Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Hannah Arendt-A Condição Humana-Forense Universitária (2007)
Hannah Arendt-A Condição Humana-Forense Universitária (2007)
Dimitri Ginev
Hermeneutic
Realism
Reality Within Scientific Inquiry
Contributions to Hermeneutics
Volume 4
Series editors
Jeffery Malpas, University of Tasmania, Tasmania, Australia
Claude Romano, Université Paris-Sorbonne, Paris, France
Editorial board
Jean Grondin, University of Montréal, Canada
Robert Dostal, Bryn Mawr College, USA
Andrew Bowie, Royal Holloway, UK
Françoise Dastur, Nice, France
Kevin Hart, University of Virginia, USA
David Tracy, University of Chicago, USA
Jean-Claude Gens, University of Bourgogne, France
Richard Kearney, Boston College, USA
Gianni Vattimo, University of Turin, Italy
Carmine di Martino, University of Milan, Italy
Luis Umbellino, University of Coimbra, Portugal
Kwok-Ying Lau, Chinese University of Hong Kong, HK
Marc-Antoine Vallée, Fonds Ricoeur, Paris, France
Gonçalo Marcelo, University of Lisbon, Portugal
Csaba Olay, University of Budapest, Hungary
Patricio Mena-Malet, University Alberto Hurtado, Santiago, Chile
Andrea Bellantone, Catholic Institute of Toulouse, France
Hans-Helmuth Gander, University of Freiburg, Germany
Gaetano Chiurazzi, University of Turin, Italy
Anibal Fornari, Catholic University of Santa Fe, Argentina
Hermeneutics is one of the main traditions within recent and contemporary European
philosophy, and yet, as a distinctive mode of philosophising, it has often received
much less attention than other similar traditions such as phenomenology,
deconstruction or even critical theory. This series aims to rectify this relative neglect
and to reaffirm the character of hermeneutics as a cohesive, distinctive, and rigorous
stream within contemporary philosophy. The series will encourage works that focus
on the history of hermeneutics prior to the twentieth century, that take up figures
from the classical twentieth-century hermeneutic canon (including Heidegger,
Gadamer, and Ricoeur, but also such as Strauss, Pareyson, Taylor and Rorty), that
engage with key hermeneutic questions and themes (especially those relating to
language, history, aesthetics, and truth), that explore the cross-cultural relevance
and spread of hermeneutic concerns, and that also address hermeneutics in its
interconnection with, and involvement in, other disciplines from architecture to
theology. A key task of the series will be to bring into English the work of
hermeneutic scholars working outside of the English-speaking world, while also
demonstrating the relevance of hermeneutics to key contemporary debates. Since
hermeneutics can itself be seen to stand between, and often to overlap with, many
different contemporary philosophical traditions, the series will also aim at
stimulating and supporting philosophical dialogue through hermeneutical
engagement. Contributions to Hermeneutics aims to draw together the diverse field
of contemporary philosophical hermeneutics through a series of volumes that will
give an increased focus to hermeneutics as a discipline while also reflecting the
interdisciplinary and truly international scope of hermeneutic inquiry. The series
will encourage works that focus on both contemporary hermeneutics as well as its
history, on specific hermeneutic themes and areas of inquiry (including theological
and religious hermeneutics), and on hermeneutic dialogue across cultures and
disciplines.All books to be published in this Series will be fully peer-reviewed
before final acceptance.
Hermeneutic Realism
Reality Within Scientific Inquiry
Dimitri Ginev
Department of Philosophy
University of Sofia
Sofia, Bulgaria
Recent developments in the realism debate are by and large characterized by a shift
from the subject-object model of thinking to a paradigm informed by the primacy of
the interpretive constitution of meaning. Putting the constitution of meaning first
seriously revises standard realism but does not imply antirealism. This book is
grounded on the premise that the facticity of scientific inquiry is that kind of inter-
pretive constitution of meaning which enables one to develop the position of herme-
neutic realism. Actually, the book defends a stronger thesis: It is difficult to imagine
a successful version of realism that does not include an interpretive theory of scien-
tific inquiry. The facticity of scientific inquiry brings to the fore that mode of reali-
ty’s being which affords the formulation and the advocacy of hermeneutic realism.
I have organized Hermeneutic Realism: Reality Within Scientific Inquiry in four
chapters. Each chapter is based on properly specified tenets of hermeneutic phe-
nomenology. The Introductory Chapter discusses the unity of meaningful articula-
tion and objectification in the scientific disclosing of reality. In encroaching on a
historical excursus, chapter “The Production of Objectified Factuality Within the
Facticity of Scientific Inquiry” resumes the Fleckian strategy of asking about the
genealogy of scientific facts. My focus here is on a hermeneutic recasting of princi-
pal issues in the realism debate. Chapter “Meaningful Articulation and Objectification
of Reality in Scientific Inquiry” addresses the interpretive fore-structuring of objec-
tified factuality within the facticity of inquiry, thereby adumbrating a program for a
philosophy of science pertinent to hermeneutic realism. The whole study is guided
by the claim that the articulation of meaning and the procedural objectification
within the facticity of inquiry manage to “textualize” the domains of reality dis-
closed by scientific practices. The prominent role that the concepts of “textualizing”
and “text” play in the study is summarized and additionally analyzed in the
Concluding Chapter.
In the name of honest advertising, I should state my location on the map of the
complicated area abandoned by both philosophy of science and philosophical
hermeneutics. I feel most at home in the tradition of the hermeneutics of scientific
research as it is typically represented by the studies of Joseph Kockelmans and
Patrick Heelan. Belonging to this tradition, I am dissatisfied with the objectivist
vii
viii Preface
Gadamer operates with the concept of play when analyzing what is “self-
presented in the hermeneutic experience.” The present study makes use of a similar
concept of interplay when analyzing what is disclosed, articulated, and objectified
by means of the phronēsis of inquiry. I attach much importance to this concept as
well as to the concept of entanglement when the hermeneutic truth of what is
achieved in the facticity of inquiry is at issue. Paraphrasing a postulate of Truth and
Method, the participants in the process of inquiry who understand what is contextu-
ally articulated in their practices are “drawn into events” through which meaning
asserts itself. However, again, philosophical hermeneutics deals with forms of play
that take place in understanding texts already created. Indeed, the effective-historical
existence of such texts in the traditions in which they are constituted (and reconsti-
tuted through their interpretive receptions) is an inextricable dimension of
Gadamer’s doctrine of hermeneutic truth. I am not saying that philosophical herme-
neutics could be reduced to a kind of cognitive hermeneutics devoted to the “proce-
dures of understanding.” Gadamer’s criticisms of conceptions suggested by authors
like Emilio Betti and Eric Donald Hirsch provide sufficient arguments against such
a reduction. Nonetheless, because he excludes the experience of objectifying inquiry
from the scope of hermeneutic experience, there is no room for treating (what I will
call) “textualizing” in his philosophical hermeneutics. Without addressing the forms
of textualizing through readable technologies – so the basic argument of this book
goes – it would be impossible to have a hermeneutic phenomenology of what scien-
tific practices meaningfully constitute.
