The Context of Constitution

BOSTON STUDIES IN THE PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE

Editors

ROBERT S. COHEN, Boston UniversityJÜRGEN RENN, Max-Planck-Institute for the History of Science

KOSTAS GAVROGLU, University of Athens

THOMAS F. GLICK, Boston UniversityADOLF GRÜNBAUM, University of PittsburghSYLVAN S. SCHWEBER, Brandeis University

JOHN J. STACHEL, Boston University

VOLUME 247

Editorial Advisory Board

MARX W. WARTOFSKY†, (Editor 1960 1997)–

THE CONTEXT OF

CONSTITUTION

by

Dimitri Ginev

Professor for Hermeneutic Philosophy of Science and HermeneuticTheory of Culture at the “St. Kliment Ohridski University” of Sofia

Beyond the Edge of Epistemological

Justification

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CONTENTS

PREFACE

INTRODUCTION a. The Hermeneutic Task of Re-Reading Kuhnb. Providing a Rationale for a Hermeneutic Reformulation

of Normal Science c. Against Externalism, and the Farewell to Normative Epistemology d. On the Phenomenological Background of Cognitive Existentialisme. Beyond the Context-Distinctionf. The Post-Epistemological Dimension of the Context of Constitution

Chapter One IDEAS FOR THE SITUATEDTRANSCENDENCEOF SCIENTIFIC RESEARCH a. Introductionb. Philosophical Hermeneutics and Hermeneutics of Scientific Researchc. Heidegger’s Ideas for the Constitutional Analysis

of Scientific Research

e. Against Cognitive Essentialism and the Possibility of a Cognitive Existentialism

Chapter Two REFORMULATING THE CONCEPT OF “NORMAL SCIENCE”IN THE FRAMEWORK OF HERMENEUTIC PHENOMENOLOGYa. Normal Science, Practice Theory, and Kuhn’s Historicismb. Framework-Reading Versus Tradition-Bound-Reading

of Normal Science c. Community’s Consensus and Situated Transcendence

vii

914262832

3543

5055

75

93

110124

1

d. Postwar Ideas for a Hermeneutic Phenomenology of Science

vi Contents

Chapter Three HERMENEUTIC PHENOMENOLOGY OF SCIENTIFIC RESEARCH a. Introductory Note b. Hermeneutic Fore-Structure, Cognitive Structure,

and Research Everydayness c. Pre-Narrativity of Normal Scientific Research d. A Passage to Macro-Hermeneutics of Modern Science e. Thematizing Projects and Types of Scientific Research f. Non-Reductionist Unity and Non-Relativist Disunity of Science

Chapter Four THE NORMATIVITY OF NORMAL SCIENCE: HERMENEUTIC CONTEXTUALISM AND PROTO-NORMATIVITY a. A Historical Noteb. Between Wittgenstein and Heideggerc. The First Step: Normal Science’s Normativity in Terms

of Holistic Epistemology d. The Second Step: Towards a Hermeneutic Theory

of Proto-Normativity

NOTES

REFERENCES

NAME INDEX

133

135145 153 158 180

191 192

198

204

217

239

257

Preface

This study brings together ideas developed over many years in various lectures in an endeavour to clarify the concept of hermeneutic fore-structure of scientific research. The starting point of my investigations was the outline of an interpre-tative approach to the constitution of science’s cognitive content. In the late 1970s I was preoccupied with a question that nowadays should be formulated as follows: Is it possible to claim a validity of the hermeneutic view of the “situatedness in a tradition” also for the natural sciences? I was convinced that the negative answer implies a self-defeating position. It states that in order to champion the (cultural) universality of hermeneutics, one has to profess the non-hermeneutic nature of the natural sciences. Paradoxically enough, this ans-wer presupposes a sharp dividing line (between dialogical experience and monological research) in culture in order to stress the universality of hermeneutics. Long before the period of perestroika in my corner, I learned from Joseph Kockelmans, Patrick Heelan, and Theodore Kisiel how the universalization of hermeneutics can include the natural sciences without ignoring their cognitive specificity.

Somewhat later, in the aftermath of the discussions over the “finalization of science”, I began to confront the view that it would be a kind of trivializing the struggle for a philosophical hermeneutics if the theory-observation nexus is treated as a specific hermeneutic circle. No doubt, the view is correct. I was, however, dissatisfied with the way of arguing for it. According to its proponents, the place where the hermeneutic circle serves the function of a circulus fructuosus is human communication. Since the research process in the natural sciences does not rest upon “the principles of rational communication”, there is good reason for relegating the experimental-mathematical (and objectifying) forms of investigation to the scope of the (non-hermeneutic) instrumental rationality.1

The argument wrongly presumes that a “hermeneutic model for the natural sci-ences” stands or falls by the possibility of revealing a circulus fructuosus in a process of mutual interpretation of a theory and its data-models. Based on my

vii

viii Preface

long discussions with Gernot Böhme and Elisabeth Ströker (and encouraged by Pierre Kerszberg’s work), I opposed the argument by stressing that a hermeneutics of scientific research should not give answers to old epistemological questions. The task of such a hermeneutic enterprise is rather to deconstruct the epistemologically-centered questioning of science. However, to deconstruct the questioning does not mean rejecting the relevance of (non-representationalist and non-foundationalist) epistemological conceptions to an interpretative (and phenomenological) philosophy of science.

I was very fortunate in having Azarya Polikarov (1921-2000) as my teacher, friend, and colleague. To a certain extent, he was an opponent to the “interpre-tative turn” in the philosophy of science. Yet he proposed a highly original strat-egy of superseding the approaches promulgating the traditional metaphysical dilemmas by a heuristic approach to the philosophically significant “problem situations” in the constitution of scientific knowledge. From him I learned how to develop a “non-algorithmic methodology” that breaks off with the distinction between the context of discovery and the context of justification; how to cham-pion a pluralism of competing theories and a “multi-methodologism” without succumbing to epistemological anarchism; how to profess a “heuristic realism” by avoiding the pitfalls of Cartesian dualism; how to struggle for anti-foundationalism without “epistemological behaviorism”; and how to defend the historicity of scientific rationality while rejecting historical relativism.2

Contemporary studies in hermeneutics of science at once continue and revise Heidegger’s “existential conception of science”. While retaining the traditional concern with science’s cognitive structure (and cognitive specificity), they re-ject any kind of epistemological essentialism (foundationalism, representation-ism, objectivism). Consequently, contemporary studies in hermeneutics of science articulate the “strange position” of cognitive existentialism. Their champions are dissatisfied not only with traditional philosophy of science butalso with those variants of philosophical hermeneutics that exclude science’scognitive structure from the “scope of hermeneutic reflection”.

The main argument of this book is that the “situatedness in a tradition” of normal scientific research underlies both the open-endedness of the research process and the “interpretative conservatism” of scientific communities. Hence, there is an unavoidable ambiguity in the positive answer to the above formu-lated question concerning the possibility of a hermeneutic theory of scientific research's situatedness. Interpretative conservatism does contribute to the isola-tion from the “rest of culture”. Being preoccupied solely with this isolation, many authors tend to exclude the natural sciences from the “scope of the hermeneutic reflection”. Yet the isolation from the rest of cultural experience is itself a hermeneutic phenomenon. The juxtaposition of interpretative conserva-tism and effective-historical open-endedness defines the main hermeneutic char-

Preface ix

acteristic of the natural sciences. This characteristic is intimately related to the cognitive specificity of scientific research – a specificity which should be the theme of an “ontology of interpretation” and not of a normative epistemology. The “unavoidable ambiguity” in answering the question about the validity of the view of “situated transcendence” for the natural sciences is terminus a quo and terminus ad quem of the philosophical hermeneutics of these sciences, which I will try to outline in the present book.

The book is organized as follows. The Introduction describes my aim of re-reading Kuhn’s work in a “postmetaphysical context”. It also locates the project of this study in the field of a tension of competing tendencies in contemporary

discovery-justification dichotomy, I introduce a proposal for a “context of con-stitution”. Chapter One discusses the very idea of a constitutional analysis ofscientific research. Starting with the so-called “existential conception of science”,it traces the development of such an analysis. I contend that to champion “the hermeneutic nature of the natural sciences” opposes both every version of externalism and the deflationary accounts of science’s cognitive content. I finish

to this program, even after Feyerabend, Rorty, and the poststructuralists, the possibility to define science’s cognitive specificity in philosophical terms is not dead. Chapter Two focuses on the main issues of special interest to the hermeneutic reformulation of the concept of normal science. In the course of this reformulation, I outline a particular paradigm of constitutional analysis of scientific research. Chapter Three adresses the basic notions of this paradigm. I suggest that there are several characteristic hermeneutic situations in scientificresearch. To them correspond various types of articulating cognitive content within normal research practices. Following this claim, I develop a conception of a “hermeneutic plurality” and a non-reductionist unity of science. Chapter Four is a discussion of how the constitutional analysis of scientific research may address the intrinsic normativity of research pracrtices in the process of articulating cognitive content.

philosophical hermeneutics. By critically expounding on the deficits of the

the chapter by examining the program for a cognitive existentialism. According

INTRODUCTION

a. The Hermeneutic Task of Re-Reading Kuhn

This book explores the possibility of developing a conception of scientific research as “situated” in tradition, experience, and more generally, in an openhorizon of practical understanding and interpretation. The underlying ideas will be largely familiar to philosophers conversant with the critique of epistemology that was occasioned in the first place by Gadamer’s view of “the universality of the hermeneutic problem” and by discussions thereof in the 1970s and 1980s. Though not formulated in the terminology of hermeneutic philosophy, the view of the “situatedness” of scientific research in its own traditions occupies a promi-nent place in Kuhn’s historical philosophy of the natural sciences. “Normal scientific traditions” and “interpretative scientific communities” are notions whose philosophical analysis requires to having a recourse to the situated transcend-ence as manifested in the routine practices of science’s research everydayness, and to the interpretative openness as a feature of scientific revolutions. Although confessing his commitment to the tenets of hermeneutic thinking,1 Kuhn has never attempted to place his ideas in a hermeneutic context of philosophizing. What he actually studied, however, was precisely the interpretative constitution of cognitive “dynamic structures” like those of scientific discovery, and of sci-entific change.

Only for the sake of illustration, I should like to mention Kuhn’s discussion of the role of anomaly for unexpected discoveries. At stake is a definite problem of interpretation – the break with established normal-scientific “prejudices” which inform the horizon of expectation in the research process. Anomalies (such as a violation of expectation and a destruction of the very horizon) do emerge from the normal scientific research when “both instruments and concepts have devel-oped sufficiently to make their emergence likely” and to make their effects

1

2 Dimitri Ginev

“recognizable as a violation of expectation”. (Kuhn 1977, pp. 173-74) The“broken” horizon of expectation plays the role of an interpretative fore-structure ofa coming cognitive transformation (whose starting point is the “unexpected dis-covery”) which calls into being new anticipations and expectations. In claiming that the recognition of anomalies is due to clashes between the anticipatory horizon and the actual results of doing research, Kuhn is looking neither for a logical (in terms of a “rational reconstruction”), nor for a socio-psychological explanation of unexpected discoveries. “The historical structure of scientific discovery” is always entangled in the interpretative fore-structure of normal scientific research. It is the “practical rationality” of normal science that (by calling into question the relevance of the existing theoretical models) teaches scientists to view old situations in new ways in order to eliminate anomalies.

