Babette E. Babich
Hermeneutics is usually defined as the scholarly and rigorous and so “scientific” [wissenschaftliche] interpretation of texts in the historical context of their transmission. In consequence, it tends to be assumed that hermeneutic philosophy of science involves the interpretation of scientific texts (research notes and reports, scholarly articles, text books, popular science accounts) or else the philosophical reflection on such interpretations, sometimes defined as a double hermeneutic or (scientific) interpretation of (scientific) interpretation.
Such a double hermeneutic, however, turns out to require yet another doubling in the case of science, whether that of the many natural sciences1 or indeed the various social sciences, inasmuch as the foregoing text-limited schematism overlooks the reference of empirical scientific practice to the interpretation of nature itself corresponding as well, in the case of the social or human sciences, to the human subject, in both cases in addition to thematic reflection on scientific practice as such, both current and historical. These “objective” references are key for the hermeneutic and phenomenological philosophers of science Patrick Aidan Heelan and Joseph J. Kockelmans as well as Hans-Jörg Rheinberger, Dmitri Ginev, and Babette Babich, among others—in addition to Martin Heidegger, who first adverted to the hermeneutic phenomenological orientation to nature and scientific observation in the scientist’s laboratory practice in addition to the scientist’s own reflective theoretical expressions, in this latter case following Edmund Husserl.2 Hence, the Heidegger of Being and Time (1927) begins with an explicitly methodological reflection on hermeneutic phenomenology as articulating the regions or fields of inquiry of the specific individual sciences as that within which that which is to be investigated can be explored.
If Heidegger two years earlier had referred almost in the very same terms Husserl uses, to the “crisis of philosophy as science,” and again almost verbatim in Being and Time—reflecting that all “sciences and groups of sciences are undergoing a great revolution of a productive kind that has opened up new modes of questioning, new possibilities, and new horizons” (Heidegger 2002, 148)—he went on to detail the theory of relativity in physics along with the crisis of foundations in mathematics, to which one must add quantum mechanics along with the movement against, on the one hand, mechanistic and, on the other hand, vitalistic thinking in the biological or life sciences. For Heidegger, what is at issue is the constitution of modern technological and mathematizable (measurable, calculable, model-oriented) science, conceived in both the Husserlian phenomenological sense and the mechanically explicit sense of standardized manufacture and institutional technology.3
Albert Einstein once suggested that we might do better to pay attention to what scientists do, echoing René Descartes’ remark in his Discourse on Method, by contrast with what scientists say they do. Hermeneutic philosophy of science thus may be regarded as a phenomenological elaboration of Einstein’s Cartesian meditation. For from the start, hermeneutic philosophy of science has focused not only on historical and current scientific texts, including scientific laboratory reports and communications, professional articles, and research protocols, but, even beginning with Heidegger, it has also attended to the scientist’s own hermeneutic and phenomenological (that is to say: experimental) interpretation of nature. This includes the hermeneutic phenomenology of scientific observation—“reading” scientific instruments. For Heidegger, indeed, a hermeneutic phenomenology is built into the world of scientific research (technological autonomy and determinative technique) from the outset: “Within the complex of machinery that is necessary to physics in order to carry out the smashing of the atom lies the whole of physics.”4
Patrick Aidan Heelan, the Irish mathematician, physicist, and philosopher of science, takes up this hermeneutic notion to develop his own account of “readable technologies” in his reflections on objectivity, specifically with regard to the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics in the writings of Werner Heisenberg but also in his reflections on what he calls the “observable” in Niels Bohr as well.5 By contrast, Heidegger’s focus on the methodological consequences of the very technological constellation or institutional laboratory and research setup is more general. Hence, to the formation of scientific training that we think of as the “scientific method,” the logic of research and the “demarcation” of the region or field of scientific inquiry as such must be added to the worldly complex that is scientific practice.