My personal road to hermeneutic realism has abounded in incidents and acci-
dents. Many years ago, when I started my career in pharmacobiochemistry, I became
a junior fellow of a research team conducting experimental studies on the antiar-
rhythmic effects of alkaloid sparteine. Initially, my activities were related only to
pharmacognosy – extracting this alkaloid from shrubs which are endogenous to the
Balkan Peninsula. But later I had to participate in pharmacological experiments
with animals. I quit this job immediately. It was clear to me that as a strong vegetar-
ian and ardent follower of Arne Næss’s deep ecology, I would not have a future in
research activities related to clinical experiments with animals. Unfortunately, I did
not find another opportunity to continue my carrier in biochemistry – the discipline
I loved so much. I left the laboratory forever to become a philosopher. Yet this reori-
entation turned out to be initially unsuccessful. I met unsurmountable difficulties in
accepting the views that prevailed at that time. It was the time of a pursuit of realism
after the image of the “mirror of nature” was definitely discredited. It was also a
period of the growing disappointment, on the part of philosophers of science, over
the doctrine that scientific theories are linguistic entities formalizable in predicate
logic and that they contain (along with the vocabulary of logic) primitive theoretical
terms whose meanings are to be gained by means of implicit definitions. According
to this doctrine, the fixed logical structure of a scientific theory is to be supplied by
a set of “correspondence rules” that enable a partial empirical interpretation of theo-
retical terms.
Philosophers of science were prone to embrace structural views about scientific
theorizing. Models, symmetries, and invariances became magic words.
Preface xi
Representation in the formal sense (and as associated with formal reduction) gained
the status of a central issue. Reality became more or less a prisoner of formal seman-
tics. Many philosophers of science of my generation – inspired also by the easy
passage from formal theories of measurement to formal semantics – believed that
there is no scientific representation of reality without the isomorphism of models,
the assumption being that reality is given to us through the models of a theory, and
any model is isomorphic to a group of transformations under which theory’s equa-
tions are invariant. I sincerely tried to make sense of these “structural representa-
tions.” But I was convinced that what scientific inquiry discloses cannot be
represented/reduced by means of representation theorems stipulating the relations
among the semantic models of a theory. It was my teacher and friend, Azarya
Polikarov (1921–2000), who drew my attention to the loss of reality within the
holist-semantic approaches to scientific theorizing. For him, the “question of real-
ity” was a question which cannot be posed and answered through logical and/or
semantic analysis. Reality shows itself when one is employing heuristic practices
and devices in scientific inquiry. (Polikarov was one of the pioneers of applying
heuristic methods of AI to the theory of scientific inquiry.) His “heuristic realism”
is still a great achievement of the nonanalytical philosophy of science.
My first reorientation – from science to analysis of science in terms of discrete
models – ended up in a mistrust toward the analytical philosophy of science. I was
at peace with myself only after my second reorientation – this time from norma-
tively codified “rational reconstruction” to linguistic hermeneutics. In the early
1980s, I came upon the two classical versions of this hermeneutics, suggested
respectively by Georg Misch and Hans Lipps. Two lessons I took from these phi-
losophers paved my way to hermeneutic realism: First, hermeneutics has an essen-
tial ontological dimension, but it ought not to be regarded as post-philosophical
thinking of the meaning of being, and second, hermeneutics is not to be disentan-
gled from the existential situations of choosing possibilities. Both classical versions
of linguistic hermeneutics were developed (in the 1920s) at once under the influ-
ence of Heidegger’s branch of phenomenology and in opposition to the radical
ontological turn in hermeneutics. My orientation to a theory of interpretation that
deals more with practices and meaningful articulation than with the meaning of
being has convinced me that the very idea for a philosophy of science external to
science-in-the-making is wrong. In a quasi-Quinean manner, I began to look for a
hermeneutic philosophy continuous with science’s interpretive internalism. What
follows is the outcome of this long-standing quest.
I would like to express my deep gratitude to the anonymous referees for their
valuable comments on the initial version of my book. Most of all, I want to thank
Professor Jeff Malpas for his encouraging and inspirational suggestions. I would
also like to thank Hemalatha Gunasekaran and Werner Hermens for their support,
cooperation, and editorial advice. I owe a great debt of gratitude to Ms Torrey
Adams for improving the manuscript stylistically.
xiii
xiv Contents
question of whether the mind does not belong to reality as disclosed and articulated
within practices. Since most of the metaphysical realists are inclined to argue that
the mind is a part of objective reality, the hermeneutic realist focuses in her criti-
cism on the predicament arising from the attempts at reconciliating the following
two doctrines which circulate in various forms in the realism debate: (a) objective
reality is independent of the mind (as something opposed to reality); and (b) the
mind represents and conceptualizes reality, but this does not imply that it is not a
part of objective reality. Doctrine (b) is obligatory for naturalizing all functions and
properties of the mind.
Any kind of ontological naturalism—that supposedly supplements metaphysical
realism with arguments about the reducibility of all spatiotemporal entities to
objects endowed with physical effects—uncritically combines (a) and (b). The pres-
ent study considers ontological naturalism as an inconsistent position. Donald
Davidson’s “deflationary realism” (cum its form of naturalism) perhaps avoids the
clash between the doctrines (a) and (b), but at the expense of holding a too scanty
concept of reality (if any). It is hard to believe that an approach based on the assump-
tions that (1) every mental event is identical to a particular physical event, and (2)
mental properties supervene on physical properties can dispel the ambiguities
caused by combining (a) and (b). More sophisticated versions of naturalizing the
work of mind—like Francisco Varela’s conception—that counter objectivist (reduc-
tionist) naturalism with excellent arguments take their cues from the phenomeno-
logical tradition. Yet again it is hard to believe that a phenomenologically
reformulated cognitive science and/or neuroscience (like Varela’s “neuro-
phenomenology”) could provide resources for a new philosophical view of reality.
In trying to overcome the ambiguities generated by the relations of (a) and (b), the
hermeneutic realist makes the difference between facticity (of the modes of exis-
tence) and factuality (produced by contextualizing and contextualized practices
within facticity) a central theme of discussion. In a tenet of hermeneutic realism,
reality is not something that can be reconstructed through an analysis of epistemic
attitudes and science’s theoretical achievements. All epistemic attitudes and forms
of theorizing are shaped within reality-as-facticity.1 The hermeneutic realist consis-
tently tries to do justice to the ontological primacy of reality-as-facticity. She denies
the possibility of having a foundational body of empirical knowledge about “firm”
objective factuality, i.e., factuality independent of facticity.
1
Hereafter I use the term “facticity” in connection with the original program of the “hermeneutics
of facticity”. In the basic cases in which the term will be used in the study, this connection will be
commented on and specified. The various connotations of the term depend on its relatedness to the
everydayness of routine practices, the nexus of finitude and situated transcendence, the potential-
ity-for-being, and so on. Yet the main connotation refers to the mode of being characterized by a
production of objectified factuality within practices of objectification that project their interrelated-
ness upon horizons of possibilities. Generally, the way in which the concept of facticity is used in
hermeneutic realism is in line with Heidegger’s triple differentiation between fall, existence, and
facticity. But the formulations in which the concept is used are not corollaries to the doctrine of this
differentiation.
1 The Kind of Hermeneutics in Hermeneutic Realism 3
2
Thus, “naturalizing” the philosophy of science in a non-objectivist manner by having recourse to
the empirical-as-facticity is a completely feasible program from the viewpoint of hermeneutic
realism.
4 Introductory Chapter: On the Very Idea of Hermeneutic Realism
3
On an alternative view about recognition in objectifying scientific inquiry, see Crease (1993, Ch.