The present study is inspired by the hermeneutic task of re-reading Kuhn. Generally speaking, a text is re-read when it is placed in a new context. The text invites us to re-read it, for it is open to new interpretations. In every new con-text, the text implies a reader for its concretization. Each new contextual inter-pretation takes place under the guidance of the text’s openness. Following the tenets of literary hermeneutics, one might argue that the openness of a text needs a reader (called by Wolfgang Iser the “implied reader”) for its “completion”.2

More specifically, the implied reader is invited to fill up (under textual guid-ance) the “gaps of indeterminacy” (Iser). As a rule, the “event of re-reading” is called into play by the need to accommodate the text to a familiar horizon. Thereby the gaps are filled up. Yet the text can also be read with the intention of transcending such a horizon. To a great extent, my study is provoked by an attempt to re-read Kuhn’s work in a manner that transcends “familiar horizons” of understanding science.

In this study, Kuhn’s texts are placed in the context of doing philosophy of science after the “end of modernity’s epistemological project”, i.e. the project that is called into being by the link of the representational conception of knowl-edge and the mechanistic science of the seventeenth century.3 Who is the implied reader of his work in this context? There is a short list of answers. First, the reader who is prepared to take a critical stance to previous readings. Second, the reader whose expectation and orientation permit her to transcend the hori-zons of such readings. Finally, the reader who is not inclined to read Kuhn as a historically minded theorist of knowledge, or as an advocate of a version ofrelativism, or as a protagonist of a neopragmatism that by giving up the notion of “data and interpretation” rejects science’s cognitive specificity, or as a neo-Kantian “transcendental realist”, or as a predecessor of a “postmodern turn” in the philosophy of science. In this book I will suggest a re-reading of Kuhn’s work in the perspective of hermeneutic phenomenology. (Following the tenets of Iser’s literary hermeneutics, one has to assume that the “event of re-reading”

3

does not only involve an implied reader. It involves an “implied author” as well. The latter can essentially differ from the personal author of the work. The im-plied author is the hypothetical figure that exercises authorial control in the de-and re-contextualization accomplished by the re-reading. It is the figure that brings into play correctives and sanctions of each new contextual interpretation of the text.)

Of course, the aspiration to re-read Kuhn’s corpus in a postmetaphysical context by shifting the focus from epistemology to a hermeneutic phenomenol-ogy runs into serious difficulties. Champions of literary hermeneutics draw attention to the fact that in a new re-reading textual guidance becomes moreintensive than in previous readings. Do Kuhn’s texts, however, tolerate at all arereading in the aforementioned context? I will answer this question by raising theclaim that sine qua non for the intended rereading is a hermeneutic reformula-tion of the concept of normal science. Yet this claim only shifts the exegetical question which now sounds as follows: Would Kuhn’s writings on a “historical philosophy of science” tolerate a hermeneutic reformulation of the notion of normal science? The negative answer is given as if by Kuhn himself, when he states: “If one adopts the viewpoint I have been describing toward the natural sciences, it is striking that what their practitioners mostly do, given a paradigm or hermeneutic basis, is not ordinarily hermeneutic... The natural sciences, there-fore, though they may require what I have called a hermeneutic base, are not themselves hermeneutic enterprises.” (Kuhn 1991, p. 23)

To be sure, several passages from Kuhn’s early papers suggest the impres-sion that routine research practices are regulated by a paradigm which is not corrigible by normal science. Moreover, they suggest the view that a paradigm guiding puzzle-solving procedures is on an epistemological meta-level with regard to the normal research process. A paradigm (as a conceptual frameworkand methodological codex) dictates the rules of a theoretical interpretation of empirical data, but it is not constituted within the “research everydayness”.4

Though the “Second Thoughts on Paradigms” marks an essential change of the original views (paradigm is the name for the shared commitments of a scientific community that become explicit within normal research), even “late Kuhn” is not willing to admit that what the practitioners of the natural sciences do is a hermeneutic enterprise. In his exchange with Charles Taylor, Kuhn goes on to maintain that because the human sciences are interpretative-dialogical, through and through, “very little of what goes on in them at all resembles the normal puzzle-solving research of the natural sciences.” (Kuhn 1991, pp. 22-23) By contrast, the lack of a dialogical dimension of the research process of the natu-ral sciences preserves the stability of reading the “texts of nature” through math-ematical theorizing and experimentation. In his last writings Kuhn advocates a view that can be summarized as follows: Though there is a constant interpreta-

Introduction

4 Dimitri Ginev

tion (whose “hermeneutic basis” is provided by the paradigm) that aims at im-proving and extending the match between theory and experiment, normal scien-

Does this view imply the impossibility of spelling out normal scientific research in hermeneutic terms? By no means. It only implies the necessity ofdistinguishing between hermeneutic method(s) of the human sciences and the hermeneutic approach to the (communal) discursive-practical being-in-the-world. According to Kuhn, because of the hermeneutic method(s), there are no normal scientific practices that consolidate scientific communities in the human sci-ences. And vice versa, because routine research aims at stable explanatory models, the natural sciences are not hermeneutic disciplines. Since there is a lack of an “interpretative dialogue” with what is under inquiry in the natural sciences, the “dogmatic voice” of paradigms determines a normal scientific con-sensus. By contrast, the dialogical pluralism implied by the methodology of “double hermeneutics” disperses the research work of disciplines like history, art criticism, and cultural anthropology in particular interpretative case studies, which are not guided by general paradigms.

To be sure, Kuhn would not object to the existence of theoretical paradigms in the human sciences (like structuralism and neofunctionalism in cultural an-thropology, or nouvelle histoire and microhistory in historiography). Yet these paradigms remain only methodological orientations of carrying out case stud-ies.5 Such an orientatation (however high is the degree of its methodological codification) cannot inform a “research everydayness” of a scientific commu-nity. Paradigms in a given human science may only engender – so Kuhn’sargument goes – a number of simultaneous incompatible “schools”. These aredistinguished by specific values and stereotypes of interpretation, but not by rou-tine practices of a team-work. On various occasions Kuhn insists (in particular, in his “Comment on the Relations of Science and Art”) that in contradistinction to the arts and the human sciences, there are no schools in the natural sciences. In sum, when Kuhn proclaims that the natural sciences are not a hermeneutic enter-prise, he has in mind the lack of methods of reproductive interpretation in them. When, however, one goes on to reformulate the notion of normal science in hermeneutic terms, one faces the need to make use of the ontological conception of interpretation as constitutive appropriation of possibilities within-the-world.

Following Kuhn’s tenets, one can hold that because of the lack of “semi-artistic” interpretative methods (which promote the formation of “schools”) and because of using repeatable procedures (like experimentation) in disciplines like physical chemistry and biophysics, the routine organization of practices of a team-work becomes possible. Kuhn admits, however, that though not singled out as a special method, interpretation is intrinsic to normal research in the

tific research is the opposite to the interpretative enterprise of the human sciences.

5

natural sciences. Though he does not offer a philosophical account of the inter-pretative nature of the routine everydayness of scientific research, his stance approximates the view of philosophical hermeneutics that interpretation is an ontological dimension of “the everyday mode of being-in-the-world” (in Kuhn’s case, the “research everydayness” of a normal scientific community). Like the champions of philosophical hermeneutics, Kuhn differentiates between (theo-retical, semantic) interpretation as a cognitive procedure and interpretation that is embedded in the interrelatedness of routine practices.

In this regard, I would not agree with Hubert Dreyfus who writes: “Heidegger’s emphasis on truth-determining practices is remarkably similar to Kuhn’s in TheStructure of Scientific Revolutions, but they draw opposed conclusions from their shared insights ... Kuhn argues persuasively ... that a given scientific lexi-con of natural kind terms determines what can count as true ... Heidegger would agree with Kuhn’s elegant argument that true statements in science can be made only relative to a lexicon. But the strong claim that no lexicon can be true or false of physical reality does not follow from the fact of incommensurate lexi-cons ... Specifically, it follows from Heidegger’s account that, although truth depends on Dasein’s practices, among which is the linguistic practice of using incommensurate scientific lexicons, a whole lexicon can be true and another false ...” (Dreyfus 1994, p. 279) I would not agree with Dreyfus’ analysis be-cause he goes on to compare not Kuhn’s view of the “hermeneutic basis” of normal scientific research, but the linguistic relativism of The Structure with Heidegger’s view of Dasein’s concernful dealing within-the-world. In Chapter Two of this study, I shall try to show that early Kuhn’s linguistic relativism is a consequence of a version of framework-content dualism, and for that reason it is incompatible with Heidegger’s non-epistemological account of science. Yet the view of the “hermeneutic basis” supports entirely the claim of existential ontology that the finitude of human beings discloses the infinity of existential possibilities within-the-world. It is the picture of the interplay of immanence and transcendence (of existential finitude and projected horizon of infinite pos-sibilities) that provides an elegant argument against all kinds (including the linguistic one) of relativism.

Is it possible, however, to re-read Kuhn as an author whose main line of argumentation is (to borrow Richard Bernstein’s expression) “beyond objectiv-ism and relativism”?6 Obviously, a hermeneutic reformulation of the concept of normal science has to confront with that relativism which follows from the view that after a scientific revolution the new scientific community is working “in a different world”. I will discuss on several occasions in this book the way of surmounting this relativism from the viewpoint of the “situated transcendence” of scientific research. Let me, however, focus on an anti-relativist argument (formulated most succinctly by Ian Hacking) against Kuhn, which I shall

Introduction

6 Dimitri Ginev

oppose. Target of the argument is the following claim: “Though the world does notchange with a change of paradigm, the scientist afterwards works in a different world.” (Kuhn 1962, p. 121) The claim is quite a convenient point of departure for developing a sort of neo-Kantian historicism. Yet it is above all a serious challenge to basic assumptions of the analytical philosophy of science.

Hacking refers to Kuhn’s challenge as a “new-world problem”. In his view, the problem consists in explaining what it does mean that scientists on either side of a global transformation of theoretical ideas are said to work in different worlds. (See Hacking 1993, p. 276) Leading in Hacking’s solution is the view that the world does not change, but after a scientific revolution the scientists work in a world of new kinds. On this suggestion, the new-world problem has to be sketched in terms of a theory of “scientific kinds” which are sui generis composition of kinds of instruments, apparatus, and artificial phenomena and “kinds found in nature”. The world of individuals is an objective reality that is distinguished from the world of kinds, where in order to get to grips with a post-revolutionary working in a new world one is obliged to “study how the introduc-tion of a kind of instrument alters the world in which the experimenter works not by having a new pile of physical stuff held together with string and sealing wax but by having an instrument of a new kind, with which certain types of inten-tional behavior become possible.” (Hacking 1993, p. 307)

Crucial for Hacking’s approach to the new-world problem is the statement that all scientific facts are relations between scientific (conceptual-experimen-tal-instrumental) kinds. Hacking combines his position of entity-realism with a sort of moderate constructivism. In contrast to the radical nominalism, his start-ing point is the presumption that the world (of scientific research) is not only the thematic world of investigation but the world of a community using conceptual and experimental instruments designed to fall under various descriptions. (A scientific community not only “sees theoretically” a new world, but it works and lives in a new world.) The final step in Hacking’s proposal consists in arranging in taxonomic trees the kinds investigated in various branches of science, whereby scientific kinds in this taxonomy never overlap; “either one is properly con-tained in the other, or they are mutually exclusive.” (Hacking 1993, p. 278) Consequently, the natural-kind terms current in the old world cannot be trans-lated into natural-kind terms of the new world.

