This study recapitulates basic developments in the tradition of hermeneutic and phenomenological studies of science. It focuses on the ways in which scientific research is committed to the universe of interpretative phenomena. It treats scientific research by addressing its characteristic hermeneutic situations, and uses the following basic argument in this treatment: By demonstrating that science's epistemological identity is not to be spelled out in terms of objectivism, mathematical essentialism, representationalism, and foundationalism, one undermines scientism without succumbing scientific research to "procedures (...) of normative-democratic control" that threaten science's cognitive autonomy. The study shows that in contrast to social constructivism, hermeneutic phenomenology of scientific research makes the case that overcoming scientism does not imply restrictive policies regarding the constitution of scientific objects. (shrink)

It is the purpose of this paper to represent an analysis of four variants of critical philosophy of science: the constructivistic methodology, the reflexion upon science from the viewpoint of the critical theory of society, the ‘social natural science’ as a further development of the finalization conception, and the projective philosophy of science. Special attention is paid to the comparison of these variants. Some points of convergence as well as of divergence among them are revealed. A common shortcoming is indicated.

At stake in the classical realism-debate is the clash between realist and anti-realist positions. In recent years, the classical form of this debate has undergone a double transformation. On the one hand, the champions of realism began to pay more attention to the interpretative dimensions of scientific research. On the other hand, anti-realists of various sorts realized that the rejection of the hypostatization of a “reality out there” does not imply the denial of working out a philosophically adequate concept of (...) reality. Against the background of this double transformation, new arguments in the realism-debate emerged. The present Introduction is an attempt at systematizing these arguments within the spectrum of doctrines between the poles of scientific realism (exposed and defended by Howard Sankey) and hermeneutic realism (advocated by Dimitri Ginev). The authors try also to demonstrate that after the classical debates the issue of scientism has to be addressed in new ways. (shrink)

_ _In __The Tenets of Cognitive Existentialism__, Dimitri Ginev draws on devel-opments in hermeneutic phenomenology and other programs in hermeneutic philosophy to inform an interpretative approach to scientific practices. At stake is the question of whether it is possible to integrate forms of reflection upon the ontological difference in the cognitive structure of scientific research. A positive answer would have implied a proof that “science is able to think.” This book is an extended version of such a proof. (...) Against those who claim that modern science is doomed to be exclusively committed to the nexus of objectivism and instrumental rationality, the interpretative theory of scientific practices reveals science’s potentiality of hermeneutic self-reflection. Scientific research that takes into consideration the ontological difference has resources to enter into a dialogue with Nature. Ginev offers a critique of postmodern tendencies in the philosophy of science, and sets out arguments for a feminist hermeneutics of scientific research. (shrink)

Ginev works out a conception of the constitution of scientific objects in terms of hermeneutic phenomenology. Recently there has been a revival of interest in hermeneutic theories of scientific inquiry. The present study is furthering this interest by shifting the focus from interpretive methods and procedures to the kinds of reflexivity operating in scientific conceptualization. According to the book's central thesis, a reflexive conceptualization enables one to take into consideartion the role which the ontic-ontological difference plays in the constitution (...) of scientific objects. The book argues for this thesis by analyzing the formation of objects of inquiry in a range of scientific domains stretching from highly formalized domains where the quest for objects' identities is carried out in terms of objects' emancipation from structures to linguistic and historiographic programs that avoid procedural objectification in their modes of conceptualization. The book sets up a new strategy for the dialogue between scientifc inquiry and hermeneutic phenomenology. (shrink)

The paper provides an overview of the hermeneutic and phenomenological context from which the idea of a “constitutional analysis” of science originated. It analyzes why the approach to “hermeneutic fore-structure of scientific research” requires to transcend the distinction between the context of justification and the context of discovery. By incorporating this approach into an integral “postmetaphysical philosophy of science”, I argue that one can avoid the radical empiricism of recent science studies, while also preventing the analysis of science's discursive practices (...) from collapsing into the frames of radical anti-epistemological critique mandated by some hermeneutic philosophers. (shrink)