6). In drawing on Husserl’s method of free variation and Heelan’s phenomenological theory of
perception, Robert Crease tries to characterize the way in which experimentalists are “recogniz-
ing” what they describe by data models of measurements as a profile of the phenomenon they
study, provided that the phenomenon is distinguished by an invariance (under transformation of
perspectives). The recognition involves the belief that this invariance structures other possible
profiles of the same phenomenon that can be revealed under changed experimental conditions. See
also Crease (2009, 2015).
6 Introductory Chapter: On the Very Idea of Hermeneutic Realism
4
I am leaving aside the fact that the “Verständigung über etwas” operates at each stage of objecti-
fying inquiry. (The achievement of agreement by means of negotiations—which is a kind of Apel’s
Verständigung über etwas—is the favorite subject of social constructivists.) My criticism has
another focus. Apel assumes that there is—in the “productive mediation between empirical and
normative reconstruction in the historiography of science”—a hermeneutic circle at work. This
defense of a kind of historiographical hermeneutics concerning the historicity of the objectifying
sciences is entirely under the aegis of the old-fashioned distinction between deductive-nomologi-
cal explanation and individualizing understanding, as his confrontation with Popper’s third-world
approach to interpretation demonstrates (Apel 1998, 224–230). He accepts this distinction, and
integrates it in the program of his “transcendental semiotics/pragmatics”. The latter—as a tran-
scendental theory of the rational dialogue/discourse—should be developed also as a philosophy of
the non-objectifying (human) sciences, thereby providing the ultimate rationale for demarcating
between the interpretive and the mathematical-experimental sciences. Since there is no place for a
trans-subjective (non-epistemological and non-communicational) hermeneutics in Apel’s pro-
gram, the contextualizing facticity of objectifying inquiry escapes his attention.
1 The Kind of Hermeneutics in Hermeneutic Realism 7
gesture or a symbolic act, but a position that demands the use of a special methodol-
ogy. What becomes methodologically recognized in the hermeneutic philosophy of
science is the contextuality of all phenomena studied with the intent to become
theoretically saved. This contextuality is due to research practices’ endogenous
reflexivity as manifested in the way in which they form and change their configura-
tions.5 The objectification by means of saving phenomena is indispensably contex-
tualized by the configuration of practices through which it takes place. In recognizing
the contextuality of objectification (along with the reflexivity of objectifying prac-
tices), one becomes aware of the contextual character of objectivity of scientific
inquiry. However, contextual objectivity, as a particular doctrine of hermeneutic
realism, has nothing to do with epistemological subjectivism or antirealist
instrumentalism.
Roughly, hermeneutic realism opposes the views which admit the following
clauses: (a) the credentials of all truth claims must be checked by a foundational
theory of knowledge; (b) objective reality is organized into distinct objects (and
“natural kinds”), and the distinctness of each of them is prior to the constitution of
meaning; (c) the epistemic subject’s mind is isolated from the world in a manner
that enables the mind to represent the world through images, ideas, concepts, and
categories; and (d) there is an invariant and universal semantic core in the mind that
contains series of meanings related to the basic structure of objective reality.
Roughly speaking, hermeneutic realism is a kind of realism that does away with
Cartesian dualism, epistemic representationalism, foundationalism, and cognitive
(including linguistic-semantic) essentialism. The hermeneutic realist advocates the
primacy of facticity as the milieu in which the subject-object relation becomes con-
textually emancipated, the priority of the contextual representation of something-
as-something (guided by the “hermeneutic as”) over the epistemic representation of
something-out-there by the mind of the knower, the ever open possibility of tran-
scending any alleged foundation within existence, and the constitution of all stable
cognitive structures (allegedly considered as “essences”) through choices of possi-
bilities within existence.
5
I will repeatedly make use in this study of a distinction between practices’ reflexivity and practi-
tioners’ reflexivity—a distinction that originates from ethnomethodology. Practices’ reflexivity has
much to do with the creation of local orders, while practitioners’ reflexivity is what the concept of
accountability refers to (Czyzewski 1994; Ginev 2014b). Not all ethnomethodologists are happy
with this distinction, and more generally, with the way of making the issue of reflexivity a central
one in the ethnomethodological work. Thus, Michael Lynch (2000) pleads for narrowing the con-
cept of reflexivity by freeing it from critical-epistemological and emancipatory-political connota-
tions. Lynch’s concept of reflexivity refers to “locally reflexive orders of action”. Reflexivity is
“incarnated” in such orders. Yet this criticism of the extended notion of reflexivity, as it is used in
critical social theory and various forms of cultural studies, attests the reasonability of the distinc-
tion being mentioned. The “incarnation” of reflexivity is due to practices’ capability to arrange and
regulate their interrelatedness. This “incarnation” antecedes (and sometimes prompts) the kind of
reflexivity that depends on practitioners’ epistemic virtues, cognitive skills, and emancipatory
interests. My central use of practices’ reflexivity will be with regard to the reflexive entanglement
of the particular practices of inquiry (and their contextures-of-equipment) with contexts of inquiry
and the interrelatedness of practices.
8 Introductory Chapter: On the Very Idea of Hermeneutic Realism
There is a widespread view that the priority mentioned is to be held even when a
contextual and embodied character of the epistemic representation is acknowledged.
Despite the fact that the research programs in “embodied cognitive science” have
become developed as an alternative to the computational and representational theo-
ries of mind, the insistence on the embodiment of cognition still does not provide
per se arguments against the admission of a foundational epistemic representation.
By taking into account bodily mechanisms of sensory processing and motor control,
one is able to show that embodied cognition is always contextually embedded. But
this again is not enough to undo the alleged primacy of the epistemic representation.
More generally, de-privileging the representational function of mind by privileging
the cognitive function of the human body only leads to a new form of essentialism
(even when the body is conceived of in a radically non-naturalist manner). This
statement ought to be subjected to some qualifications. Those who insist on the
embodiment of cognition quite often go on to oppose the embodied cognitive pro-
cesses not only to objectivism but to objectification too. In so doing, they tend to
forget that objectification is performed by embodied technologies of research. Some
phenomenological approaches to technologies developed in science and technology
studies STS try to eliminate this confusing ambiguity. Donna Haraway and Don
Ihde are perhaps the most prominent champions of the view that humans are bodies
in technologies. The approaches of these authors, however, do not reify the human
body because technologies are not viewed as mediations located between humans
and another bit of the world. Furthermore, these approaches are quite effective in
undoing any assumption about the primacy of the epistemic representation.
Technologies are seen as “organs and full partners” of the human body (Haraway
2006, 175). The way in which technologies become such “organs” must be studied
in a phenomenological (and not in an objectivist) manner. The body-technology
partnership is a “worldly embodiment” (Haraway). More specifically, making use
of the concept of embodiment that includes instruments invites studies of practices
in which the technical entanglements of the human body take place. At issue are
human bodies entangled with culturally constructed locations (Ihde 2002, xi).6
The extended embodiment—as viewed by Haraway and Ihde—no longer privi-
leges the human body per se. Their phenomenological approaches place emphasis
on the primacy of bodies situated in technological practices. Within the tradition of
hermeneutic philosophy of the natural sciences, one can find the claim—sounding
much in the spirit of Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology—that there is “on the one
hand, the ‘flesh’ of instrumental usage corporeally mediating the shared corporeal
schema of a specialist group with the flesh of the material world; on the other, the
translation of a scripted report into a skilled artistic performance that phenomenally
presents the material world in the flesh” (Kisiel 1997, 75). In their studies on the
hermeneutics of experimentation and instrumentation, Patrick Heelan and Robert
Crease unfold this claim in different directions. Yet in so doing, they again recast the
“corporeal factors and mediators” in terms of practices: The corporality (Leiblichkeit)
6
For an interesting criticism of Ihde’s phenomenology of the body that radicalizes the imagery of
extended-bodies-in-practices, see Feenberg (2006).