The price Hacking’s solution has to pay is the retention of a sort of a “residu-ary-Cartesian dualism”. The solution harbours the metaphysical distinction between individuals and kinds which echoes this dualism. In several papersHacking has been telling us that basic for all philosophical undertakings is the dis-tinction between the world of individuals and the world(s) of kinds. In my view, the talk of worlds of acting, working, living (and finally constructing kinds designated by names that are projectable in Nelson Goodman’s sense) which are

7

superstuctures over the material world of individuals is a continuation of the “old-speak” talk of the “external world” that is “out there” as opposed to the (individual and social) cognitive apparata. In his “new-speak” talk Hacking simply replaces the independence of the external world with Putnam’s inde-pendence of reference of terms from any particular scientific theory. Hacking fails to surmount Cartesian dualism in a radical manner since he does not take into consideration the fact that scientific communities find individuals in “the natural world” always within a projected (here not in Nelson Goodman’s sense) “worldness of the world” as a horizon of interrelated discursive practices. There are neither “natural kinds” nor individuals in the “natural world” existing be-yond the projected horizon of being-in-the-world. This claim is the starting point of a solution of the new-world problem in terms of hermeneutic phenomenol-ogy. At the same time, it provides the rationale for a reformulation of the con-cept of normal science.

It is in keeping with the “practical nature” of normal scientific enterprise that would allow a closer look at the “interpretative phenomena” taking place in scientific research. On the level of the interrelatedness of such practices normal science is predicated on a self-regulatory development. Even when a paradigm changes, inducing thereby significant shifts in the criteria legitimating the res-ults of the puzzle-solving enterprise, there is no break of the continuity of chang-ing configurations of interrelated research practices. The interrelatedness of practices always projects a horizon of further possibilities of doing research; a horizon that resists even the most radical scientific revolution. This horizon is not to be confused with a conceptual scheme. Moreover, it is not statically projected onto normal scientific practices. It is (pre)given in a specific manner to each particular situation of the research process. It is also an “anticipatory horizon” (or, a “horizon of expectation”) regarding the (situational) outcomes of the puzzle-solving activity. Discrepancies between the expectations suggested by the tradition of practical experience and the actual results of research prac-tices like measurements and calculations call into question the “practical ration-ality” (the “prudence”) of the puzzle-solving enterprise. Kuhn’s arriving at the view of normal science’s phronesis is closely related to his criticism of the equa-tion of scientific rationality with normative-epistemological justification.7

Neither the theory of scientific change that stipulates “a constancy of logic and method which unifies each scientific age with that which preceded it and with that which is yet to follow” (Scheffler 1967, p. 9), nor Laudan’s reticulated model of change can give an account of normal science’s practical rationality which provokes a revolutionary conceptual change. The oversimplification coun-tenanced in these conceptions is painful. The account I am looking for is to be given in terms of a hermeneutics of “practical experience” that combines ideas of hermeneutic phenomenology and practice theory. “Practical experience” is

Introduction

8 Dimitri Ginev

an expression denoting that kind of “unreflective understanding” which is8informed by the anticipatory horizon. To a certain extent, the attitude of “prac-

tical experience” that calibrates practices, rules, and dispositions in normalscientific research resembles Bourdieu’s “habitus”. The experience of normal science (say, in molecular biology) is “acquired” through participation in theresearch practices that this experience perpetuates through the “exemplars” (de-riving molecular structures from X-ray diffraction patterns, experiments with information transfer from nucleic acid to protein, sequence analyses of genetic codes, etc.) it generates. Normal scientific experience plays the role of a habitus when in its perpetuation it selects the actions a scientific community’s members perform.

One of the reasons why Bourdieu introduces the notion of habitus is to pre-vent explanations of the organization of practices based on the presumption that thoughts, rules, and plans are not mere accompaniments of practice, but causes and independent determinants of it. In treating (in certain papers) normal sci-ence as a self-regulated organization of practices, Kuhn opposes such explana-tions as well. One can take a step further by claiming that the paradigm’s rules of intepretation (the “hermeneutic basis of normal science” in Kuhn’s terms) are generated by the interrelatedness of activities involved in the research process. It is this interrelatedness that institutes the normative resource (rules and stand-ards) of interpretation, which is at the same time the “implicit normativeness” of normal scientific research. In other words, normal science is an interrelatedness of norm-instituting, interpretative practices. The process of norm-instituting is engendered by the very discursive-practical fore-structure which in this case is a horizon of interpretation by carrying out normal scientific practices. There isa mutual reinforcement of interpretation and norm-instituting process which is an aspect of what Kuhn dubs a “hermeneutic basis of normal science”. Like a paradigm, the hidden prescriptive factors of research practices are not inde-pendent determinants of normal science.

With regard to the upcoming re-reading of Kuhn’s conception (Chapter Two), I should like to single out the moments whose working out will be guiding my attempt to find a way beyond the edge of epistemological justification. The first moment concerns the coexistence of a holistic view of normal science’s cogni-tive structure and (a kind of ) “historical hermeneutics” in this conception. The second moment is the inherence of “practical understanding and interpretation” in the normal scientific enterprise. The unity of understanding/interpretation and discursive practices in normal science informs a discursive-practical fore-structure of scientific research which is the medium of articulation of all con-ceptual paradigms. And the third moment is the type of historicity that arises out of the dynamics of normal scientific practices. It is a type that opposes both the Hegelian type of rational reconstruction and historical-cognitive relativism.

9

b. Providing a Rationale for a Hermeneutic Reformulation of Normal Science

Nancy Cartwright, an author who by no means subscribes to a “hermeneutic program” in the philosophy of science, pinpoints the problems that call into being a reading of normal science related to interpretative notions like practice, tradition, experience, discourse, and situation. She makes it clear that in Kuhn’s conception there is no suggestion “that the concepts of force, mass, and accel-eration have no meaning of their own, that they need to be defined by more concepts like separation and charge. Rather, we need, case by case, to under-stand more concretely what being subject to a force of a given size consists in.” (Cartwright 1993, p. 270) By implication, the “normal scientific practitioners” are not seeking to reduce the theoretical to the observable, nor are they doing anything that bears on confirming a theory or testing a theoretical construction experimentally. Rather, they are, in an interpretative manner, fitting their con-cepts out in concrete models by means of which they constitute the reality under investigation. If one undertakes a step further in this direction, one shall go on to aver that the “interpretative fitting out” is that central feature of normal science which makes hermeneutic reflection necessary. The analysis of the nexus be-tween a community’s belief in the existence of theoretical objects and a routine interrelatedness of research practices illustrates in a tentative manner how this reflection should operate.

In a nutshell, the hermeneutic reformulation I am after consists in the demon-stration that normal science is neither an idealized activity that can be “ration-ally reconstructed” (though it resembles Lakatos’ “work in the protective belt”) nor a state of affairs that is in need of explanation in terms of the sociology of scientific communities (though precisely its scrutiny has essentially contributed to the rise of cognitive sociology of science). In comparing Kuhn’s normal sci-entific puzzle-solving with Lakatos’ account of long-term stability in the history of science, Alan Musgrave observes that the only difference between both con-ceptions “is that Kuhn, following Polanyi, uses psychological terminology, and speaks of the normal scientific community being ‘committed’ to its paradigm. Lakatos, on the other hand, speaks not of ‘commitments’ but of methodological decisions.” (Musgrave 1976, p. 458) In fact, Kuhn has never dealt with the psychological problematics of the motivation of a scientific community’s mem-bers. “Commitment to a paradigm” has not so much to do with personal motivations but with the conservatism of the normal scientific mentality. The latter cannot be elucidated in terms of the “context of discovery”. “Commitment to a paradigm” is Kuhn’s expression for what in philosophical hermeneutics one calls attachment to the “prejudices of a tradition” (or, the “pre-judgments handed

Introduction

10 Dimitri Ginev

down by a tradition”). Both “commitment to a paradigm” and “tradition’s preju-dices” are not subjective but rather trans-subjective phenomena.9 Furthermore, Kuhn’s stress on the conservatism of the normal scientific mentality is informed by the assumption that a scientific community involved in routine practices displays a “non-psychological familiarity” with what is going on in its research domain. I will make the case that this assumption is to be understood in terms of an analysis of the interpretative phenomena indicated in the preceding section.

To begin with, a reformulation of normal science in terms of hermeneutic phenomenology requires a clear delineation of the reality under investigation without committing any kind of sociological or epistemological reductionism. This reality is to be classified under the heading “a scientific community doing normal research in a scientific domain”. The whole expression designates a unitary notion, which is not a mere composition of its ingredients. In other words, “a community of researchers working in a scientific domain” denotes a sui generis entity. “Scientific community” is a sociological notion, whereas “scientific do-main” is an epistemological notion. My point is that a “scientific community working in a scientific domain” is neither sociological nor epistemological, but a notion that has to acquire its meaning in the context of a hermeneutico-phenomenological constitutional analysis.10 It is impossible to match the no-tions of “scientific community” and “scientific domain” by recasting each of them separately in terms of a constitutional analysis. Like the notion of a “scien-tific community working in a scientific domain” is irreducible to its ingredients, the constitutional analysis is not a “composite framework” of descriptive soci-ology and normative epistemology. The aim of the hermeneutic reformulation of normal science in terms of this analysis is to show that the inquiry into the “embeddedness” of both the structure of a scientific domain and the structure of a scientific community in the interrelatedness of discursive practices opens up a new avenue for scrutinizing scientific research.

Stressing the irreducibility of (the kinds of) constitutional analysis to empiri-cal or normative-epistemological investigations allows one to elaborate on a set of notions that go beyond the traditional opposition between the context of dis-covery and the context of justification. The notion of “horizon” (and its deriva-tive, the notion of hermeneutic fore-structure, which will play a crucial role in this study) belong precisely to the intended context of constitutional analysis. They have to be taken into consideration when at stake is the issue of the integ-rity of a “community doing normal research in a scientific domain”. Roughly speaking, in the context of the constitutional analysis at issue is the hermeneutic circularity between the horizon (of doing research) and the particular situations of the research process in which a community of researchers and a scientific domain gradually take shape. It is this circularity that cannot be recast in terms of sociology and normative epistemology. The constitution of both a scientific

11

community and a scientific domain proceeds within a given horizon of doing research. Yet to do justice to the notion of “horizon” requires making use of many other hermeneutico-phenomenological notions, in the first place those of “transcendence”, “situatedness”, “projection”, and “interpretative articulation of meaning”. In a succinct formulation: Normal scientific research in a given domain is a community’s everyday-routine mode of being-in-the-world where “the world” is both the interrelatedness of practices and the ongoing articula-tion of cognitive content.