Thus, Heidegger observes that the specific and ever-narrowing specialty and sub-specialty fields of the scientific research enterprise is
by no means simply an irksome concomitant of the increasing unsurveyability of the results of research. It is not a necessary evil, but an essential necessity of science as research. Specialization is not the consequence but the foundation of the progress of all research.6
What is at issue for Heidegger is the hermeneutic constitution of modern technological and mathematizable (measurable, calculable, model-oriented) science as conceived in both the Husserlian phenomenological sense as well as in the mechanically explicit sense of standardized manufacture and institutional technology. In the “ongoing activity” of science, “the plan of an object sphere is, for the first time, built into whatever is.”7 As a result, Heidegger argues that
modern physics is not experimental physics because it applies apparatus to the questioning of nature. Rather, the reverse is true. Because physics, indeed already as pure theory, sets nature up to exhibit itself as a coherence of forces calculable in advance, it therefore orders its experiments precisely for the purpose of asking whether and how nature reports itself when set up in this way.8
In this sense, hermeneutic philosophy of science is always a hermeneutic phenomenology of science including, for Heidegger, a sustained reflection on this very “setting up” of nature, to use his terminological expression for this experimental ordering, and consequently on the way “nature” subsequently “reports itself when set up in this way.”9
Heidegger, like Nietzsche before him, had argued that philosophy is an explicitly active questioning. Setting sense-oriented reflection [Besinnung] in opposition to the calculative and predictive and controlling project of Western technologically articulated science, Heidegger observes that “all scientific thought is merely a derived form of philosophical thinking” (Heidegger, 2001, 26). This is not merely a matter of saying that philosophy “is prior in rank”10 but of emphasizing the logic of hermeneutic philosophy as a creative or “productive logic” (Heidegger 1962, 30) capable of
leaping ahead into some area of Being, disclosing it for the first time in the constitution of its Being and, after thus arriving at the structures within it, making these available to the positive sciences as transparent assignments for their inquiry.
(Heidegger 1962, 31).
In this sense, it is a fundamentally hermeneutic fore-structuring that makes science possible in the first place. Thus, it is possible to summarize the classically hermeneutic philosopher of science Joseph J. Kockelman’s primary concerns by detailing
the triads of fore-having, fore-sight, and fore-conception that characterize the kinds of scientific thematization (qua objectification of the world.) The “anticipatory sighting” of what gets constituted by epistemic practices ensures the passage from hermeneutic ontology to hermeneutically pertinent epistemology. Horizonal understanding is at once a constitutive ontological phenomenon and (via its interpretative specification) the fore-structure of each kind of knowing (including the knowing achieved by procedures of idealization in the natural sciences).11
Like Kockelmans, Heelan’s hermeneutic account of the philosophy of science similarly draws on Heidegger’s convention, using the prefix fore-, which is in turn a hermeneutic articulation of Husserlian intentionality: fore-having, fore-sight, and fore-conception. Given the very hermeneutic phenomenological predisposition of natural science, Heidegger proceeds to articulate his opposition of “aletheic truth” to the truth of the sheerly factically correct under way (in the context of discovery) toward a specifically and essentially scientific uncovering in truth: writing that before “Newton’s laws were discovered, they were not ‘true’” (Heidegger 1962, 269). In other words, as Heidegger explains:
with such truths entities became accessible in themselves to Dasein. Once entities have been uncovered, they show themselves precisely as entities which beforehand they already were. Such uncovering is the kind of Being which belongs to “truth.” (Heidegger 1962, 269)
It is in this revelatory/un-covering or “aletheic” sense that the later Heidegger will argue that instead of the explicitly calculative or mathematized reasoning,12 traditionally regarded as the heart of scientific cognition, it is much rather reflective or hermeneutic questioning that first constitutes “the unique habitat and locus of thinking.”13
For his part, Heelan argues that “hermeneutic philosophy of science” is concerned “with the generation, transmission, and acceptance of meaning within the lifeworld.”14 Hermeneutics is thus inseparable from the natural sciences and was from the outset for Heelan, “the original method of the human sciences stemming from F. Schleiermacher and W. Dilthey.”15 This same focus on meaning has also had important convergences with influential accounts of the role of hermeneutics using the more neutral language of “interpretation” in the social sciences. Thus, the subjectivist economist, Ludwig Lachmann invokes “The Method of Interpretation” in his 1970 study of Max Weber without once using the theologically weighted term hermeneutics. Sources influential in what may be described as Anglo-analytic approaches to the hermeneutics of science may be traced to the Canadian political theorist Charles Taylor, who also emphasized “interpretation” in the human sciences (Taylor 1971) along with an overview of Gadamer and the human sciences,16 in addition to the ethnographer Clifford Geertz (2005/1972),17 the sociologists Anthony Giddens, Howard Garfinkel, and Erving Goffman (ethnomethodology), in addition, to be sure, to Thomas Kuhn.