1 The Kind of Hermeneutics in Hermeneutic Realism 9
operates not behind but only within the practices of instrumentation and experimen-
tation. The embodied cognition is always situated within and transcended by
practices.
The emphasis upon the non-determinacy (not being-determined) of existence
(including scientific inquiry as a mode of existence) makes two sorts of existential-
ism indispensable partners of hermeneutic realism. These are a cognitive existen-
tialism about the constitution of scientific inquiry’s autonomy via free choices of
possibilities for doing research, and a trans-subjective existentialism about the tran-
scendence of the epistemic relation by the hermeneutic circularity of reality’s mean-
ingful articulation. (The epistemic subject is not situated once and for all by being
doomed to have a socially determined standpoint. In opposing the relativist objec-
tivism of standpoint epistemology, the hermeneutic realist holds that any situated-
ness of the epistemic subject is open to be transcended due to the choices of new
possibilities. The epistemic subject has a mode of existence that takes the form of
situated transcendence within the aforementioned hermeneutic circularity.)
Depending on to which sort of existentialism more importance is attached, one
might distinguish between a narrower and a broader sense of construing hermeneu-
tic realism. In placing emphasis on cognitive existentialism, one chiefly pays atten-
tion to the ways in which the reality becomes disclosed, articulated, and objectified
within scientific inquiry. In engaging primarily the problematic of trans-subjective
existentialism, one develops hermeneutic realism in a broader sense as a family of
post-metaphysical doctrines whose common denominator is the conviction that
(pace Rorty) the place vacated by (foundationalist and representationalist) episte-
mology should be occupied by hermeneutics (Ginev 2014a). Hermeneutic realism
in both senses opens avenues to new forms of a dialogue between (post)analytic and
Continental traditions.
Hermeneutic realism is an attempt at a radical universalization of hermeneutics.
In pursuing this goal, the position I will defend in the remainder deviates from
mainstream philosophical hermeneutics. The deviation is most pregnant in the treat-
ment of objectifying inquiry. Considerations about the phronēsis of scientific
research provide a guideline of this study. In this regard, the study significantly
revises the view of “method” in philosophical hermeneutics. Surprisingly enough,
Gadamer appeals to traditional epistemological assumptions in his argumentation
against the inclusion of the natural sciences in the hermeneutic universe. Truth and
Method tells us that the research process in the natural sciences “penetrates more
and more deeply into nature” (Gadamer 1989, 285). In contrast to the human sci-
ences, in the mathematized empirical sciences the theme and object of research are
independent of the facticity of inquiry. (In the human sciences this facticity is their
own tradition that raises the important questions [about the ways of constituting
themes and objects of inquiry] which the particular studies try to answer.) The
objects of the natural sciences “can be described idealiter” as what would be known
in a perfect knowledge of nature.
10 Introductory Chapter: On the Very Idea of Hermeneutic Realism
Thus considered, these are objects in themselves toward which the research pro-
cess is directed.7 (This Gadamerian position, which recognizes the sovereignty of
objectivist naturalism in the mathematized empirical sciences while dispelling
objectivism in the rest of culture, is continued and completed in Hubert Dreyfus’s
“pluralistic robust realism”. In spelling out the doctrine of science in Heidegger’s
The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, Dreyfus reaches the conclusion that nature
has a being in the ensemble of natural entities and phenomena that does not depend
on practices whereby Dasein makes sense of innerwordly things. Roughly, Dreyfus’s
[and Taylor’s] program of “pluralistic robust realism” is based upon this construal
of Heidegger’s “philosophy of science”. To be sure, robust realism is not a realist
position that assumes the existence of natural kinds outside current science.8 It is a
position that only aims to show “the coherence of the natural scientist’s current
practices for dealing with natural kinds as the way nature is in itself” (Dreyfus 1991,
30; Dreyfus and Spinosa 1999, 50). In developing the argument that humans have
practices for achieving access to entities independent of all human practices,
Dreyfus and Taylor advocate in their recent book [entitled Retrieving Realism] the
claim that understanding the status of the structures revealed by the natural sciences
requires making sense of an independent reality characterized not only by things-in-
themselves, but also by its own intrinsic structure. Robust realism is a quasi-
Heideggerian realism enclosed in a framework that attests the primacy of a
de-contextualized subject-object relation. Like Gadamer, Dreyfus—in ignoring the
facticity of scientific inquiry—is after a minimal access to the ultimate reality
beyond the description of access practices. It seems to me that they both commit to
a dubious view leading to unavoidable Kantian duplication of reality: The facticity
of scientific inquiry discloses reality by guaranteeing the minimal access to the
ultimate reality. It is this residual-objectivist image of having “access to reality” that
the hermeneutic realist tries to recast in terms of disclosing and articulating reality
without duplicating it in a transcendental-epistemological manner.)
The most important consequence following from the way in which Gadamer
ostracizes the (presumably non-interpretative) constitution of natural scientific
objects of inquiry is the impossibility of a hermeneutic philosophy of the natural
sciences. The entities constituted by the other cultural activities (like works of art,
documents, historical monuments, discursive embodiments, sacral symbols, etc.)
7
To be fair, in the edition of Truth and Method from 1989, Gadamer (1989, 374) supplies his origi-
nal elaborations with the following note: “Now, in the light of the past three decades of work in the
philosophy of science, I willingly acknowledge that even this formulation is too
undifferentiated.”
8
Dreyfus has good reasons to draw on The Basic Problems of Phenomenology. This is Heidegger’s
work in which the classical transcendental position and the kind of essentialism related to it are
most consistently supported. Heidegger treats intraworldliness as a transcendental condition of the
possibility for reaching the essence of things that would necessarily occur even if Dasein had never
existed. It is not hard to see that, thus defined, the transcendental position is not commensurate
with the ontic-ontological difference (and its transcendental dimension) as inaugurated by the
existential analytic. For this reason, I believe, Heidegger relinquishes this position in his later
work.
1 The Kind of Hermeneutics in Hermeneutic Realism 11
9
Barbara Tuchanska (2008) suggests an excellent criticism of this view, developing at the same
time a comprehensive critique of Gadamer’s conception of science from the viewpoint of the her-
meneutic philosophy of science. She focuses on such basic shortcomings as the assumption that
the objects of inquiry of the natural sciences are objects-in-themselves, independent of the research
process; the view that the research process is performed from “nowhere”; and the belief that the
quintessence of scientific rationality is objectivity as defined by objectivist epistemology.
10
To a question (posed by Riccardo Dottori) of whether theoria (as a strategy of participating in the
universal nous by pursuing it through phronēsis) is also a kind of praxis, Gadamer responds that it
is “the highest form of praxis” (Gadamer 2003, 35). Now this question can be specified—in a non-
12 Introductory Chapter: On the Very Idea of Hermeneutic Realism
Gadamerian manner—with respect to the character of theoria within the natural sciences. Quite
intentionally, I am again using the Greek word because I do not have in mind “theory” as a quasi-
axiomatic structure with a partial empirical interpretation. I am referring, rather, to the totality of
theoretical practices in scientific research whereby one constitutes meaningful objects of inquiry.
