex body of knowledge, given that it is isolated from the process of textualizing, the concept of “text” is not a kind of pre-epistemological concept. In hermeneutic realism, “text” is an ontological concept characterizing scientific inquiry’s facticity. (A discussion of the preliminary concept shows that the “minimalist texts” are recognizable even within the strategies of epistemological justification. But this recognition can only be attained by assuming that interpretive fore-structuring is an intratheoretical relation between theoretical terms and theory-laden data.) The hermeneutic realist specifies—with respect to the concept under discussion—the ontic-ontological difference as a difference between semantic and hermeneutic meaning of the “texts”. The former presupposes knowledge, structured in models, about objectified factuality. Furthermore, this knowledge is enclosed within a framework of objectification. The hermeneutic meaning—as engendered by the interpretive fore-structuring—refers to the “text’s” way of being in facticity of scientific inquiry and the domain’s meaningful articulation. While the preliminary concept of “text” draws on an approach seeking to find a balance between hermeneutics and epistemology/semantics, the full-fledged concept requires enriching the hermeneutics of textualizing with deconstructionist motifs.
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- 1.
This is why Eric Donald Hirsch’s distinction between “meaning” and “significance” has no place in hermeneutic realism. In fact,—leaning on Gadamer’s arguments—the distinction is to be rejected also within the scope of the textual exegesis.
- 2.
There is something highly instructive in Sokal’s hoax published in Social Text. The very title illuminates what the hermeneutics of science should look like from the viewpoint of naturalist objectivism . The “transformative hermeneutics of quantum gravity”—an expression contained in the title—implies that hermeneutics is part and parcel of the phenomenon of “quantum gravity” as existing in its objective factuality. In the hoax’s plot, hermeneutics is factually unveiled in the phenomena as conceptualized by the synthesis of “non-linearity, relativistic space-time, and differential topology”. Naturalizing hermeneutics in the sense of incorporating it in the natural world’s phenomena is, for Sokal, the only way in which the hermeneutics of science might work. Phrased differently, the interpretative subjectivity is a constitutive dimension of the natural world. (As a matter of fact, if the hermeneutic philosophy of science would naturalize hermeneutics in this way, it would become a part of what it severely criticizes: the “New Age” interpretation of science.) Sokal’s “transformative hermeneutics” operates within the space of epistemological relations between natural phenomena and interpretive subjectivity. He ridicules a particular kind of interpretive cultural studies by starting from a caricature of hermeneutics. Sokal starts from this caricature because he absolutizes the epistemological framework of relating interpretative subjectivity to natural phenomena. Placed in this framework, hermeneutics is doomed to be naturalized in a grotesque way. By contrast, hermeneutic realism starts from a trans-subjective hermeneutics that—in a way similar to Rouse’s non-objectivist naturalism and Barad’s agential realism —transcends any hypostatized opposition between (interpretive) subjectivity and (metaphysically present) objectivity . This hermeneutics is to be assigned neither to the interpretative activities of epistemic subjects nor to the natural phenomena, but to the constitution of “texts” within the interplay of practice and possibilities in scientific research. Sokal’s criticism (of whatever) does not have the resources to address this kind of hermeneutics. It is no accident that in Impostures intellectuelles Sokal and Bricmont do not pay attention to the tradition of the hermeneutic philosophy of science. Leading figures of that tradition like Patrick Heelan or Martin Eger , who are respected mathematical physicists, or important scientists who support (and even contribute to) the tradition like James Cushing , Abner Shimony , and Gunther Stent are not mentioned at all. Instead, there are boring comments (with unnecessarily long quotations) on authors who do not have any significance to the hermeneutic philosophy of science. It is another question that the criticism of the postmodernist misuses of scientific ideas (and the political attacks on science from positions of “radical democracy”) is always a welcome initiative, regardless of whether there is a peace treaty after the science wars.
- 3.
The prediction of an unknown phenomenon through such a scenario also requires the experimental construction of an appropriate data model. The theoretical prediction of an unknown phenomenon must clearly be differentiated from the (already discussed) experimental discovery of an unobservable phenomenon waiting to be saved via a theoretical model. Though predicted by a verified theoretical model, the unknown phenomenon might have not received an acceptable representation through a data model. Thus, the difference is to be summarized thusly: When expressed through data models, the unobservable phenomena are waiting for appropriate theoretical models, whereas the theoretically predicted unknown phenomena wait for the construction of acceptable data models that are capable of expressing them.
- 4.
Roughly, the semantic notion of truth as well as the epistemological concepts of correspondent, coherentist, consensualist, operationalist, pragmatic, and other types of truth refer to the truth-characteristics of linguistically expressed units of factual knowledge, whereas aletheia —the revealing (and concealing) of reality in a characteristic hermeneutic situation —is the truth-characteristic of facticity. The concept of hermeneutic truth is an ontological concept which takes into account the finite-contextual revealing/concealing of a “text” within the potentially infinite processes of textualizing and re-contextualization.
- 5.
Let me draw attention to the fact that this argument against Heidegger’s thesis does not necessarily appeal to the “active conceptualization” of hermeneutic situations in scientific inquiry. The claim that Heidegger ignores the potential of reflexivity of scientific inquiry—a form of reflexivity that takes into consideration the characteristic hermeneutic situations —does not imply that scientists actively elaborate on devices for conceptualizing these situations. As already pointed out, having recourse to the hermeneutic situations of inquiry does not make scientists hermeneutic philosophers of science. But the ways in which these situations are reflexively taken into consideration show that scientific research is capable of “thinking” what—for Heidegger—should be unthinkable for science. “Taking into consideration” is not tantamount to “actively conceptualizing” because it is the relatedness of inquirers’ reflexivity to practices’ endogenous reflexivity that brings the characteristic hermeneutic situation to light. This enlightening essentially differs from conceptualization.
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Ginev, D. (2016). Concluding Chapter: “Texts”, Relevant Contexts, and Textualizing. In: Hermeneutic Realism. Contributions to Hermeneutics, vol 4. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-39289-9_5
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