Geertz, as an economic (handicapping, betting odds, and including probability analysis)18 structural anthropologist, draws not only on his own predecessors Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead but also on Suzanne Langer and Maurice Merleau-Ponty as well as on, and importantly, what Geertz calls the “thick” or deep literary theory of Northrop Frye (which “thickness” has been ever since associated not with Frye but with Geertz). It is in Geertz’s effort to give an account of what he describes as a “Balinese reading of Balinese experience: a story they tell themselves about themselves” (Geertz, 2005/1872, 82) that he emphasizes that the “extension of the notion of a text beyond written material, and even beyond verbal” is nothing new. Indeed, Geertz’s hermeneutico-metaphorical ethnographic account draws quite explicitly on Ricoeur, but no less on Max Black and, as Lachmann’s account shows, on Weber, in addition to Geertz’s own invocation of “Lévi-Strauss’s ‘structuralism’.” (Geertz, 2005/1872, 83) To this extent, Geertz may be seen as the palimpsest for the emphasis on text-author-reader even as Geertz himself offers an emphatically hermeneutic ethnographic account of the (note the reference to Frye) “coding” of the Balinese cockfight, and thus means the text reference qua text as metaphorical, all echoing Ricoeur’s specific themes, including the reference to hermeneutics in Aristotle and comprising, Galileo himself as both Heelan and Paul Feyerabend emphasize,19 the
interpretatio naturae tradition of the Middle Ages, which, culminating in Spinoza, attempted to read nature as Scripture, the Nietzschean effort to treat value systems as glosses on the will to power (or the Marxian one to treat them as glosses on property relations), and the Freudian replacement of the enigmatic text of the manifest dream with the plain one of the latent.
(Geertz, 2005/1872, 83)
If Geertz’s reading prowess (and his code allusions) shows his indebtedness to Frye, Geertz ascribes his invocation of what he calls a “general hermeneutics” to Paul Ricoeur. The word “hermeneutics” is not highlighted even if the method is clearly hermeneutic, even phenomenologically so. Perhaps for this reason, Geertz, Taylor, Riceour, and Jürgen Habermas20 have been distinctively influential in analytic approaches to hermeneutic philosophy of science, sometimes called in the words of a recent commentator “naturalistic hermeneutics” (Mantzavinos 2009) such as Gary Gutting, Joseph Rouse, Ronald Bontekoe, and Susan Heckman but especially Dagfinn Føllesdal (1979), Axel Bühler (2003), etc., in addition to the role of this influence on more classically continentally minded approaches.
An ongoing limitation to the reception of hermeneutic approaches to the philosophy of science is the erroneous assumption, common even among those otherwise receptive to hermeneutic philosophy, that continental philosophy, generally, and hermeneutics, in particular, is unconcerned with the natural or even the human sciences.21 But, as the preceding reflections show, this assumption is unsustainable. In addition to Heidegger’s already noted concern with logic, mathematics, and science, as well as history, Edmund Husserl too was concerned with natural science, logic, and mathematics, as was Jean Cavaillés,22 as this has also been foregrounded by Georges Canguilhelm—himself a hermeneutic and phenomenological student of the biological sciences.23 A focus on meaning in the lifeworld is thus presupposed in the natural sciences, which thus attends to the historical context of science in time and place as well as a sensitivity to interpretation and social context. In addition, there is a further expression within formal mathematics in the work of Oskar Becker,24 foregrounding, as Becker could well do as a student of both Husserl and Heidegger, the hermeneutic element interior to Husserl’s phenomenology, as does Gadamer with respect to history and science in this same context, as has also been emphasized.25
It is similarly a mistake to assume that the focus of hermeneutic philosophy of science, given the significance of Dilthey and the fact–value distinction, would be limited to the social sciences or, that it ought to be, as in the case of a recent book collection on, of all things, Nietzsche’s philosophy of science, alternated or conjoined with “cultural studies.”26 The foregoing discussion of Geertz indicates some of the limitations of that move, even for the social sciences themselves. But metaphorical slippage is dangerous, and thus it was important to note the error of limiting all hermeneutic philosophy of science to the interpretation of the culture of texts (and the culture of authors and readers) as if hermeneutic approaches had no purchase (and here there is an important reference to the social studies of science and knowledge, specifically of the natural sciences; see Bruno Latour, who initially deployed his ethnographic training in just such an effort)27 on the actual or “real” practice of theoretical and laboratory science, replicating in its turn the more general error in mainstream philosophy of science that seeks to separate the history of science from the philosophy of science. The same error recurs in Anglo-American tendencies to seek to speak of history of philosophy as a historical rather than properly philosophical analysis.