The following question will remain forever open: Had Gadamer understood scientific theorizing in
this way, would he have continued to insist that practical-contextual rationality is irrelevant to
scientific objectivity?
2 Basic Concepts and Conceptual Figures of Hermeneutic Realism 13
One may raise serious objections against the assertion that human beings’ constant
involvement in practices opens up access to reality. Such an assertion still presup-
poses the primacy of Cartesian dualism inasmuch as reality is taken to be “out there”,
independent of practices that supposedly stand for a collectively organized mindset
as distinguished by various kinds of patterns. Hermeneutic realism advocates a stron-
ger claim: Practices as the facticity of a mode of existence that produces objectified
11
It is worth mentioning that Ludwik Fleck maintains a quite similar position regarding the cogni-
tive autonomy of science. The prevention of science from political distortion of the research pro-
cess is a central motif in his debates with Tadeusz Bilikiewicz. In countering (and ridiculing) both
types of “demagogical-mythical” doctrines in the mid-1930s—the programs of “proletarian sci-
ence” as subjected to the goals of planned economics, and the ideas of scientific theories in which
the “spirit of a race” gets embodied—Fleck argues that the dependence of scientific cognition on
cultural-historical milieus is to be sought in the ongoing configuration of Gestaltsehen and the use
of rhetorical figures in linguistic descriptions of phenomena (Fleck 2011a, 329–331).
14 Introductory Chapter: On the Very Idea of Hermeneutic Realism
factuality are disclosing domains of reality.12 The suspicious idiom and imagery of
“access to reality” have to be undone. It is the disclosure or revealing within practices
that allows reality to manifest itself (in particular, to manifest itself as being amena-
ble to becoming objectified). Since practices in their interrelatedness do not make a
preexisting reality meaningful, but are the very reality-of-meaningful-articulation,
one might state that the reality-of-objectified-factuality is rooted in facticity as a
contextual-interpretive appropriation of possibilities within a potentially inexhaust-
ible horizon. Specifying this claim with regard to the facticity of scientific practices
and the factuality produced in scientific inquiry is the main task of hermeneutic real-
ism. Doing justice in a hermeneutic way to science’s potential to disclose reality at
once as meaningful articulation and as objectified factuality has nothing to do with
arguing that science provides a “privileged point of reference” in defending realism.
(Arguing in this way is on a par with the idiom and imagery of gaining “access to
reality”.) In hermeneutic realism, reality is genuinely disclosed to be objectified in
(the facticity of) scientific practices exclusively.
The facticity of scientific inquiry is the only mode of being-in-the-world in
which reality becomes revealed as ready-to-be-objectified. (The everyday-practical
[non-objectifying] experience faces contingent factualities within the particular
contextures-of-equipment, but—despite its potential for typification [in Alfred
Schütz’s sense]—this experience fails to “standardize” the production and repro-
duction of factuality. In enabling intersubjective typifications and habitualizations,
routine everydayness constitutes a dense texture of meanings. It would not be cor-
rect to say that the everyday-practical experience in its entirety is exclusively char-
acterized by a prepredicative circumspective deliberation. The agents of routine
everydayness constantly predicate what they encounter in their contextures. Yet this
sort of predication still does not disclose reality as amenable to becoming objecti-
fied. It rather incidentally transforms entities that are ready-to-hand into something
that is admittedly present-at-hand, i.e., distinguished by predicates that supposedly
are independent of particular contextures. This is why Heidegger (1962, 122) makes
the observation that practical experience is guided by the deliberative circumspec-
tion’s operators of the “in-order-to”, the “for-the-sake-of”, and the “with-which”, all
of them resisting “mathematical functionalization”. These operators do not exclude
possible predications. But they exclude predications that through “mathematical
12
On a thesis that is closer to Dilthey’s idea of “productive nexuses” (Wirkungszusammenhänge)
than to Heidegger’s ontology, facticity and factuality are the two modalities of the empirical. The
hermeneutic realist holds that the production of procedurally objectified factuality is only achiev-
able in the facticity of scientific inquiry. By implication, if objectified factuality is addressed as
being contextualized within the continuity of facticity, then factuality ceases to be an actual pres-
ence, and its being is revealed but in the possibilities of a domain’s articulation. It is this continuous
production of contextualized factuality within the facticity of objectifying inquiry that requires the
implementation of the methodology of double hermeneutics. Without devising an integral herme-
neutic circle that unites the interpretive study of the production of objectified factuality and the
proper interpretive circularity of facticity studied, the factuality would be captured only as a mani-
fold of discrete elements. In employing double hermeneutics, the hermeneutic realist is after the
phenomenological unity of producing-factuality-within-facticity. It is this unity that—while con-
textualized—resembles Dilthey’s “productive nexuses”.
2 Basic Concepts and Conceptual Figures of Hermeneutic Realism 15
13
This claim stands in stark contrast to Heidegger’s existential conception of science. For
Heidegger, scientific practices are objectifying regions of inquiry, but they cease to articulate the
world meaningfully. To put it bluntly, while constituting thematic objects, scientific practices are
de-worlding the meaningful reality. The existential conception of science developed in Being and
Time is in line with the phenomenological tradition of sharply opposing the pre-objectified (pre-
thematic, prepredicative) world to the objectified world of science. The hermeneutic realism, by
contrast, holds that scientific objectification is only achievable within a new horizon of reality’s
meaningful articulation. This horizon is projected by the interrelated scientific practices. To sum
up, scientific practices in their interrelatedness are not de-worlding but re-worlding the reality of
meaningful articulation. (I unfold this claim as criticisms of the existential conception of science
in Ginev (2011a, 1–22; 2015a, 181–197).)
16 Introductory Chapter: On the Very Idea of Hermeneutic Realism
project their being upon possibilities that they appropriate (and actualize), thereby
enabling the meaningful articulation of reality. Accordingly, the interrelatedness of
practices gains its ontological definiteness by having a being projected upon possi-
bilities.14 This claim is to be extended to practitioners as well: They understand and
make intelligible the reality which once disclosed becomes articulated in their prac-
tices. The articulation takes place within the horizon of possibilities the practitio-
ners can appropriate and contextually actualize. This horizon of understanding is at
the same time the horizon in which they constitute their identities as practitioners
who articulate reality in a certain way (in particular, as inquirers who articulate a
scientific domain). Thus, the possibilities of reality’s articulation are also possibili-
ties for practitioners’ reflexively achieved identities. The more possibilities they
appropriate, the more prospective contextual configurations of practices become
envisioned. There is an ongoing interplay of practices and possibilities in the mean-
ingful articulation of reality. Being involved in this articulation (as it is character-
ized by a hermeneutic circularity) amounts to interpreting the reality as having a
being projected upon possibilities that are engendered by the interrelatedness of
practices. From an ontological point of view, the reality always has a potentiality-
for-being (and potentiality-for-meaning) that can be transformed under special con-
ditions into a thematic presence of objectified factuality.
In this study I will argue that the domains of reality are disclosed in the interplay
of scientific practices and possibilities for doing research. The meaningful articula-
tion of discrete entities and structures takes place in the continuity of this interplay.