The conception that will begin to emerge is a result of a twofold disagree-ment with theoretical (as championed by post-positivism) and practical (as suggested by neopragmatism) holism. This conception states that since no puzzle-solving enterprise can exist unless its practitioners are involved in a net-work of “everyday dealings” in a domain of scientific research, there is always a fore-structure of the articulation of a domain’s cognitive structure. This fore-struc-ture, however, does not exist per se. It can only be recognized in the process of articulation of the cognitive content of a scientific domain. Roughly speaking, discursive-practical fore-structure (as unreflective “practical understanding and interpretation” in carrying out routine research practices) projects a room-for-maneuver concerning possibilities of articulating (conceptually, mathematically, and methodologically) a domain of research. In each particular situation of the research process, the articulation of a domain’s cognitive content is pressed forward into a limited range of possibilities.

All cognitive, experimental and communicative activities of producing (worlds

cause there is no worldless activity the talk about an independent world of indi-viduals is meaningless. Within-the-world precedes ontologically both the “world of kinds” and the “world of individuals”. Only within-the-world one is able to draw a demarcation between kinds and individuals (as a specification of the epistemic “subject-object cut”). Furthermore, all demarcations of such a sort (i.e., demarcations based on epistemological considerations) are to be only held with regard to their origin in the discursive-practical being-in-the-world. To stress this is to move towards a reflection upon scientific communities’ two-dimensional existence – within a theoretical world expressed by a domain’s cognitive content, and within a practical horizon of doing research. This reflec-tion is a prelude to a strong (ontological) hermeneutics of science. Working in a new world means changing the mode of being-in-the-world, where the “world” is both the interpretative fore-structure (world-as-a-horizon of doing research) and the changing structure of a domain of research (world-as-a-thematized-reality). The expression “being-in-the-world” stands for a human being’s prac-tical (concernful) involvement in the “world” constituted at the same time by the everydayness of interrelated practices. Therefore, the “world” is simultaneously

Introduction

of ) scientific kinds are “always already” within-the-world. And vice versa, be-

12 Dimitri Ginev

pre-given (not to the involvement in it in general, but to the particular situations qua configurations of discursive practices) and constituted by these practices.

The meaningfulness of the “world” rests upon the discursive-practical in-volvement/constitution in/of it. There is no meaning (including the meaning of the empirical facts studied by scientific theories) in the “world” without being-in-the-world. (To put it in another way, there is no “objectivity”, however de-fined epistemologically, without discursive-practical constitution of meaning.) Accordingly, there is no “world” independent of (the modes of ) being-in-the-world. The “world” is changeable since the modes of being-in-the-world are variable. The existential unity of “agents” and “world” precedes the “emancipa-tion” of any kind of epistemic subject as opposed to an external world that is “out there”. In this perspective, “to work in a new world” amounts to being involved in a new routine discursive-practical enterprise characterized by a specific world-as-a-horizon and world-as-a-thematized-reality. Yet howeverradical the “newness” of the new “world”, there is always an interpretativefore-structure which it shares with the old “world”.

The task to re-read Kuhn’s work with the intention to reformulate the notion of normal science requires specifying the “target-conceptions” by means of which the reformulation should be accomplished. These are hermeneutic and phenomenological doctrines which have to provide the relevant context of the re-reading and the appropriate terms of the reformulation. Yet the “target-con-ceptions” need also to be contextualized. They are to be placed in the context of searching for a new (postmetaphysical) “identity of science”. In addressing this context, Gianni Vattimo makes the observation that “drawing primarily on aes-thetic experience, hermeneutics further advances the polemical assertion of the superiority of the human sciences to the natural sciences ...; and in so doing, it closes off the path to a recognition of its own nihilistic vocation, remaining moreover linked to a vision of science ... that is still metaphysical.” (Vattimo 1997, pp. 16-17).

Prima facie, it does not make much sense to match the “nihilistic meaning of the philosophy of interpretation” with the need for a hermeneutic reevaluation of the natural sciences. If one is going, however, to do justice to this undertaking in terms of “the logic of Nietzsche’s hermeneutics” (as Vattimo suggests), then the “nihilistic vocation of hermeneutics” seems most relevant to the search for a “postmetaphysical identity of science”.11 Vattimo tells us that the “existentialist discovery” of the finiteness of the practical and theoretical horizons of scientific research cannot be separated from that series of events which in Nietzschean terms is called “the history of nihilism”. In other words, a hermeneutically reformurlated Kuhnian philosophy of science does belong to “the nihilistic his-tory of modernity”. Vattimo makes sense of this statement by referring to late Heidegger’s ideas. In discarding the reading of these ideas as a road to an

13

“apophasic ontology”, he launches a “leftist reading of Heidegger” that is guided by the intention to remain faithful to the ontico-ontological difference (i.e., faithful to the engagement of avoiding the collapse of hermeneutic ontology into a kind of interpretative relativism).

Yet this ontology can never be achieved in the form of a complete and univer-sal theory of interpretation in whose terms one can recast the cultural (scientific, religious, political, moral, aesthetic, etc.) experience of modernity. The “return of Being” is no longer possible. What remains possible is “the history of Being as the story of a ‘long goodbye’, of an interminable weakening of Being.” (Vattimo 1997, p. 13) In this case, the overcoming of modern metaphysics is understood as “a recollection of the oblivion of the ontico-ontological difference”. This “weakly ontological theory of interpretation” is precisely in harmony with the post-Nietzshean nihilistic vocation of hermeneutics. The “tendency of weaken-ing” through a recollection of what is forgotten in modernity is, in Vattimo’s view, the only possible way of philosophizing “after the death of God”. Now, the tendency of weakening concerns not only the metaphysical subject-object dualism, foundationalism, objectivism, and representationalism.

The “long goodbye” is also an interminable weakening of the ontico-onto-logical difference itself. A weakly ontological theory of interpretation (not to be confused with James Bohman’s “weak holism”, which is a kind of interpretative epistemology) has to make the phenomenological ontology of human finiteness translatable into interpretative theories with an empirical status (e.g., reflexive sociology, interpretative anthropology, theory of structuration, practice theory). The weakening of the ontico-ontological difference means in this regard a dia-logue (based on a partial co-translatability) between ontological and ontic inter-

12

“postmetaphysical identities” (including that of modern science). Yet the weak-ening of the ontico-ontological difference is by no means only a manifestation of the Nietzschean nihilistic vocation of hermeneutics. The “dialogue that weak-ens” opens up not only the possibility of the aforementioned interpretative theo-ries, but also a wide range of hybrid ontico-ontological discourses which are at once manifestations of a “postmetaphysical culture” and topoi of hermeneutic theorizing where postmetaphysical identities are forged. In contributing to the construction of such identities, the ontico-ontological discourses have an af-firmative vocation as well. Examples of these discourse are art criticism (moulded upon the Gadamerian critique of aesthetic consciousness) after (what Arthur Danto 1986, pp. 81-116 calls) “the end of art”; interpretative theological con-ceptions aiming at a deconstruction of religious fundamentalism;13and the socio-philosophical discourses that seek for (what Chantal Mouffe 1993 calls) “the return of the political”. The ontological hermeneutics of science should be ranked

theories). It is this dialogue that underlies the search for modernity’s

Introduction

pretation (or, between hermeneutic ontology and interpretative scientific

14 Dimitri Ginev

among these discourses. Its task is to provoke a science’s new philosophical self-reflection (and “identity”) that can overcome the ideology of scientism. (See Ginev 2000, pp. 94-99).

Though I do not share the view that the only vocation of contemporary philo-sophical hermeneutics is the nihilistic one, I completely agree with Vattimo that only an ontological theory of interpretation that can forge a non-objectivist (and a “non-scientistic”) identity of science can be a truly postmetaphysical hermeneutics. In reaching this conclusion, let me turn now first to the views I will oppose in my hermeneutic account of scientific research, and second, to the target-conceptions that shall be used in the intended reformulation of normal science.

c. Against Externalism, and the Farewell to Normative Epistemology

As a rule, internalism is defended by those who champion normative epistemol-ogy and cognitive essentialism about the structure and dynamics of scientific knowledge.14 This study is led by the intention to dismiss normative epistemol-ogy and cognitive essentialism in scrutinizing scientific research. Nevertheless, the study advocates a kind of internalism. Yet this is not the internalism of the “rational reconstructions” whose proponents expect to find support for their epistemological theories of rationality in the “empirical manifestation” of sci-ence’s “internal logic” of development. The view I am going to put forward is rather a kind of hermeneutic internalism. On this view, the theoretical and prac-tical horizons of scientific research are responsible for science’s cognitive specificity (and autonomy).15 Furthermore, the interpretative “effective history” (Gadamer’s Wirkungsgeschichte) of normal scientific traditions is the “source” of science’s historicity. By implication, all kinds of science’s externalist historiographies as well as all kinds of rational historical reconstructions are “secondary” with respect to the historiographies suggested by hermeneutic internalism. Finally, this internalism is an indispensable dimension of the def-ence of science’s cognitive autonomy “at the end of modernity”.

The “classical” externalist conceptions of science’s development and change maintain that the leading cognitive interests in constructing better (according to methodological criteria) theories and research programs are (in an important way) “affected” by social, political, and economic circumstances, or, by views stemming from political ideology, aesthetic doctrines, metaphysical systems, religious experience, and moral world-views. For Edgar Zilsel (1942), it is the systematic contact between intellectual strata (university scholars, secular hum-anists, and artisans) that in the early modern age brought into a dialogue theexperimental thinking and the neo-Platonic mathematical speculations. These

15

strata were separate in late Mediaeval Europe and due to the technologicalinnovations by the beginning of the 17th century a merger of the liberal andmechanical arts (and of the aforementioned strata) took place. In the final reckon-ing, the socio-economic change (and the progress of mechanical technology) in early capitalist societies “affected” the cognitive interest in having mathematized theories with empirical interpretations. For Robert Merton (1978, p. 238), “the combination of rationalism and empiricism that is so pronounced in the Puritan ethic forms the essence of the spirit of modern science.” The cognitive interest in carrying out experiments whose results acquire meaning in the frameworks of formalized theories was provoked by the co-existence of neo-Platonic rational-ism and the practical, active, and methodical bents of Puritanism. For Boris Hessen, the cognitive interest in developing a general mechanics (as expressed in Newton’s Principia) is a response to the technological needs of emerging merchant capitalism and manufacture. Joseph Needham “derives” the cognitive interest in constructing scientific theories based on conceptual idealization from the bourgeoisie’s political power which succeeded in bridging the gap between mental and manual labour. For him (like for Zilsel), the nomological design of modern science (i.e., the structuration of scientific knowledge according to the doctrine that the universal natural laws have a divine origin) is inspired by the rise of powerful centralized goverments in the early modern period.

All these conceptions share the assumption that the production of specific cognitive content in the research process is “embraced” by a cultural-historical medium. The embracement is responsible for the content’s specificity. The latter is a function of the former. Changes of the cultural-historical medium would imply changes of the cognitive content (new objects of inquiry, new patterns of theorizing, new mathematical apparata, etc.). Indeed, only some Marxist con-ceptions admit that the medium determines (by establishing causal relations) the “production” of scientific research. (For instance, the socio-economic situation of 17th-century England determines the structure of classical mechanics, in-cluding such particular facts as Newton’s denial that motion is inherent to mat-ter, or his failure to develop a law of the conservation of energy.) Yet, regardless of how “classical” externalism would specify the functional dependence on the cultural-historical medium, in all cases the view is asserted that non-scientific pre-judgments underlie the judgments of scientific reason.