In this article, I examine various aspects of the application of Heidegger's motif of interpretative articulation (the core phenomenological motif of existential analytic) to the constitutional analysis of meaningful objects in scientific research that are contextually ready-to-hand. It is my contention that not only the concepts of the ‘fore-structure of understanding’ and the ‘as-structure of interpretation’, but also the extended concepts of the ‘hermeneutic fore-structure of meaning constitution’ and ‘characteristic hermeneutic situation’ are the keys to understanding the interpretative nature of (...) scientific research. The paper applies the constitutional analysis of hermeneutic phenomenology to several phenomena of scientific research—constitution of meaningful objects, situational fulfilment of a domain's general project, production of a domain's thematically given objects, implementation of readable technologies to what is contextually ready-to-hand, reading hypothetical theoretical objects, and exegetical textualizing within interrelated practices. The study is supplied with exemplary illustrations from enzymology and biochemistry. The correlation between a domain's interpretative articulation and the appropriation of research possibilities within the research everydayness is addressed. Special attention is paid to the belief in and reading of intracellular enzymes as hypothetical theoretical objects. (shrink)

Much of Ludwik Fleck’s work on the social constitution of knowledge, scientific facts, and objects of inquiry is informed by a specific use of transcendental arguments. This paper analyzes the ways in which Fleck looks for “conditions of possibilities” for the stylization and circulation of cognition. Following a brief discussion of his political agenda regarding science’s “cultural mission,” the paper offers a reconstruction of Fleck’s implicit concept of the transcendental. It is argued that Fleck addresses scientific truth as an ongoing (...) revealing and concealing of possibilities for doing research. By implication, the truth about a scientific fact is at once situated in scientific practices and transcended by a horizon of possibilities. The transcendental takes shape in Fleck’s social epistemology as a result of the reflection upon knowledge production’s “situated transcendence.”. (shrink)

The paper suggests a critique of scientism by revealing the existential genesis of knowledge-constitutive interests in scientific research. This scenario of overcoming scientism is spelled out in terms of the doctrine of cognitive existentialism. On the doctrine?s central claim, a knowledge-constitutive interest is not fixed and determined by a strongly situated epistemic position that is distinguished by invariant norms of theorizing, methodological devices, cognitive aims, goals, and values. In reflecting upon its situated transcendence, scientific research has a potentiality for discarding (...) that form of objectivist realism which is pre-supposed by the ideology of scientism. The paper develops arguments against the essentialist picture of scientific research shared by philosophers as different as Heidegger and Habermas. (shrink)

This paper discusses the tenets of the politics of postmodern philosophy of science. At issue are Rouse's version of naturalism and his reading of Quine's distinction between the indeterminacy of translation and the underdetermination of theories by empirical evidence. I argue that the postmodern approach to science's research practices as patterns of interaction within the world is not in line with the naturalistic account Rouse aims at. I focus also on Rouse's readings of Heidegger's existential conception of science and Kuhn's (...) concept of normal science. Finally, a strategy of defending science's cognitive distinctiveness in terms of hermeneutic philosophy is suggested as an alternative to the postmodern philosophy of science. (shrink)

IntroductionThe aim of this paper is to outline the program of a hermeneutic theory of the way in which reality becomes disclosed and meaningfully articulated in practices of scientific inquiry.Text and MethodsI describe the profile of hermeneutic realism by addressing the issue of how objectified factuality is produced within the facticity of inquiry. Hermeneutic realism is characterized as a position that discards foundational epistemology and cognitive essentialism. I argue that the meaningful articulation of domains disclosed in scientific inquiry is an (...) ontologically self-sufficient process. This claim is the kernel of interpretive internalism. At stake in my analysis is the interplay of interrelated scientific practices and the possibilities for doing research, granted that the practices’ interrelatedness is projected upon the horizon of possibilities. Three kinds of hermeneutic circularity in this interplay are distinguished. They refer accordingly to the selection of data, the construction of data-models, and the saving of phenomena whereby theoretical objects become contextually envisioned. The main emphasis is placed on the reading of theoretical objects in the articulation of scientific domains.ConclusionThus, the kind of philosophy of science pertinent to hermeneutic realism and interpretive internalism aims at revealing reality within the facticity of inquiry. (shrink)