The entities and structures are contextually articulated: A particular context is a
14
Thus considered, the interrelatedness of practices is a usual object of study of all programs deal-
ing with culturally patterned forms of everydayness. However, here again one has to differentiate
between studying it as factuality and as facticity. The facticity of a culturally individualized every-
dayness is the meaningful articulation in its capacity to enable interpretative fore-structuring of
what is situated in it. The procedural objectification of such everydayness as factuality—say,
within the scope of the sociology of everyday life or the social geography of routine regimes of
spacing and timing—is doubtless a feasible task. But this objectification precludes one from com-
prehending the empirical-as-facticity. The argument for this claim follows a well-known line of
reasoning in hermeneutic phenomenology: The world as ever transcending horizon—irreducible to
the totality of what is ready-to-hand and present-at-hand within-the-world—can never be concep-
tualized as a theme of positive-empirical research. At first glance, this line of reasoning is in a
conflict with empirical research programs that aim at studying the interpretive worlds of life forms
as distinguished by their ethos and habitus. Understanding a culturally distant world and interpret-
ing what is going on within the horizon of this world is a scientific strategy often deployed in
programs of cultural history, phenomenological sociology, and cultural anthropology. This strat-
egy is successful in identifying, describing, and conceptualizing the life forms articulated within
the world-horizon. Yet, in making the life forms objects of inquiry, the adepts of the strategy
decisively refrain from studying how the world is situationally transcendent in enabling the
regimes of life forms’ temporalizing and spatializing. Accordingly, they take the intended objects
of inquiry to be already temporalized and spatialized. Following this strategy, one operates with
interpretive factuality, but not with facticity. The hermeneutic realist argues that the interpretive
research of life forms within their world-horizons can be extended to cover the issues of how the
world is transcending in temporalizing and spatializing what is within-the-world. (For a nice
unfolding of this claim with respect to the quest for a new identity of geography as scientific dis-
cipline, see Zahnen 2015)
2 Basic Concepts and Conceptual Figures of Hermeneutic Realism 17
separation between ontic factuality and ontological facticity. But it does not dis-
miss—as Misch seems to suggest—the ontic-ontological difference.)15
All tenets of hermeneutic realism are formulated and defended in this study by
invoking a theory of practices that in several respects differs from basic positions
established upon the “practice turn”. Elsewhere I deal with this issue in detail (Ginev
2013a, 15–38). Though in the remainder different aspects of the theory of practices
relevant to hermeneutic realism will occasionally be touched upon, a systematic
treatment of the theory’s profile will not be offered. Yet some short notes cannot be
avoided. To begin with, I agree with Stephen Turner’s (2010) criticism of the nor-
mative theories of practices. These theories wrongly concede that the normative is
somehow implicated or embedded in practices. Practices are normatively connected
with one another, so that practices are normative. This is a thesis especially charac-
teristic of the theories inspired by Brandom’s inferentialism. An important goal of
these normative theories is to conceptualize communal intersubjectivity by explain-
ing how the chain relations of justification and inferential connections underwritten
by practices remain preserved (Turner 2010, 145). Yet these theories are unable to
explain how human beings become initiated in the normative worlds of culture. In
other words, they lack explanatory resources concerning the issue of how one passes
from the pre-normative to the normative. They should either assume that the pre-
normative is already an elementary normative (or proto-normative) state or resolve
the passage problem by committing a certain sort of naturalist fallacy (Ginev
2013b).
Turner criticizes these theories from a more or less naturalist viewpoint. This is
why he reaches the conclusion that the normative theories of practices suffer from
accepting a false idealization of a complex of real social facts of interaction. His aim
is to show the “hard facts” that are outside “the circle of normative reasoning”
(Turner 2010, 147). The theory of practices relevant to the tenets of hermeneutic
realism has an essentially different agenda when at stake is the way of breaking the
circle of normative reasoning. This theory takes a cue from the expression of the
pre-normative state: It means neither a proto-normative state nor a natural-factual
state. In the remainder I will try to show that interpretive pre-normativity is a central
concept of hermeneutic realism. Pre-normativity refers to the constraining (and heu-
ristic) force of fore-having, fore-seeing, and fore-grasping as they are specified as
presuppositions by a characteristic hermeneutic situation. Phrased differently, pre-
normativity is the constraining heuristic force of the hermeneutic circularity set up
by the interplay of practices and possibilities. Thus considered, the concept of pre-
normativity informs to a great extent the strategy of constructing a theory of
practices.
The reality of practices (as projecting their being upon possibilities) should not
be taken as harboring a destructive natural-normative dualism. If practices are enti-
ties consisting of spatially and temporally ordered actions and activities that contain
normative elements, this dualism becomes part and parcel of the theory of practices’
15
For the status of the hermeneutic philosophy of science between Heidegger’s hermeneutics of
facticity and Misch’s hermeneutic logic, see Ginev (2011b, 45–64).
20 Introductory Chapter: On the Very Idea of Hermeneutic Realism
structure. The normative and the natural coexist in practices as two kinds of factual-
ity in theory’s empirical basis. As a rule, the hypostatization of normativity in the
theories of practices goes hand in hand with the postulation of the immanent teleol-
ogy of practices. To be sure, subjective and collective human activity is fundamen-
tally teleological. More specifically, all rational activities have a teleological
character. But is this conclusion generalizable to practices? Most of the theorists of
practices are quick to answer affirmatively.16 Like activities, practices are—so their
argument goes—distinguished by normatively ruled directedness at ends. Thus,
Theodore Schatzki (2010, 145) admits in developing his theory that norms “short
circuit the teleological determination of practical intelligibility by themselves speci-
fying what makes sense to people to do.”
In hypostatizing normativity as normative teleology, the theories of practices fail
to discriminate between actions/activities, on the one hand, and practices, on the
other. The same frameworks of conceptualization are to be implemented in both
cases. Accordingly, actions (activities) and practices share the same objectified fac-
tuality. But if all of them refer to facts about the temporal-spatial organization of
normatively patterned acts, then why develop a theory of practices at all? Such a
theory would be in the best case a special chapter of a theory of action. In herme-
neutic realism, there is a principled difference between activities and practices that
resonates the difference between factuality and facticity. The discrete actions and
activities are not on a par with the continuous interplay of practices and possibili-
ties. Obviously, it would make sense to develop an autonomous theory of practices
if and only if there is a caesura in the transition from actions and activities to prac-
tices. This caesura can be described, and will be described in the remainder, in
several ways. Of prime importance to hermeneutic realism is that the caesura does
not amount to a change from a particular factuality to another one. It is rather a
change that marks a passage from factuality to facticity. Actions and activities
invoke intersubjective normativity (and its ontic factuality), whereas interrelated
practices that are projecting and appropriating possibilities are facticity as charac-
terized by hermeneutic pre-normativity. However, the theory of practices is admit-
tedly an empirical theory. Accordingly, it has to approach the facticity of
contextualized practices (and the intercontextuality of practices) in an empirical
manner. The theory of practices relevant to hermeneutic realism deals with some-
thing that is prohibited by Heidegger’s hermeneutics of facticity and the existential
analytic. It deals with the constitution of “ontic facticity”.