“Non-classical” conceptions of externalism (like that of the “finalization of science”) outline more sophisticated and complex relationships between cir-cumstances and kinds of scientific research. These conceptions are inspired by the political motive to “remove the barriers set against a social orientation of science by conservative members of the scientific community.” (Böhme 1992, p. 6)16 While classical conceptions focus on the initial phases of formation and development of scientific disciplines (when cognitive content is still largely open

Introduction

16 Dimitri Ginev

to external influences), the non-classical ones are prompted by the idea of the existence of cognitively complete branches of science, i.e. branches character-ized by “closed theories” (e.g., Newtonian mechanics). Under the conditions of such a cognitive completion, the further development of the mature scientific branches is determined by targeted external purposes. The social orientation of science acquires a leading role just because there are (from an epistemological point of view) complete theories. At the same time, the incorporation of external orientation and regulation in the cognitive dynamics leads to new forms of “scientizaton” ( scientification ) of social life and the public sphere. “ ”

Non-classical externalism advances non-determinist scenarios of science-society relations, and this is a significant advantage as compared with the clas-sical conceptions. In the last two decades, different forms of social, historical, political, and cultural contextualization have replaced the old-fashioned search for causal determinism. (A case in point is Steven Shapin’s [1994, pp. 310-354] cogent scenario about the formation of Robert Boyle’s view of the proper place and role of mathematics in experimental philosophy. Shapin is highly successful in revealing several non-causal relations between the probabilistic, observa-tional and experimental early-modern English tradition, and the role of civil considerations of social order. As a result, he offers, in particular, a nice externalist account of what “mathematics” and “the mathematical sciences” in early mod-ern culture were for those who had been involved in their practices.) Unlike the classical version, at issue now is something that mediates between social-his-torical circumstances and the pursuit of scientific knowledge. The role of such a mediator is played by scientists’ multifarious experiences of their own settings. These experiences are both external and internal, and their interpretation helps one to contextualize the production of science’s cognitive content. But the pro-tagonists of non-classical (non-determinist) externalism do not dispute the main hermeneutic assumption of the classical version – the assumption that the res-ponse to social, intellectual, and economic circumstances shapes the cognitiveinterest in outlining research programs and constructing theories. By implica-tion, both versions of externalism do contribute to demolishing the critical dis-tance from the pre-judgments of external traditions. On the main externalist assumption, there are in science’s cognitive dynamics circles of interpretation between the horizons of extra-scientific traditions and the articulation of scien-tific knowledge. (For scientists, these are circles underlying their ongoing prac-tices, whereas for students of science, making the circles explicit is the chief task of understanding science historically and philosophically.)

Due to these circles, the cognitive interests of constituting scientific (theo-retical and/or experimental) objects are “absorbed” in what might be counted as “external pre-judgments” of the research process. I think that this assumption is wrong. More specifically, I believe that there is an essential incoherence in

17

the externalist relativization of science’s cognitive interests (and content) tocultural-historical settings. To carry out such a relativization requires two incom-patible procedures. First, one has to draw in epistemological terms a clear bor-derline between the content and context of scientific research. Second, one needs to look for a hermeneutic unity (a common circle of interpretation) between external horizons and internal content. This unity-disunity-contradiction of con-tent-context-relations expresses, in my view, the hermeneutic fallacy of every version of externalism. (There is a special class of historical studies, repre-sented typically by those of Mario Biagioli, which are looking for externalist accounts not of the production of scientific knowledge but of the legitimation of science. For instance, Biagioli [1990, pp. 253-258] tries to show that an episte-mological legitimation of Copernican astronomy and the mathematical explora-tion of nature Galileo practised, required Galileo’s extraneousness to his dicovery of the stars. In this case, the hermeneutic fallacy does not arise since the institu-tionalized codes of a given socio-cultural milieu [like those of the Medici court culture and the Medici system of patronage] are not supposed to explain phe-nomena of cognitive dynamics.)

Even the most detailed externalist case studies fail to take into account scien-tific traditions’ potential of translatability of the external pre-judgments into interpretative fore-structures of scientific research. Thus, in his celebrated study of the formation of conceptual structures of quantum mechanics in the Weimar academic world, Paul Forman makes the point that physicists’ bias towards a renunciation of the principles of causality was influenced by the “irrational metaphysics” (Spengler’s philosophy of life in the first place) of that period. No doubt, the repudiation of causality was an external pre-judgment rooted in vari-ous philosophical, artistic, and political reactions against the abstract intellec-tualism associated with mechanical determinism. Forman is quite successful in arguing that the wide acceptance of non-determinist patterns of theorizing was an expression of physicists’ wish to remove the pain of spiritual loneliness and to form a community with those who dictated the intellectual fashion. In his view, the search for non-causal models in the development of quantum mechan-ics under the circumstances of Weimar culture is an “ideological adaptation” to the Zeitgeist. Forman’s case study, however, does not have resources to explain why the ideological adaptation to the intellectual environment that might result in a personal capitulation to irrational philosophical views and dangerous pol-itical doctrines is not erosive to science’s cognitive structures. (On the contrary,this ideological adaptation is quite fruitful for the advent of quantum mechan-ics.)

To be sure, there is something “irrational” in physicists’ adaptation to the “hostile intellectual environment”, and perhaps, there is a sort of “transgres-sion” of the academic ethos and “the codex of scientific honesty”. Echoes of this

Introduction

18 Dimitri Ginev

transgression are to be heard in Wilhelm Wien’s statement that “the results of research are worthless if they are not taken up into the culture”; in the “quasi-religious conversions to acausality” (Walter Schottky, Richard von Mises, and Walther Nernst); and in the fact that “most German mathematicians and physi-cists largely participated in, or accommodated their persona to, a generally Spenglerian point of view.” (Forman 1971, p. 55) But why did not this irration-alism and dubious ideological adaptation to the intellectual climate invitedistortions of the cognitive structure of scientific research? Why did not the ideo-logical adaptation transform scientific theories into ideological constructions? Why was not the openness to acausality’s pre-judgments destructive in terms of provoking non-scientific forms of idealization, conceptualization, formalization, and so on? Perhaps, there is a significant link between “Weimar culturalirrationalism” and the philosophical spirit of quantum theory, but (unlike thehuman sciences) there is no merger between extra-scientific (in particular,

17metaphysical) ideas and cognitive content.To reiterate, the central shortcoming of both versions of externalism consists

in the failure to take into account the potential of translatability of scientific research. Here, “translatability” is to be understood in the first place as the opposite to the “absorption” of cognitive interests I mentioned earlier. Translat-ability connotes the potential of scientific research to transform all significant external influences into “cognitive factors” of its own mode of being-in-the-world. Nothing external can exercise an influence before being integrated in the intrinsic hermeneutic circles of the constitution of cognitive content. No social, political, or economic circumstance can affect the pursuit of scientific research without being caught up in the intrinsic interpretative fore-structure of the res-earch process. In contrast to the hermeneutic assumption of externalism, theversion of internalism defended here assumes that the interpretative openness of the constitution of a domain’s cognitive content rules out any kind of external determinism. Thus considered, the research process’ interpretative openness promotes a version of cognitive existentialism: The research process in a given domain is mature when the interpretative choice and appropriation of possibili-ties is (1) not disturbed by “untranslatable” external circumstances; and (2) carried out entirely in its own space of possibilities (i.e., in the hermeneutic fore-structure of the research process). (1) and (2) provide the most general charac-terization of cognitive existentialism.

I am not going to state that cognitive existentialism is a consequence from hermeneutic internalism. Rather, by discussing issues of the latter, one is able to enter into the problematics of the former. On a further connotation of cognitive existentialism, it is this fore-structure of scientific research that selects what tointernalize from the cultural-historical milieu and what to transform into cogni-tive factors”. From that point of view, scientific research constructs (or creates)

“

19

its own medium. Due to the interpretative dimensions of scientific research,the constitution of cognitive content “makes possible” a relevant external con-text, which becomes only “visible” within the theoretical and practical horizons of the research process. (When one goes on to restrict cognitive existentialism only to the free choice of possibilities within the research process, then it would be more with a Sartrean than with a Heideggerian flavour. Sartre (1963, p. 168) states that “existentialism is anthropology insofar as anthropology seeks to give itself a foundation.” Not a hermeneutic ontology but the “immediate compre-hension” of the project as non-determined choice of possibilities provides this foundation. This existentialism stresses in the first place the moment of free choice and responsibility. My aim, however, is to show that the conception of hermeneutic internalism is rather in line with a kind of cognitive existentialism grounded on the tenets of hermeneutic phenomenology [and ontology]. For Heideggerian existentialism, what is important is not the individual’s free choice, but the interpretative fore-structure that underlies the problem of choice. The project is not an elaborated plan of acting, but the very existence that is pressed forward into possibilities. Although the free choice always takes place within-the-world of projected possibilities, existence is not determined by something that is outside it. To claim that there is a fore-structure that underlies the prob-lem of choice is not to hold an essentialist determinism. The “ontological prior-ity” of the hermeneutic fore-structuring of scientific research [within the room of projected possibilities] over all kinds of “anthropological factors” is the hall-mark of the Heideggerian version of cognitive existentialism. To follow this version, however, is by no means an unreserved commitment to Heidegger’s variety of hermeneutic phenomenology. The version of cognitive existentialism, I will put forward in this book, involves both a radical criticism of Heidegger’s “existential conception of science” and an implementation of ideas stemming from postwar variants of hermeneutic phenomenology.)

Let me now spell out the same argumentation from another perspective. Hermeneutic internalism does not efface the essential (and philosophically sign-ificant) differences between the objectifying natural sciences and the interpre-tative human sciences. On the contrary, it provides a rationale for arguing that the genuine discussion of these differences can be addressed not by normative epistemology (and methodology), but by hermeneutic philosophy.18 In contrast to the human sciences where there is a constant fusion of internal and external horizons, – a fact of prime importance for Gadamer’s hermeneutics – in the natural sciences the extra-scientific pre-judgments (however influential they might be) are always internalized in practical and theoretical horizons of the research process. Because of the internalization, this process possesses the aforemen-tioned “potential of translatability” of pre-judgments into cognitive content’s elements. Physicists cannot escape the influence of the milieu in which they live,

Introduction

20 Dimitri Ginev

but nevertheless, physical science is immune to the destructive effects of this milieu. There are no extra-scientific pre-judgments that underlie the work of scientific reason. (Forman could display discontent with a certain research pro-gram of that period, but would not go on to claim that even the “fundamentally acausal quantum mechanics” is an irrational enterprise. Though the acausality may result from external influence, it does not operate in physical theories as a metaphysical idea. It is rather an internalized pre-judgment that is translatable into theories’ conceptual, observational, and mathematical languages.)