Such a common error is both noncontroversial and literally pious: it has the mainstream behind it, and it is seemingly inspired by religiously oriented theorists as a focus on the text alone, sola scriptura. However, this focus misses the importantly phenomenological application of hermeneutic methodology. Indeed, newer contributions to the hermeneutic philosophy of science increasingly foreground phenomenology,28 although it remains the case that the dominance of the author-reader model still handicaps both the articulation and the reception of hermeneutic philosophies of science.29
One of the prime examples of the widespread text-author-reader convention may be seen in an essay by György Markus negatively and provocatively titled “Why Is There No Hermeneutics of Natural Sciences?” (Markus 1987, 5–51), an essay which also makes the additional logical error of assuming at the outset what is to be argued. A specialist in Lukács’s literary Marxism, Markus understands hermeneutics in a critical literary Marxist light. He thus invokes the resources neither of the philosophy of science as such nor indeed of Gadamerian hermeneutics nor yet of Heideggerian hermeneutic phenomenology but only those of (Marxist) literary reception theory. Markus therefore asserts (and thus concludes that this proves a lack of hermeneutic philosophy of natural science) that one can find nothing in the philosophy of science resembling the “cultural organization of the Author-Text-Reader relation” (Markus 1987, 5–51). Heelan, in an important response to Markus, pointed out that a hermeneutic philosophy of natural science of the kind Markus presumed absent was in fact not only extant but already well developed. Thus, Heelan could emphasize that Markus’s analysis should have engaged that tradition (which it did not), given the existing hermeneutic philosophy of science, and without such an engagement, the reading (and the methods of literary hermeneutic scholarship) inevitably fell short just on its own terms (Heelan 1989, 469–480). Heelan, in addition to his own specialization in the hermeneutic philosophy of quantum mechanics, also detailed there as he does elsewhere elements of the hermeneutics of “reading” not only texts but laboratory technologies and laboratory practices as well as what he called the “observable.”30
The hermeneutic study of laboratory science also includes, as Heelan (1983, 181–204) himself noted, mainstream philosophy of science itself, represented in both Norwood Russell Hanson’s Patterns of Discovery as well as—if also more mainstream in its emphasis and its references to the history of science as such—Ian Hacking’s Representing and Intervening,31 and there is a patent connection that remains to be further articulated with sociological studies of knowledge and laboratory and ethnographic science in the work of Bruno Latour and others.32 Hans-Jörg Rheinberger’s Toward a History of Epistemic Things extends this instrumental hermeneutic beyond the continental philosophy of science to more conventionally analytic history of science (Rheinberger 1997).
Other (by and large rhetorically minded) appropriations of hermeneutics also set hermeneutics in opposition to the philosophy of science as indeed to the sciences as such, a tactic differing from Heidegger’s regional analysis and that may be traced back to Gadamer (Gadamer 1983), a distinctive undertaking perhaps cemented by its echo of Gadamer’s contribution the small book that brought together Gadamer’s own take on hermeneutics and science together with that of Ernst Konrad Specht, one of the first German philosophers to embrace analytic language philosophy, and Wolfgang Stegmüller, the then-leading philosopher of science in Germany, who was himself keen to adopt the same basis for a German philosophy of science, a pro-analytic turn that is as dominant in German philosophy of science as in the Anglophone tradition of the same. Gadamer, Specht, and Stegmüller’s joint collection was titled in such a way that any reader, even to this day, might be forgiven for overlooking its interrogative punctuation: Hermeneutics versus Science? (Gadamer 1988).