16
To be sure, the admission that practices have a teleological character rests on sound intuitive
assumptions. Conceived of as factuality, a practice consists of acts that are following a rule in
achieving a goal. Together with the entities that the acts manage to enact (make ready-to-hand) and
organize environmentally, the practice forms a contexture-of-equipment in which operators like
“in-order-to” and “for-the-sake-of” determine the direction of activity. Conceptualizing practices
as rule-following acts inherent in goal-oriented conduct implies the picture of teleologically
ordered acts. However, this picture is about action and activities, and not about practices. Assuming
a teleological framework of conceptualization is perhaps suitable for developing a theory of action,
but it is, as I will argue in this study, ineligible for the construction of a theory of practices.
3 Hermeneutic Realism and Interpretive Internalism 21
The position of hermeneutic realism that will be developed in this study counters
two views of the “diremption of reality”. Roughly, embarking on strategies against
these views defines a thesis that I call interpretive internalism. Before tackling this
thesis, a few words about the diremption of reality are in order. Both views, which
advocate the duplication of reality—dividing it into a reality of “lived experience”
and a reality alienated from the meaningfulness of this experience – admit that there
is a crucial divergence between what is meaningfully articulated and what becomes
idealized and (procedurally) objectified. The views differ on answering the question
of where the source of the meaningful articulation of reality should be located. In
the first view, reality becomes meaningfully articulated within the pre-scientific life-
world. The gap between the contextualized meaning of mundane activities and the
alleged de-contextualized objectification that extricates reality from meaning causes
the irreversible diremption of reality. The second view is more sophisticated, since
it denounces the wrong assumption that scientific inquiry is alien to the meaningful
articulation of reality. Yet it insists on the divergence between meaningful articula-
tion and procedural objectification by placing this divergence within the process of
22 Introductory Chapter: On the Very Idea of Hermeneutic Realism
inquiry. This process is, as it were, divided into two stages related, respectively, to
the constitution of meaning and the theoretical construction of objectified factuality.
The criticism of the first view is the topic in this section, while in the next one I will
discuss the unity of meaningful articulation and objectification of reality within the
practices of inquiry.
The well-known motifs of the “forgotten life-world” and the orientational deficit
of scientific objectification stem from the first view. In line with the classical phe-
nomenological doctrine based on these motifs, one upholds that the world of sci-
ence’s ideal essences and the world of the meanings generated by everyday practices,
experience, and communication are crucially divided by the procedures of measure-
ment as enabled by idealization and ideal essences (Sokolowski 1992, 164–170).
Science’s objective world is the world in which only measurable entities may exist.
Within intuitive comprehension, which operates in the everyday experience, the
entities become understood, while the investigation predicated on ideal essences
stylizes the entities as variables to be measured. In idealization one transforms—so
the classical phenomenological argument goes—the world of things to be under-
stood exclusively into a world of things to be measured. Exact measurement totally
replaces meaning. However, this conclusion becomes vulnerable when one poses
the following question: Is any particular measurement—however strongly it is
determined by ideal essences—not always already in a horizon of actual and pos-
sible (experimental, conceptual, formal, and instrumental) meanings? Being deter-
mined by an ideal essence, measurement objectifies (makes things reducible to or
representable by measurable variables), but within a horizon of meanings.
How structures of elementary (life-world) meanings become transferred from
everyday experience to the “methodical order” of scientific knowledge production
is a central subject of the constructivists of the Erlangen-Konstanz school. At issue
is a “series of steps to introduce the fundamental concepts of geometry, chronome-
try, and hylometry in that order using ‘idealized’ operations with physical bodies”
(Lorenz 1989, 15). This approach—worked out in a radical opposition to any form
of epistemic foundationalism—promises to overcome the diremption of reality
implied by the phenomenological critique of objectifying science. Yet the price one
has to pay for this overcoming is too high: By reducing the constitution of meaning
to a normatively guided construction of systematizations—and thereby replacing
the constitutional analysis with methodical reconstructions—these philosophers of
science lose sight of the meaningful articulation of what takes place within the rou-
tine everydayness of scientific inquiry. One should not forget that all processes and
procedures of constructing methodical order are also situated in and fore-structured
by this articulation of meaning (Andreev 2004). Methodical constructivists tend to
overcome the diremption of reality by assuming the unfathomability of the life-
world’s patterns of action. The hermeneutic realist counters this assumption by rais-
ing the argument that all patterns of action are formed within the interrelatedness of
practices, and not the other way around. Patterned human actions are ingredients of
3 Hermeneutic Realism and Interpretive Internalism 23
practices, but they become such ingredients only within the interrelatedness of
practices.17
In his groundbreaking work, Joseph Kockelmans argues that the specificity of
modern science consists in projecting observed and unobserved phenomena (as pre-
sented by measurable data) upon horizons of potential meaning that become actual-
ized in the process of saving phenomena. Since this process is involved in a
hermeneutic circle, scientific inquiry is “inherently hermeneutic enterprise”
(Kockelmans 1997, 41). Hermeneutic realism receives and develops this view. My
aim in the present study is to provide a general profile of hermeneutic realism by
taking into account the issue of how reality is factually disclosed within the facticity
of scientific research. One can tentatively admit that what becomes articulated in
scientific inquiry are entities—already crudely delineated in everyday experience—
that can be submitted to controlled observation, experimentation, manipulation
through calibrated instruments, possible measurements, quantification and calcula-
tion through formalisms and mathematical models, and conceptualization by means
of theories that put forward verifiable predictions. However, to the extent to which
this claim separates meaningful articulation from the subsequent processing of enti-
ties already meaningfully constituted, the claim is misleadingly formulated. It
leaves the wrong impression that scientific inquiry “imports” entities and (possibly
even) structures constituted in pre-scientific practices and experience, and then
“transforms” them via its own practices into experimentally testable, formalizable,
and quantifiable objects and structures. The hermeneutic realist subscribes to the
opposite idea that in scientific inquiry reality is afresh disclosed and meaningfully
articulated by the changing configurations of scientific practices as they project the
totality of their interrelatedness upon possibilities for doing research.
Some consequences of this idea contrast phenomenological doctrines concern-
ing the relations between the meaningful life-world(s) and the objectifying-
idealizing scientific inquiry: the doctrines which most typically instantiate the first
view of the diremption of reality. More specifically, certain consequences following
from the idea of the authentic disclosedness of reality in scientific inquiry are at
odds with the assumption (shared by these doctrines) that all scientific objects are
17
This claim is to be extended to elementary linguistic distinctions and practical orientations—
both of them playing a crucial role in the scenarios for methodical reconstruction. Elementary
linguistic distinctions and practical orientations presuppose horizons of interrelated practices.
When the champions of methodical constructivism study the groundedness of science’s theoretical
concepts in such distinctions and orientations, they take the life-world to be not a horizon but an
inscrutable ground. Accordingly, they deny the possibility for developing a theory of life-world.
Such a theory would violate their principle that theoretical knowledge cannot go behind life, which
implies that all methodically guided cognitive constructions in science are refining stylizations of
“that which has always constituted the practical life-world” (Lorenzen 1987, 5). In hermeneutic
realism, if the expression “theory of life-world” is only the alternative designation of the theory
about the constitution of meaning within practices, then there is no threat of entering a vicious
circle when grounding methodical reconstructions of science’s theoretical constructions on such a
theory. In so doing, one would rather commit the search for “methodical order” to the hermeneutic
circularity (of meaning constitution) in which the construction of order is always already
situated.