It is the failure to take into account the above mentioned potential of translat-ability that indicates the hermeneutic deficit of externalism. The deficit rests upon the wrong presumption that patterns of thinking stemming from the extra-scientific milieu come directly (or, via scientists’ experiences) into the theoreti-cal frameworks of scientific research. To put it in another way, what the externalist conceptions fail to take into account is the unavoidable translation of external pre-judgments in ideas and views that only acquire meaning within the theoreti-cal and practical horizons of scientific research. In drawing a parallel with Carnap’s “internal questions”, one could argue that the pre-judgments coming from the intellectual milieu are only operative in scientific research when they are internalized in the hermeneutic circles characterizing the effective-historical dynamics of the research process. The “intrinsic hermeneutic circles” of scien-tific research are stronger than the direct external influence upon science’s cog-nitive structure.

Now, I am in a position to take a preliminary look at the hermeneutic situa-tion of the natural sciences. They attain a cognitive autonomy through a “selec-tive translation” of views, ideas and doctrines in constructions that address “ internal questions” of scientific research. (If not translated in an appropriatemanner, many of the “external pre-judgments” may threaten the ethos of research.)The “methodologically controlled alienation” from the intellectual environment is carried out within the theoretical and practical horizons of doing research, which in this case are also “horizons of translatability”. (In this book I will make the case that it is not the “anti-hermeneutic nature” but the hermeneutic situation of the natural sciences that demands this alienation. And it is not the “purification from hermeneutics” but the “hermeneutics of selective transla-tion” and cognitive existentialism that provide the mechanism of alienation and autonomy.) Thanks to the ongoing translatability that internalizes external pre-judgments, the constitution of theoretical objects of investigation is entirely placed in the cognitive dynamics of research traditions. And because of this translat-ability, the cognitive dynamics takes on the form of an effective-historicaldevelopment, i.e., a development in which every construction is predicated on a “situated transcendence”.

21

The hermeneutic situation of achieving autonomy by means of an ongoing translatability of external pre-judgment informs also the indestructible cogni-tive specificity of the natural sciences. This specificity owes its existence to the stability of the interpretative fore-structures (the intrinsic “horizons of translat-

The natural sciences are resistant to external influences (and able to maintain their cognitive specificity) not because their research process is a non-interpre-tative enterprise, but because of the potential of translatability they demonstrate in each particular historical situation. Their cognitive specificity has to be definedfirst and foremost with respect to the intrinsic hermeneutic circles constitutedby that ongoing translatability which prevents the “ideologization”, “meta-physical finalization”, or “political manipulation” of the research process. Sci-ence maintains its cognitive autonomy not through isolation by implementing procedures of idealization, but by means of interiorization based on ongoing translatability. To come to grips with this hermeneutic situation is the task of the “strong hermeneutics of science” which I will address in the first chapter.

From a “political” point of view, the advocate of hermeneutic internalism is an uncompromising antagonist of all “postmodern philosophies of science” that expose the academic ethos and autonomy of scientific research to danger. In particular, she opposes the social epistemologists’ attempts to reform scientists’ research practices in a “socially responsible manner”.19 The advocate of hermeneutic internalism rejects the very possibility of developing normative programs for a society’s political control over the production of scientific knowl-edge. Every appeal to the “democratization of scientific authority” from outside (i.e., from “the rest of society”) threatens scientific research with a destruction of its practical and theoretical horizons of producing knowledge.

Against the background of the view of hermeneutic internalism outlined thus far, let me indicate the type of criticism of normative epistemology that will be followed in this book. The articulation of such epistemology (codifying scien-tific rationality) is a response to the demand of preserving science’s cognitive autonomy. In my view, it is the wrong response. At stake in normative episte-mology is the belief that one may defend science’s cognitive autonomy in the context of justification by stressing a canon of (invariant) epistemological norms that express the essence of science as an intellectual enterprise. Thus, the nor-mative-epistemological strategy of defending science’s cognitive autonomy is coupled with the position of cognitive essentialism. As a rule, those who advo-cate this position (cum justificationist normativism) raise the (negative) argu-ment that there is no alternative to the essentialist view of scientific rationality.20

According to Lakatos (1978), the abandonment of this view entails a commit-ment not only to dubious philosophical positions (like historical relativism) but to dangerous political positions (“elitism” and “authoritarianism”) as well. Lakatos’ caution sounds reasonable and seems to suggest the indispensability

Introduction

ability”) and not ( pace Husserl and Gadamer) to the procedures of idealization.

22 Dimitri Ginev

of normative epistemology. What then is wrong with the coupling of science’s cognitive autonomy with the normative-essentialist doctrine of scientific ration-ality?

Provisionally, I will outline four answers relating them to the efforts of Feyerabend, Polanyi, Toulmin, and hermeneutic phenomenology. Feyerabend’s answer rests on the assumption that all normative theories of rationality are only tools for insinuation that the regularities (in the development of science) are not merely factual, but are a manifestation of aprioristic normative codes of rational behaviour. There is no such theory that can provide reliable arguments for the choice of the standards of normative appraisal. All methodological can-ons of rationality are obtained via arbitrary steps. There is also another aspect of Feyerabend’s attack against the normative stylization of methodology as a kernel of scientific rationality. The conceptions in normative epistemology (and philosophy of science) offer arguments in favor of the “objective” (rather than “meta-historical”) character of the methodological norms, standards, and crite-ria. Feyerabend refutes the claim of objectivity in a manner that reminds us of the strategy of “naturalizing epistemology”. In his view, to claim objectivity for given standards means that by following them (granted that the cognitive proce-dures are also “objective”) one will obtain the same epistemic results in the same circumstances. This “objective normativity”, however, “arises as the res-ult of rigorous training that reinforces some reactions and supresses others.”(Feyerabend 1974, pp. 27-28) Hence, normativity is the subject of an empirical theory of the training process in scientific institutions. The appeal to objectively valid norms (i.e., norms whose validity transcends each empirical context of their application) functions as an instrument for epistemological indoctrination.

Michael Polanyi (1969, p. 138) expresses his aversion to normative episte-mology by raising the following claim: “No rules can account for the way a good idea is found for starting an inquiry, and there are no firm rules either for the verification or the refutation of the proposed solution of a problem. Rules widely current may be plausible enough, but scientific inquiry often proceeds and triumphs by contradicting them.”21 The main point of Polanyi’s criticism of normative theories of knowledge is that the rules of rational scientific behaviour are part of the practical experience of doing research and they are known tacitly. The explicit formulations of rules and norms presuppose “tacit knowledge”, which is always situational and contextual. As a consequence, there is no “stat-ute law” but only a “case law” for demarcating between rationality and non-rationality. The logic of “tacit inference” may serve as a heuristic model of the situationally prescriptive “logic of discovery”.

Stephen Toulmin is most consistent among post-positivist authors, in his efforts to tie down the criticism of normative epistemology with a (partially Wittgensteinian and partially neo-Aristotelian) emphasis upon praxis and

23

historical experience. Toulmin (1976, p. 666) writes: “Since the intellectualcontent of a natural science embraces both its (linguistic) terms and propositionsand also the (non-linguistic) procedures ..., the ‘third-world’ model of science must make room for the essential praxis of natural science alongside its propo-sitions and inferences, terms and ‘truths’.” By raising this claim, Toulmin op-poses the refusal to take into account concrete, contextual, and contingent rules and norms of praxis. In his view, alluding to the normative dimensions of prac-tical experience does not mean an irrational surrender to the context of discov-ery. By integrating these dimensions in the “sphere of rational discussion”, he shifts essentially the demarcational line between rational and non-rational. Ques-tions of the changing normativity of scientific praxis remain rational (or, ques-tions of the “evolutionary ecology” of scientific disciplines) in contrast to the institutional, psychological, or sociological questions of “scientific professions”. In his most recent papers Toulmin displays sympathy for “the hermeneutics of the natural sciences” as an approach to the inseparability of practical rules and normative codices of rationality.

To sum up, there are three main types of arguing against a normative-episte-mological definition of scientific rationality in post-positivist philosophy. In dif-ferent ways, Feyerabend, Polanyi and Toulmin are trying to overcome the hypostatization of normativity through a certain reform of the doctrine of rat-ional reconstructon (i.e., the doctrine that couples cognitive essentialism withnormative epistemology). Feyerabend proceeds from an opportunist relativism called by him a “Kierkegaardian view of scientific rationality”: The task of reconstructive epistemology is neither to replace rules and norms, nor to show their worthlessness, but “to increase the inventory of rules, and ... to suggest a different use for all of them ... [This epistemology] regards each piece of res-earch both as a potential instance of application for a rule and as a test case ofthe rule ... We are guided by the vague hope that working without the rule, or on the basis of a contrary rule we shall eventually find a new form of rationality that will provide a rational justification for the whole procedure...” (Feyerabend 1977, p. 368) This statement reveals the quintessence of “epistemological anar-chism”. Polanyi tends to a kind of heuristic psychologism. He believes that the paradigm of gestalt psychology of perception demonstrates the “tacit opera-tions” of scientific research. The cognitive coherence of the research process is grounded upon these operations and their contextual rules. Toulmin adheres to an evolutionary model of scientific reason, in which there is only room for regu-lative mechanisms (by no means immune to variability) that maintain a continu-ity in the face of historical change. Toulmin ascribes to these mechanismsimplicit normative functions of preserving a dynamic equilibrium between inno-vative and selective processes. Again, the contextual rules of, say, selecting “conceptual populations” in the historical evolution of collective understanding

Introduction

24 Dimitri Ginev

replace the invariant methodological norms of rational behavior. In all three casesthe protest against the ahistorical and essentialist approach to the normative notion of scientific rationality does not rule out the normative dimension of scientific research.

The impetus to unfold the intrinsic normativity of scientific research comes to the fore in hermeneutic phenomenology as well. Yet in this case, at issue is not the ways of contextualizing or relativizing the methodological rules, but the “regularizing perspectivity” of each mode of being-in-the-world. It is the in-volvement in practical and theoretical horizons that informs a perspectivity of doing research. Each particular mode of being-in-the-world constrains us to articulate meaning (as praxis, discourse, and knowledge) in a given perspective. Thus, the inescapable perspectivity of existence implies a discursive-practical proto-normativity of articulating meaning and constituting “meaningful worlds”. In hermeneutic phenomenology, the idea of discursive-practical proto-normativity is intimately related to the defence of “relativity without relativism”. However different our cognitive, historical, or linguistic worlds might be, there is always a shared horizon of “primitive meanings” and meaningful orientations of every-day practices. On this view, one has to do justice of the contextual norms and rules not by weakening the ideal of a rational reconstruction in the context of justification – a strategy followed by all post-positivist philosophers – but by spelling out the idea that in-the-world is always in a range of “existential possi-bilities”.