In drawing on Poincare’s conventionalism, Cassirer’s neo-Kantianism, Duhem’s methodological conservatism, and Russell’s holist doctrine of scientific knowledge, Worrall (1989) launched in his classical paper a new position in realism debate. The champions of structural realism have managed to combine a sense in which the development of science is cumulative with a picture of theory change that coheres with the argument of the “pessimistic meta-induction”. Twenty two years after the publication of Worrall’s paper, the volume under review presents an exciting recapitulation (...) of the structuralist movement’s main achievements. The recapitulation is most welcome, since from the very outset of its development not only did structural realism oppose the forms of logical reductionism, but it also got its emancipation as a philosophical position through suggesting an alternative to van Fraassen’s constructive empiricism, while at the same time provoking a transformation of the latter into structu .. (shrink)

The paper attempts to elucidate and evaluate Oskar Becker’s search for a complementarity between the paradigm of constitutional analysis put forward by Heidegger’s hermeneutic phenomenology and constructivism as a meta-mathematical position suggesting criteria for existence of the mathematical objects. At stake is the issue of the possibility of an existential analytic of “the mathematical”. In this regard, a special attention is paid to the temporality of “mathematical existence”. Th e paper invites new forms of a dialogue between phenomenology and philosophy (...) of mathematics. (shrink)

Rather than attempting to combine the two meta-methodological programmes for justifying the epistemological study of science, which is the case of Laudan's normative naturalism, this paper aims at presenting a third alternative to the controversy between the traditional normativism and the reductionistic naturalism. The paper is a preliminary move in developing a theory of the autopoietic cognitive organization of science. The underlying assumption of this project calls that science is a self-constructing, self-specifying and homeostatic system. The scrutinizing of these three (...) predicates leads to the view that the epistemological propositions about science cognitive organization are neither normative, nor descriptive, but transcendental ones. The final discussion shows the connection between this project and the theory of group rationality. (shrink)

Based on an analysis of double hermeneutics in the human sciences, a distinction between a weak and a strong rhetorical analysis of human-scientific research is introduced, taking account of the self-reflective character of hermeneutic interpretation. The paper argues that there are three hermeneutic topics in the research process for human-scientific experience, which are associated with applying specific rhetorical tools. The three topics are described under the following rubrics: (a) bridging the gap between experience-near and experience-distant concepts; (b) achieving integrity of (...) the cultural objects dispersed in different interpretive strategies; and (c) taking into consideration that an important task of hermeneutic interpretation in human-scientific research is to give an account of the object's immanent narrative coherence. The paper is written in the conviction that a kind of re-methodologization of philosophical hermeneutics which does not rehabilitate epistemological foundationalism can provide a new philosophical identity to the human sciences. (shrink)

The principal aim of this article is to examine the capacity of existential analytic to suggest alternatives to entrenched dichotomies and dilemmas in practice theory, and more generally, in social theory. In this regard, the doctrine of trans-subjective existentialism is developed. The underlying aim is to inform hermeneutic engagement with social practices’ potentiality-for-being in order to illuminate a possible existential ontology of practices. It is argued that the concept of chronotope should be central in this ontology. Thus, the possibility of (...) hermeneutic realism about social practices becomes open to scrutiny. (shrink)

This article addresses the ongoing debate between transcendental pragmatics and philosophical hermeneutics. I argue that Apel's version of linguistic transcendentalism is to be refuted, if one succeeds in demonstrating that the normative conditions of intersubjective validity of the argumentative discourse are `derivable' from the fore-structure of the discursive-practical medium of communication. Loci for specifically hermeneutical investigations of this fore-structure include the proto-normativity of the discursive practices, the effective-historical openness of the medium of communication, and the interplay between argumentative discourse and (...) medium. (shrink)

The paper presents a comparative analysis between hermeneutics and ethnomethodology of science. A careful examination of the approaches suggested by the two programs not only demonstrates that a non-essentialist inquiry of scientific practices is possible, it also reveals how the significant methodological differences between these (post-phenomenological) programs inform divergent pictures of science’s practical rationality. The role these programs play in the debates on science’s cognitive autonomy is illuminated by spelling out the idea of the internal criticism of scientific research they (...) advance. In contrast to the external criticism of social epistemologists, the internal one does not aim at a deconstruction of science’s cognitive autonomy. Its task is to promote the epistemic emancipation of scientific communities by stressing the reflexive dimension of scientific research. (shrink)