Beyond Gadamer, and in addition to the obvious connection with hermeneutics and the social sciences in Dilthey, I have already noted Paul Ricoeur’s contributions to hermeneutics and the social sciences in Geertz among others.33 But, despite this habit of connecting hermeneutics to literature and classical philology as well as to theology and law,34 and despite the history of misreading its relevance to the natural sciences (as limited to texts alone rather than to what Heelan called “readable technologies”), it is not only the case that hermeneutic approaches to the philosophy of science provide the basis for a comprehensively philosophical reflection on the natural as indeed the social sciences,35 including rather than excluding the history of science,36 but, arguably, the case may even be made that only a hermeneutic approach to the philosophy of science is capable of this.
This is especially the case where science itself comprises both natural and social science, even including in addition to anthropology and history, psychology as well as theology, art history, and so on. It only compounds the problem that mainstream philosophy as such often undertakes to distance itself from its own historical and multifarious associations with hermeneutics, a distancing further complicated by a long-standing tradition of marginalizing hermeneutic approaches to the philosophy of science.
Hermeneutically speaking, one clear benefit of the “marginalized” voice in philosophy is that it takes the vantage point or position on the margin as such.37 In such a marginalized circumstance, the scholar is first able to reflect on assumptions otherwise taken for granted. To this extent, as both Nietzsche and Heidegger would emphasize in their reflections, marginal thinkers offer perspectives that are by definition underutilized resources. Reflecting on the tradition, returning, as it were, to the texts themselves, whereby the texts of science include the Galilean “book of nature” as Geertz and Heelan and Feyerabend specifically detail this all in addition to textbooks and handbooks as Ludwik Fleck also emphasizes this tradition, but also the popular or “lay” instruments (we might say gadgets) and techniques as techniques and technologies that inevitably constitute the prerequisites for what become scientific research protocols, as both Fleck and Gaston Bachelard emphasize this. For Bachelard, “A truly scientific phenomenology is thus essentially a phenomenotechnology,”38 by which Bachelard refers to the same everyday technologies he cites his predecessor Louis Basso as emphasizing.39
Many experts have reduced Bachelard’s complex point to the standardization of technologies or instrumentation, but Bachelard himself points to nothing less than a Heideggerian hermeneutics of science “built into,” as it were, the extant technologies of laboratory science and featuring Bachelard’s own word for both fore-structure and fore-having in the “pre-program” that is the working of extant and interconnected technologies. Thus, Bachelard and Basso reflect on technology’s “concrete realizations,” as these constitute what these French theorists of science call a “little universe.” In these concretizations of technology (the term is evocative of Whitehead’s own “concretions”), this same “little universe” is thereby isolated from the whole of reality, in order to rearrange it for its proper usage, by applying the method which science employs for its disinterested ends. Only the complexity of this “little universe” being infinitely less that the whole from which it is abstracted, can technology undertake to compose it, at least by approximation, starting from abstract elements, while science can only confine its research to the discrimination of these technologically concretized elements themselves.40
Heelan develops Bachelard’s notion of such “little universes” together with his reading of Husserl and Heidegger into his description of so many “portable laboratories,”41 invoking the same phenomenon with regard to the highly specialized experimental technologies and techniques of the research laboratory that for Heidegger presupposed a certain fore-having, fore-sight, and fore-conception and thereby the horizon for future scientific discovery.
Speaking of “readable technologies,” in this fashion, the scientist does not simply “observe,” as might be assumed, but rather comes to be able to observe the observable as the scientist is inaugurated into a certain membership in a tradition of research, in his training, and through his own research experience. Ludwik Fleck spoke of this inauguration as a thought style [Denkstil] for a given thought collective and which “initiation” Fleck details by emphasizing what he here calls “irrational” and often intuitive and sometimes unteachable initiation was also characterized as the “tacit dimension” by Michael Polanyi. For Fleck, the necessity of being experienced introduces into knowledge an ineliminably irrational element, which cannot be logically justified but which is nonetheless its sine qua non.
Introduction to a field of knowledge is a kind of initiation that is performed by others. It opens the door. But it is individual experience, which can only be acquired personally, that yields the capacity for active and independent cognition. The inexperienced individual merely learns but does not discern. Every experimental scientist knows just how little a single experiment can prove or convince. To establish proof, an entire system of experiments and controls is needed, set up according to an assumption or style and performed by an expert.