In this study (Chapter Four), I am going to spell out an answer to the above formulated question and develop an alternative to the normative-epistemologi-cal justificationism from two standpoints: the proper hermeneutics of non-representationalist (and holist) epistemology, and the “ontological normativity” of scientific being-in-the-world. The principal tenet I will follow demands that all epistemic normativity be articulated within the horizon-boundedness (Horizontgebundenheit) of the discursive practices in-the-world. There are no ultimate, critical standards of rationality that “transcend” the horizon-boundedness. Corresponding to the latter is the notion of proto-normativity,which refers to the part-whole relations of various hermeneutic circles character-izing the normal scientific research process – relations between a projected horizon of possibilities for doing research and particular actualizations of them; between a totality of routine everydayness and particular situations in the res-earch process; between a whole interrelatedness of research practices and parti-cular configurations of practices; between a community’s transsubjectivity and individual choices of possibilities in a particular situation, etc. In all these

research process.ing preferences, inclinations, expectations and orientations that shape the cases, the horizon-boundedness serves a proto-normative function in delineat-

25

Proto-normativity is not a “product” of a normative mentality. On the con-trary, proto-normativity underlies the formation of normative-methodological attitudes in normal science. It is rather an intrinsic characteristic of the unreflective commitment to the horizon of a routine “skillful coping” with experimental ins-truments, conceptual and mathematical tools. Proto-normativity accompaniesthe self-perpetuating normal science. Since all “practical understanding” (the know-how of everyday activities) embraces a proto-normative regulation, the latter is existentially (ontologically) prior to the regulation through explicit epis-temological and methodological norms.22

Notoriously, Karl-Otto Apel tries to rescue the normative epistemology and normative reconstruction of scientific rationality from the arguments of philo-sophical hermeneutics. Though rejecting the postulation of non-contextual meth-odological norms, he is not willing to dismiss the normative-epistemological notion of rationality altogether. (See Apel 1994 and 1997) In his view, the surrenderof the “regulative idea of possible progress” of the rationality of understandingand interpretation is tantamount to a repudiation of a critical (evaluative-reconstructive) function. If one admits the ontological priority of the proto-normativity (generated by the interrelatedness of practices) and holds that the “prejudices” of practical experience are “more powerful” than the normative principles of rational dialogue and agreement, one is unable to determine the logos of hermeneutics. To do justice to this logos requires taking into account the “validity-claims in communicative agreement”, which define the regulative criteria for progress in understanding and interpretation. The “transcendental pragmatics” (as a result of reframing Kantian themes in terms of communica-tive intersubjectivity) rehabilitates normative epistemology’s notion of scien-tific rationality by recasting Lakatos’ “codices of scientific honesty” in terms of universal cognitive interests and their validity-claims. Matthias Kettner argues that in attributing a universal cognitive interest in objectifying and controlling physical nature to the natural sciences, Apel is not relativizing science’s empiri-cal truth. He goes on to assert that “without some conceptually universal tie to human agency and to significant practices in which human agency flourishes in the actual world as a source of empirical knowledge would lose its very point for us ...” (Kettner 1996, p. 263) In opposing this claim, I should like to stress that all of the conceptually universal ties of science to human agency are gener-ated in the medium of discursive practices of the modes of being-in-the-world that are not characterized by conceptually articulated cognitive interests (and validity-claims). The essential difference between philosophical hermeneutics and transcendental pragmatics lies in the construal of the discourse-notion. The former operates with the notion of a discourse-as-an-interpretative-medium, whereas the latter is committed to the notion of discourse as a tool of universal cognitive interests. For philosophical hermeneutics, discourse reveals the hermeneutic truth, while for transcendental pragmatics it makes validity-claims.

Introduction

26 Dimitri Ginev

This is why Apel’s enterprise needs a certain paradigm of normative epistemo-logy. Elsewhere I spelled out the view that in rehabilitating the normative notionof (scientific) rationality, transcendental pragmatics fails to defeat cognitive essentialism. (See Ginev 1999b) The myth of a pre-communicative knowing subject is replaced by the myth of a transcendental intersubjectivity whose prin-ciples of unrestricted rational dialogue build up the ultimate cognitive essence of all cultural forms of man’s being-in-the-world. It follows from this criticism of Apel’s intersubjective reframing of normative epistemology that proto-normativity is to be attributed to the phronesis of designing and carrying out practices, and not to the structural possibility of argumentative discourse. In terms of Being and Time, proto-normativity is to be attributed to the fore-sight, fore-having, and fore-conception of everyday practices.

d. On the Phenomenological Background of Cognitive Existentialism

According to Husserl, the life-world of which “we are all conscious” is the horizon of our everyday life. It is the world in which forms of life distinguished by particular aims and goals take shape. The life-world is a “self-enclosed ‘world’-horizon”. What exists within this world is not a matter of indifferent (objective) predication. Entities and events are meaningful when they are congruent with the participants’ ends in the life-world.23Within the self-enclosed horizon what is right and wrong does not depend on elaborated criteria. It is the pre-predica-tive practical experience that decides in this regard. Like the “practical criteria” of right and wrong, the whole life-world is unthematic for the practitioners. Being in the self-enclosed world-horizon implies a “communal understanding” (Husserl’s expression) of the participants. The transition from everyday life to scientific idealizations destroys the life-world’s self-enclosedness. Husserl (1970, p. 380) writes (in a manuscript from 1936) that the “scientific world, the scien-tists’ horizon of being, has the character of a single work or edifice growing ininfinitum, upon which the generations of scientists, belonging to it correlatively, are unendingly at work.” Since the scientific world is not constituted within a self-enclosed horizon, it is not a “work-world”, but a “work of predicative truth”. The lack of “horizons of everydayness” (or, “horizons of pre-predicative truth”) in the scientific world can be characterised as a “deworlding” (Entweltlichung).

Despite all essential differences between Husserl’s and Heidegger’s concep-tions of science, they share mutatis mutandis the same idea of “deworlding”. For Heidegger, in the change-over from everyday circumspection within the totality of the “equipment-world” to the theoretical attitude of objectifying thematization, one overlooks the place of what has a character of tool in this world. In this scenario of deworlding, the place of a tool in the equipment-world

27

becomes a matter of indifference, or more specifically, it becomes “a spatio-temporal position, a world-point”. (In the popular example of the falling body, the everyday horizons of seeing and using such bodies are replaced by idealizations that disregard everything except the initial position and velocity of the falling body. Being reduced to “ideal-mathematical entities”, the bodies are world-points of a mathematically projected infinite reality.) Speaking more tech-nically, after the deworlding of the equipment-world (or, the “work-world”), the transition to a mathematically homogeneous world of objectifying thematization becomes possible through the formulation of relevant theorems of invariance. In the most elementary case, these are theorems that concern displacement in time and space (as a first step of an “objectifying replacement” of the “world of concernful everydayness”). For a large class of classical theories, Poincaré’s derivation of the theorems of invariance from the equations of electrodynamics provides something like a “code of deworlding” employed by classical scientific thinking. (Notoriously, this code is invalid for most of the non-classical theo-ries, in which one cannot derive theorems of invariance from theoretical postu-lates.) What for Husserl is a destruction of the self-enclosed world-horizon, for Heidegger is a releasing of places of equipment ready-to-hand from the confine-ment of the equipment-world.

In opposing Husserl’s and Heidegger’s idea of deworlding, one of the main tasks of the strong hermeneutics of science is to reveal the intrinsic “horizons of everydayness” of scientific research. Although Heidegger deals with the “exis-tential genesis” of science’s theoretical attitude, the very idea of deworlding (deprivation of worldness) implies cognitive essentialism about scientificresearch. The idea states that the mathematical projection of an infinite andhomogeneous “natural world” is the cognitive essence of science on which allresearch practices are based. All kinds of objectifying thematization presupposedeworlding attained by means of mathematical projection. According to Heidegger (1962, p. 414), science’s specificity consists “in the fact that the entities which it takes as its theme are discovered in it in the only way in which entities can be discovered – by the prior projection of their state of being.” Strangely enough, because of the idea of deworlding “the existential conception of science” of Being and Time involves a significant essentialist assumption. The task of that version of the strong hermeneutics of science, which I will follow in this study, is to develop a kind of constitutional analysis without reducing it to cognitive essentialism. This task requires revealing the intrinsic horizons of normal scien-tific research and addressing hermeneutic phenomena of everydayness, situated transcendence, interrelatedness of practices, pre-narrativity, proto-normativity, temporality, hisoricality, and so on as “existential conditions” of the constitu-tion of research domains. By integrating the account of these phenomena in a paradigm of constitutional analysis of scientific research that aims at unfolding

Introduction

28 Dimitri Ginev

science’s cognitive specificity, one follows the tenets of what I have called cog-nitive existentialism. Let me now touch upon that distinction of the traditional philosophy of science whose overcoming has to make headway in the further discussion of the possibility of cognitive existentialism.

e. Beyond the Context-Distinction

Two great philosophers of the last century – Imre Lakatos and Azarya Polikarov–argued that there exists a realm of rational heuristic procedures and non-guaranteed methods for problem-solving between the context of discovery and the context of justification. In both cases, the belief came into prominence that there is no ultimate instance of (“Euclidean principles” in Lakatos’ terms) epis-temological justification, but nevertheless, scientific research is governed by a kind of “methodological rationality”. Lakatos (starting with the program of Proofsand Refutations) was inspired by Polya’s ideas for a mathematical heuristic that is susceptible to rational analysis. Under the guidance of these ideas, Lakatos developed the methodology of research programmes. Polikarov was inspired by several lines of research in AI. His “divergent-convergent method of problem-solving” (which includes procedures of detecting possible solutionsand procedures of selection of relevant solutions) is devised to identify criteriaand standards of doing research that are not justified by a normative-epistemological reconstruction.

In joining (from a hermeneutic position) the efforts for a heuristic philoso-phy of science, my aim in this study is to define a specific context of scrutinizing scientific research. I should like to call it the context of constitution (or, the context of cognitive existentialism). Delineating this context (in Chapter Three) raises the important question about the traditional distinction between the con-text of discovery and the context of justification. The interpretative fore-struc-turing of scientific research is not to be cast in terms of the context of discovery, since the “spiral movement” of the hermeneutic circles (e.g., between a horizon of theorizing and particular theoretical constructions, between an interrelated-ness of research practices and particular procedures of inquiry, and so on) it involves is intrinsic to the cognitive dynamics. (This statement is a corollary to hermeneutic internalism.) Yet the fore-structuring does not belong to the context of justification either, because it is not “located” in science’s “ready-made cog-nitive content”, which is the theme of all programs of rational reconstruction.

The “situated transcendence” and interpretative openness of scientific res-earch shifts the focus from what is complete (in epistemological and semanticterms) to what is in status nascendi (or, what is yet to be completed). Studying science in the context of constitution is opposed first and foremost to all kinds of

29

reifying scientific knowledge. There is no Platonic world of science’s cognitive entities ( pace the dogmatic construals of objective knowledge’s “third world”), and no Hegelian historical logic of science’s development ( pace the attempts to build a self-consistent version of rationalism within the historiography of sci-ence that can avoid the self-authentication of philosophy in history). The consti-tution of science’s cognitive content is situated within the traditions of doing research. The “effective history” of these traditions is not to be subjected to the standards of a rational reconstruction. Yet the studies in the context of constitu-tion are not to be reduced to a particular sort of empirical investigation of “sci-ence in the making”.