This is a sequel to my paper, "Searching for a Foundational Approach to Philosophy of Science", which appeared in an earlier issue of this Journal [Ginev 2001, Journal for General Philosophy of science 32, 27-37]. In the present paper I continue to scrutinize the possibility of a strong hermeneutics of scientific research. My aim is to defend the position of cognitive existentialism that combines the advocacy of science's cognitive specificity and the rejection of any form of essentialism. A special (...) attention will be paid to the notion of the thematizing project of scientific research. (shrink)

My aim in this paper is to re-examine Arthur Fine’s concept of the natural ontological attitude. Whereas earlier critical interpretations focus on the compatibility of NOA with scientific realism, I argue that Fine’s conception is to be recast in terms of an interpretative theory of scientific research. Specifically, I make the case that the hermeneutic reformulation of NOA is unavoidable when at stake are the issues of the structural, conceptual, and experimental articulation of scientific domain. The paper concludes by considering (...) the formation of local epistemological positions in the research process. (shrink)

This article develops the thesis that normative social orders are always fore-structured by horizons of possibilities. The thesis is spelled out against the background of a criticism of ethnomethodology for its hermeneutic deficiency in coping with radical reflexivity. The article contributes to the debates concerning the status of normativity problematic in the cultural disciplines. The concept of hermeneutic pre-normativity is introduced to connote the interpretative fore-structuring of normative inter-subjectivity. Radical reflexivity is reformulated in terms of hermeneutic phenomenology.

This paper discusses a version of the hermeneutic philosophy of science. Special focus is placed on the ways of reading theoretical objects in scientific inquiry. In implementing readable technologies, this reading succeeds in contextually visualizing the theoretical objects by means of various sorts of signs. A configuration of readable technology accomplishes a further step. The configuration textualizes the contextually produced signs. Textualizing the reading of theoretical objects interlaces the meaningful articulation and objectification of scientific domains. The horizon of possibilities for (...) textualizing is constantly shifting in the process of normal-scientific inquiry, and the shifting horizon plays the role of a hermeneutic fore-structuring of the outcomes of textualizing. The paper explores the importance of “material hermeneutics” for the contextual reading of theoretical objects. The conclusion is drawn that the hermeneutic study of the entanglement of technological artifacts with the outcomes from reading-as-textualizing requires the introduction of ontic-ontological difference. (shrink)

In this book the author has brought together his long-standing interests in theory of scientific rationality and hermeneutic ontology by developing a hermeneutic alternative to analytic (and naturalist) epistemology of science. The hermeneutic philosophy of science is less the name of a new field of philosophical than a demand for a repetition of the basic philosophical questions of science from hermeneutic point of view. The book addresses chiefly two subjects: (I) The hermeneutic response to the models of rational reconstruction of (...) scientific knowledge; (II) The specificity of hermeneutico-ontological approach to the cognitive pluralism in science. (shrink)

In my presentation, I will try to develop a picture of scientific research in terms of heremeneutic phenomenology. I will claim that theoretical objects of science do exist at once as "inscriptions" on the horizon of possibilities for doing research, and as "traces" left by practices of formalization, experimentation, calibration, measurement, and calculation. The possibilities become appropriated in the research process, whereby a conceptual structure of scientific domain gradually takes shape. According to this, the horizon of possibilities remains always an (...) open fore-structure of interpretation concerning the structure of the domain. In elaborating on this view, I will sketch out a phenomenological program of "cognitive existentialism". (shrink)

In _Debating Cognitive Existentialism_ the authors offer philosophical, cultural-theoretical, and sociological perspectives on the value of extending hermeneutic philosophy to the natural sciences. At stake is the universality of post-metaphysical hermeneutics.