(Fleck 1979, 95–96)
Thomas Kuhn famously unpacked Fleck’s points, making them more accessible for ordinary philosophy of science as Kuhn described the very same hermeneutic achievement and historical context of practice and initiation of which Fleck speaks, as what Kuhn calls a normalizing “paradigm.”42 What is at stake is an understanding of method as such, including the scientific method. Thus, Kockelmans had highlighted “The Importance of Methodical Hermeneutics,”43 foregrounding the contributions of Thomas Seebohm in addition to Gadamer and Heidegger and specifically drawing a connection between Dilthey and the philologist August Boeckh for the sake of a hermeneutic philosophy of science.
The relevance of hermeneutics to science, in particular, must be foregrounded here, and if it has been essential in the foregoing to refer to the mainstream tendency to distinguish the history of science (and its historiographically hermeneutic orientation) from the philosophy of science with its orientation to theory (which can then be critically assessed) and experiment (requiring judgment), one may trace both trends to Dilthey’s famous apothegm: “We explain nature, we understand the life of the mind.” [Die Natur erklären wir, das Seelenleben verstehen wir.]44 The contrast between explication and understanding articulates an importantly hermeneutic truth when it comes to the relation between subject and subject in the human sciences. This recurs in Gadamer’s existential emphasis in his reminder that we always understand otherwise, when we understand, inasmuch as understanding is always understanding another—an other, any other’s—understanding. To this day, Dilthey’s distinction continues to be decisive for analytic and logical positivist philosophies of science (e.g., von Wright’s 1971, Explanation and Understanding), and we likewise continue to contrast the natural and human sciences on what are arguably Dilthey’s terms, whereby the natural sciences dominate our ideal notion of science as science.45
Heidegger highlights the academic tendency to connect the arts and the sciences, foregrounded as a kind of contest which culminates in Richard Rorty’s pragmatic expression: “physics envy.”46 Rorty’s phrase captures the relation to the natural sciences evident in analytic philosophy, blatantly on evidence in the so-called “science-wars”47 but also to be seen in the ongoing debates on the irrelevance of philosophy expressed from the point of view of physicists like Stephen Hawking.48 In both debates, what has been counted and discounted as philosophy excludes hermeneutics and phenomenology defined according to the cognitive conventions and neuroscience references favored by many mainstream philosophers fond, to cite P. M. S. Hacker’s more pithy phrase, of “singing the Hallelujah chorus for the sciences.”49 Hawking’s and other scientist’s complaints make it plain that the scientists view themselves as soloists, or else as stand-alone conductors able to lead the band without the aid of philosophical cheerleaders.50
The range of approaches to the hermeneutic philosophy of science also includes Kockelmans’ studies of Maurice Merleau-Ponty,51 in addition to a range of philosophers of science cutting across the contemporary analytic-continental divide, where some are patently analytically minded and others more traditionally, or classically, continentally framed. Although hardly to be reduced to any one tradition, this broad range of hermeneutic phenomenological approaches to the history and philosophy of science is highlighted in Kockelmans’ several approaches to the philosophy of science beginning with a concern with the history and philosophy of mathematics (Kockelmans 1953) and physics (Kockelmans 1962).
Overall, the hermeneutic philosophy of science is beginning to enter the mainstream. I already noted, for example, the analytically minded work in the history of science done by Crease to which may be added analytic interpreters of Heidegger on the theme of science, such as Joseph Rouse, as of Husserl like Lee Harvey as well as the very historically sensitive but analytically tuned contributions of Dimitri Ginev. In addition, I read Alfred Nordmann’s “Getting the Causal Story Right” as an important step in such a direction, interior to the mainstream approaches to the philosophy of science, apart from his tendency to repeat the same error noted at the outset, by limiting hermeneutic philosophy of science to the model of the “interpretive encounter of a reader with a text” (Nordmann 2008, 369–388) rather than in the interpretive schemata that for Heidegger worked out what counted as a given region of science or that delimited an individual science qua science, or, following Merleau-Ponty as well, informed sense perception including measurement, as Heelan all in addition to theory.