In a central claim I am going to spell out, studies in the context of constitu-tion place more emphasis upon the dynamics of research practices. There is no articulation of cognitive content beyond the interrelatedness of these practices. By no means, however, studies in the context of constitution would advance a picture of scientific research as a heterogeneity of contingent practices and “local accomplishments”. In opposing any kind of philosophical essentialism,the proponents of such studies are not willing to reduce their enterprise toethnomethdological descriptions of research practices. Ethnomethodology of science tries to avoid the methodological difficulties with the problem of “dou-ble hermeneutics” in understanding the laboratory everydayness by abandoning a core of philosophical (and sociological) interpretation in favor of an endless array of practitioners’ (philosophical and sociological) self-interpretations. For ethnomethodologists of scientific practices, only the collection of such self-in-terpretations (Garfinkel’s “wild sociologies”) does make sense.24 By contrast, the studies in the context of constitution start out with (the ways of) handling the problem of “double hermeneutics” in the interpretation of scientific practices. In this context, the interpretative constitutional analysis of practitioners’ self-in-terpretations of their being-in-research-domains (i.e., the “double hermeneutics” of the constitutional analysis) is a sui generis methodologization of the ontico-ontological distinction. The empirical (ontic) interpretation of research prac-tices presupposes (and requires) an ontological interpretation of what becomes constituted within the interrelatedness of these practices. To enter the context of constitution amounts to entering the hermeneutic circles between empirical and ontological interpretation.

In the context of constitution, the notion of “constitution” has very little to do with the social-constructivist notion of “construction”. I agree with Michael Lynch (1993, p. 267), who claims that “no particular epistemic or political criticism would seem to follow from the announcement that ‘science is a social construction’, nor would it imply that scientists could possibly choose to act differently.” The champions of the sociology of scientific knowledge go on to universalize the notion of “social construction” in a manner that trivializes it.

Introduction

30 Dimitri Ginev

The possibility of “facts before artifacts” in scientific research drops out of relevance. Social constructivism (in particular, cognitive sociology of science) trivializes itself by rejecting the possibility of “unconstructed realities”. In order to avoid such a self-defeating trivialization, studies in the context of cognitive existentialism specify the notion of “constitution” in paradigms of constitutional analysis. (See Ginev 2001b) The assertions that facts, social contexts, cognitive content, theories, theoretical worlds, cultures of research work and so on are constituted through processes of interpretation do make sense only within a given paradigm of constitutional analysis. These paradigms are at the bottom of the context of constitution.

For many years the traditional context-distinction has been under attack from different perspectives. It has been criticised for the impossibility of drawing a clear-cut temporal differentiation between discovery and justification. In fact, discovery and justification are not only intimately interwined, but their insepa-rability is an essential feature of scientific work. Of course, “there is no reason to conclude that the entire process of discovering must be completed before the process of justification can begin.” (Salmon 1970, p. 37) But nevertheless, the constant interplay between discovery and justification prevents one from draw-ing a clear demarcational line between studying scientific research (exclusively) in terms of a certain empirical discipline and judging the rationality of this res-earch (exclusively) in terms of normative epistemology. Neither discovery norjustification can be extracted as “pure” processes. Furthermore, the disciplines that are supposed to constitute the two contexts are not so clearly divided as the context-distinction admits. On the one hand, psychology, sociology, and cul-tural history (the main disciplines that provide data and explanatory resources to the context of discovery) contain significant logical and normative aspects, and on the other, normative epistemology presupposes empirical studies for de-lineating the context of justification. (Moreover, there is no normative justifica-tion that can be detached from the justifying psychological and social attitudes. Empirical processes are always shaping the normativity of justification.) Fin-ally, a necessary condition for defending the context-distinction is to claim theirreducibility of normative epistemology to empirical disciplines. But if this claim fails, as, in particular, the champions of naturalized epistemology assert, then there is no room for separating the normative from the factual in scientific research.25

I am not trying here to articulate further some of the existing lines of criti-cism of the context-distinction. It is not my aim to reject the pragmatic validity (and value) of differentiating between normative reconstruction and “ethno-graphic” description of the construction of scientific knowledge. My basic argu-ment is rather that the issues addressed in both traditional contexts are “ontologically irrelevant”. This is why neither in the context of justification nor

31

in the context of discovery one can pose the problem of constitution. What strikes me about this state of affairs is not so much the dichotomizing of the factual and normative aspects of science as the fact of ignoring that both “sci-ence-as-praxis” and “science-as-cognitive-structure” are only manifestations of science as a kind of being-in-the-world. The context of constitution is to be delineated by taking into consideration the ontico-ontological difference. (In terms of this difference, both the rational justification and the empirical studies of research practices are “ontic enterprises” since they are unable to formulate and approach the ontological problematics of the constitution of meaning within-the-world. In hermeneutic phenomenology, reflection upon this problematics defines a transcendental position with regard to the treatment of empirical and normative-evaluative issues.) This is why the ontico-ontological difference in-forms a transcendental dimension of the analysis of the constitution of meaning within-the-world. Yet, in delineating the context of constitution, one has to avoid a transcendental dichotomism in appropriating this for the purposes of a hermeneutics of scientific research.

As I pointed out in the preceding section, a kind of transcendental dichotomism is still preserved in Heidegger’s existential conception of science. Let me remind that thanks to the transformation of the world of everydayness into a mathe-matical infinity of world-points, science cannot “think” the meaning of Being.It is science’s cognitive essence (objectifying thematization through mathemati-cal projection) that prevents scientific research from asking transcendental ques-tions about the existential-temporal structure of Being. It is no accident that Heidegger develops his conception of the “genesis” of science’s theoretical atti-tude in a section of Being and Time that defines the transcendental position of hermeneutic phenomenology through the formulation of “the temporal problem of the transcendence of the world”. In this context of discussion, he postulates objectifying thematization as science’s cognitive essence in order to show that the theoretical attitude that constitutes its objects of inquiry through mathemati-cal projection cannot approach the “transcendental problem of transcendence”. By objectifying, scientific research is “making-present”, but the latter is distin-guished from the temporal modus of the present of everyday circumspection within-the-world. Science’s making-present is rather an atemporalization that prevents from thinking the “ecstatical unity of temporality” as the transcendence of the world. Yet if “transcendence does not consist in objectifying, but is presupposed by it” (Heidegger 1962, p. 415), then objectifying thematization has its own existen-tial-temporal structure, which is totally ignored by Heidegger. To subject this structure to a constitutional analysis is the main task of cognitive existentialism.

I am indicating tentatively the basic point of my criticism of Heidegger’s conception, since in this study the same point will be of prime importance in overcoming the dilemmas of the context-distinction. Engaging science in the

Introduction

32 Dimitri Ginev

context of constitution requires a confrontation with all kinds of cognitive ess-entialism entrenched in the discovery-justification controversy. With the turnto constitutional analysis of science as a mode of being-in-the-world, hermeneutic philosophy of science tries to attain two aims. First, it allows us to reformulate many important problems (e.g., the problem of scientific rationality, the prob-lem of incommensurability, and the problem of demarcating internal from exter-nal history of science) posed by the standard (analytical) philosophy of science in an entirely new framework. Second, it opens up a horizon of new problematizing. In this regard, the context of constitution invites discourses (hitherto ignored or prohibited by analytical philosophy) to dwell on various non-standard problems.

f. The Post-Epistemological Dimension of the Context of Constitution

Hermeneutic studies of science in the context of constitution have an ambivalent relation to the “epistemological heritage” of the traditional philosophy of sci-ence. On the one hand, by embracing the “discursive-practical image of sci-ence”, they break in a radical fashion with any kind of subject-object dualism. On the other hand, in contrast to the postmodern programs of “overcoming epistemology”, they retain a connection with some holistic and semantic theo-ries of scientific knowledge. This ambivalent relation is consonant with a post-epistemological (not to be confused with an anti-epistemological) position that in my further analysis will be specified in different directions. By “post-episte-mological philosophy” I mean a discourse that does not aim at “epistemological foundations and justifications”, but nevertheless admits (not only the possibility but also) the necessity of “systematic” reflections regarding the authority and autonomy of scientific knowledge. (See Ginev 2001a) (The first historical step towards a post-epistemological attitude is the disentanglement of reflections upon truth, objectivity, validity, and rationality of knowledge from the frame-work of subject-object dualism. In my opinion, this first step was undertaken by Popper in his “epistemology without a knowing subject”. By putting the “objec-tive problem situations” first, Popper combats “traditional” [subjectivist] epis-temology [typically represented by Locke, Berkeley, Hume, and Russell], on the one hand, and the objectivist reification of knowledge, on the other. The special status of his “third-world situational logic” is informed by the unique combina-tion of a kind of anti-naturalism [anti-behaviorism and anti-psychologism] and a quasi-mathematical [anti-mentalist] constructivism, achieved through a criti-cism of Brouwer’s intuitionism. I should go on to assert that Popper (1979, pp. 140-145) suggests a view of “situated transcendence of scientific inquiry” in terms of his objectivist-constructivist epistemology.)

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Though non-foundationalist and non-justificationist, the reflections upon truth, objectivity, and rationality of scientific knowledge in a wide range of post-epis-temological conceptions do not collapse into an “epistemological behaviorism” that explains any and every sort of epistemic authority (including that of sci-ence) by reference to particular contexts of social interaction. (In a succinct formulation, epistemological behaviorism “is a matter not of metaphysical par-simony, but of whether authority can attach to assertions by virtue of relations of ‘acquaintance’ between persons and, for example, thoughts, impressions, universals, and propositions.” [Rorty 1979, p. 177]) The main common feature of all post-epistemological conceptions is the rejection of deflationism implied by epistemological behaviorism. All of them assume that a cognitive autonomy based upon epistemic rationality and authority cannot be explicated in behavioral and interactionist terms. Yet the rejection of deflationism does not eo ipso legiti-mate the indispensability of (non-foundationalist and non-justificationist) epis-temological reflections. To dispense with such reflections is the ambition of most champions of a “systematic” phenomenological constitutional analysis, who show little sympathy for “scientism” (as modern science’s metaphysical self-identity), but are eager to guard with non-epistemological means science’s cognitive autonomy and authority.

Thus, there are post-epistemological conceptions, in which the redescription of issues about objectivity, autonomy, rationality, and the truth of scientific knowledge is carried out without invoking non-Cartesian kinds of epistemol-ogy. (To be sure, to this category belong not only conceptions of hermeneutic and phenomenological traditions. Kenneth Burke is an example of a post-epistemological thinker, who dispenses with “systematic” epistemological ref-lections. In rejecting behaviorist deflationism, he recasts epistemic authority,truth and objectivity into rhetorical terms. For Burke, the tropes of metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, and irony are vehicles for such a recasting. (See Burke 1969) Indeed, he is not a philosopher of science. This is why a much more appropriate example of post-epistemological thinking that is committed nei-ther to a non-foundationalist epistemology nor to a constitutional analysis is the whole tradition of the so-called “Methodical Constructivism”, which grew from the early works of Hugo Dingler and was developed by the Erlangen school of Paul Lorenzen. (See Janich 1997) Philosophers like Peter Janich, Jürgen Mittelstrass and Friedrich Kambartel working in this tradition believe that the transitions from pre-scientific to scientific knowledge can be sub-jected to a “principle of methodical order”. According to this principle, sci-ence’s objectivity, truth, and rationality stem from everyday practices and are, consequently, constrained by pre-scientific interests, goals, and values. The normative function of methodical constructivism as a “critical philoso-phy of science” consists in rejecting theories that represent research practices

Introduction

34 Dimitri Ginev

and cognitive results in an order which hides the real steps and passages of 26their construction. ).

Cognitive existentialism is a post-epistemological conception that can be developed in both variants – by means of complementarity between non-Cartesian (holist) epistemology and constitutional analysis, and through a radical version of such analysis that dispenses with epistemological assumptions. This study tends to the second variant.27