Die doppelte Hermeneutik wird im vorliegenden Aufsatz als eine Strategie geisteswissenschaftlicher Umformulierung der ontisch-ontologischen Differenz behandelt. Die Aufgabe ist es, zu zeigen, wie die Interpretation als epistemische Prozedur mit einer konstitutionstheoretischen Interpretation verschränkt wird. Betrachtet wird ein integraler Zirkel der doppelten Hermeneutik, durch welchen die Verschränkung der beiden Interpretationen innerhalb geisteswissenschaftlicher Erfahrung zu Stande kommt. Der abschließende Teil unternimmt den Versuch, die Eigenart der vom integralen Zirkel erzeugten Empirie zu befragen. Der Versuch kulminiert in dem Aufweis, dass diese Empirie durch (...) eine unreduzierbare Prä-Narrativität charakterisiert wird. (shrink)

Any conception in linguistics and linguistic philosophy that prioritizes the world-disclosing function over the world-representing function of language can be regarded as a kind of linguistic hermeneutics. The paper tries to specify this general thesis by picking up and analysing historical trends in the philosophy of language. It spells out the relationship between the situatedness of locutors in the medium of linguistic practices and the way in which they articulate this medium by actualizing possibilities for personal expressivity and interpersonal communication. (...) It is argued that the starting point from the medium that always already transcends the particular speech acts offers an alternative to inferential semantics. From the perspective of linguistic hermeneutics, the world is disclosed and exposed to ongoing articulation in characteristic hermeneutic situations of language use. The concepts of linguistic medium and discursive articulation of the world are treated in terms of hermeneutic trans-subjectivity as enabling all forms of communicative intersubjectivity. If one ignores the fore-structuring role of the former, one would hypostatise the latter. With regard to this claim, the theory of formal pragmatics is critically discussed. (shrink)

Die Frage nach dem ontologischen Status theoretischer Objekte fordert eine Auseinandersetzung mit den Doktrinen des semantischen Realismus, des wissenschaftlichen Realismus und des konstruktiven Empirizismus. Die epistemologische These der potentiellen Veranschaulichung theoretischer Objekte beruht auf hermeneutischen Voraussetzungen, aus deren Explikation sich eine ontologische Auffassung der angesprochenen Objekte ergibt. Die Interpretation theoretischer Objekte auf der Grundlage eines kognitiven Existenzialismus ermöglicht eine hermeneutische Erweiterung des Komplementaritätsprinzips. Zwei Fassungen dieses Prinzips werden in Termini des kognitiven Existentialismus formuliert.

ABSTRACT The aim of this paper is to draw important parallels between the way in which configured pictorial practices of early Cubism interpreted the idea of tactile space and the phenomenological concept of existential spatiality. It is argued that in dispensing with the “illusion of perspectival space” and deconstructing geometrical perspective, several Cubist artists developed a position of multi-perspectival realism with respect to what remains ungraspable in the three-dimensional visual rendering of space. Tactile space is the main theme of early (...) Cubist painting. Tactility remains concealed by linear perspective and three-dimensional space, and existentially primordial tactile space turns out to be the ungraspable which Cubist experiments has to disclose. At the same time, these artists succeeded in avoiding any kind of a reification of space as something that statically embraces what is situated in it. The paper is also preoccupied with Cubist “geometrical experimentation”. The claim is defended that it is precisely this experimentation that most essentially anticipates Heidegger’s analyses of the spatiality of the ready-to-hand and the spatiality of being-in-the-world. Parallels are also drawn with Merleau-Ponty’s spatiality of the perceiving-tactile body which was chiefly focused on the presupposition that the visibility attained through visual perception is imbued with invisibility stemming from the immediate tactility relating the perceiving body and the perceived entities – a presupposition shared by the early Cubists and the French phenomenologist. (shrink)

This paper is an assessment of the key debates on Heidegger’s existential conception of science. It relates the topics to contemporary problems in the philosophy of the natural sciences, providing the reader with a framework to evaluate various versions of hermeneutic phenomenology of scientific research as alternatives to both, naturalistic and normativeepistemological conceptions of scientific research. The paper delineates a context of constitution that is irreducible to the context-distinction between discovery and justification. In this context, the tenets of the doctrine (...) of cognitive existentialism are formulated. (shrink)

This paper is an assessment of the key debates on Heidegger’s existential conception of science. It relates the topics to contemporary problems in the philosophy of the natural sciences, providing the reader with a framework to evaluate various versions of hermeneutic phenomenology of scientific research as alternatives to both, naturalistic and normativeepistemological conceptions of scientific research. The paper delineates a context of constitution that is irreducible to the context-distinction between discovery and justification. In this context, the tenets of the doctrine (...) of cognitive existentialism are formulated. (shrink)