24 Introductory Chapter: On the Very Idea of Hermeneutic Realism
prefigured within the pre- and non-scientific life-world. It goes without saying that
those who are committed to the assumption mentioned do not dispute that there are
no counterparts of (say) quarks and regulatory genes in everyday (mundane) experi-
ence. The existence of quarks and regulatory genes is enabled by a network of
highly sophisticated scientific practices that are entirely designed within long-
lasting processes of inquiry. These entities are only understandable by esoteric
communities speaking about them in languages that are absolutely foreign to the
non-initiated. Furthermore, quarks and regulatory genes are reachable or identifi-
able within cultural and discursive spaces that do not have boundary points with the
public spaces of laymen everydayness. Following such motifs, one unavoidably
reaches the conclusion that entities instrumental in everyday experience cannot
affect the existence of entities like quarks and regulatory genes.
Yet the rationale for holding the assumption that all scientific entities are prefig-
ured in the pre- and non-scientific life-world(s) goes in another direction: However
strongly diverged (from everyday experience) the scientific constitution of objects
of inquiry is, there is no network of scientific practices that is capable of completely
cutting this constitution off. Genetic ties with everyday experience and the entities
instrumental in it still remain intact. For many followers of Husserl’s classical
views, it is the task of a special “genetic phenomenology” to restore these ties pre-
sumably lost—or better, blurred—within the scope of scientific experience (Ströker
1979, 1987, 156–169; Held 1991; Welter 1991; Vaysse 2006; Tonkli Komel 2008;
Steinle 2010; Lembeck 2011). The restoration should recover the meanings which
have once been imported from pre- and non-scientific life-world(s) and which have
been subsequently sedimented in the constitution of ever more complex scientific
entities. At stake in genetic phenomenology is a meticulous step-by-step tracking of
meaning-sedimentation within science’s “conceptual layers” of the methodically
organized cognition. Covering life-world’s texture of meanings with cognitive con-
structions based on mathematical idealizations supposedly creates and warrants sci-
entific objectivity. Going back (Rückgriff) to the alleged life-world’s ground of
primary meanings aims at unraveling the “life-world’s roots” of scientific
objectivity.18
Elisabeth Ströker, the author who most extensively tried to ground philosophy
of the natural sciences on Husserl’s phenomenology, is by no means an uncritical
supporter of the genetic-phenomenological scenarios which bestow the life-world
on the source of meaning veiled (but not annihilated) by scientific objectification.
For her, Husserl’s original critique of modern science’s objectivity from the view-
point of life-world’s grounding function (Bodensfunktion) makes an essential use
of a fiction: that of the “immovable pre-scientific ground” (der unverrückbare vor-
18
Moreover, attempting to recover the sedimented layers of meaning promises a life-world’s
grounding of the objectifying cognitive structures which have veiled the primary meanings consti-
tuted within the finite horizons of pre-scientific experience. It remains an open question as to
whether, for Husserl and his followers, this recovery could have retroactive consequences for the
structure of objectification in scientific inquiry. An affirmative answer would imply the possibility
of moving from a phenomenological critique of science to a phenomenological-critical philosophy
of science (Ginev 2008a).
3 Hermeneutic Realism and Interpretive Internalism 25
19
In claiming that scientific inquiry discloses and articulates reality anew, the hermeneutic realist
does not try to neglect the genetic ties with the life-world’s experience. However, since these ties
are not based on a continuation of the constitution of meaning, they have to be investigated not in
terms of “genetic phenomenology”, but as a subject of disciplines such as cultural history of sci-
entific practices, history of concepts (Begriffsgeschichte), history of ideas, or (not necessarily
Foucauldian) archaeology of scientific knowledge. Lorraine Daston coins the term “applied meta-
physics” when referring to the historical studies of objects that in their coming into being, exis-
tence, and passing away have been oscillating across the boundaries of scientific domains and
non-scientific areas of social practices. Applied metaphysics deals with the history of scientific
objects and migrating entities (possibly becoming hybrid, natural-cultural entities) and is com-
mitted to what Bruno Latour calls “historical realism”. In so doing, this metaphysics places the
genetic ties between non-scientific practical experience and various kinds of scientific inquiry in
diverse cultural-historical spaces without looking for a continuity of meaningful constitution.
Applied metaphysics “posits that scientific objects can be simultaneously real and historical”
(Daston 2000, 3).
26 Introductory Chapter: On the Very Idea of Hermeneutic Realism
20
Theodore Kisiel (1997, 71) is right when he stresses that Rouse’s conception of scientific prac-
tices “eschews the banner of hermeneutics” and instead proposes to examine scientific-technolog-
ical work by using different sorts of case studies. As a result, the phenomenological subject of the
constitution of scientific domains is turned into the empirical inquiry of practices.
3 Hermeneutic Realism and Interpretive Internalism 27
21
Pierre Bourdieu’s “logic of practice” as based on the concept of habitus serves much better the
tenets of hermeneutic realism than the theories aiming at the objectification of practices as discrete
factuality. My point is that the concept of habitus is commensurate with the hermeneutic circling
of practices in which reality becomes disclosed. According to Bourdieu (1990, 54), once internal-
ized in the form of schemes of perception, thought, and action, the habitus ensures the continuity
of practices and their constancy over time more reliably than all formal rules and explicit norms.
In the course of this study, I will show that some approaches to practices in ethnomethodology are
also in line with the tenets of hermeneutic realism.
28 Introductory Chapter: On the Very Idea of Hermeneutic Realism
22
For an attempt to advocate interpretive internalism by using models of self-organization, see
Krohn and Küppers (1987). The point of this attempt is that scientific research is not passively
adjusted to various social milieus. Science actively constitutes its milieu.
3 Hermeneutic Realism and Interpretive Internalism 29
are privy to objective truth and the authority of science is unassailable (Fox Keller
1987, 45). Choosing the other alternative would compel us to make cultural relativ-
ism and the “polytheism of values” our religion. The hermeneutic realist believes
that Fox Keller’s formulation expresses in several respects a wrong dilemma. First,
it incorrectly assumes an ontic dichotomy between nature and culture. Second, the
formulation introduces the opposition between objective knowledge and relative
knowledge within a Cartesian framework. But the most significant deficiency con-
sists in ignoring the ways in which the objectivity of scientific knowledge is contex-
tualized without becoming relativized. Contextual objectivity without relativism is a
formula advocated by the hermeneutic relativist. Following this formula as a coun-
terpart of interpretive internalism has tremendous socio-political consequences for
fighting scientism without undermining the authority of science.
The more adequate the reactions of the research process to its milieu, the higher
is the process of inquiry’s plasticity and the leeway in choosing possible roads of
inquiry. Without this plasticity the external pressure would be destructive. In inter-
pretive internalism, however, what becomes incorporated is not left unchanged. To
reiterate, all themes, values, and goals infused in the process of inquiry become re-
described in accordance with the possibilities that can be appropriated within the
domain’s articulation. The incorporation of external tasks in the autonomous
research is an assimilation of these tasks within the proper horizon of interpretation.
In other words, the meaning of what becomes incorporated is recast in accordance
with the interplay of scientific practices and possibilities for doing research. As
already indicated with regard to the criticism of phenomenological doctrines ascrib-
ing a grounding function to the pre-scientific life-world, the view of interpretive
internalism states that all meaning and meaningful entities in scientific inquiry are
constituted in the process of inquiry. Scientific inquiry does not permit the import of
external meaning that cannot be made “congruent” with the possibilities generated
by the practices of inquiry, i.e., the possibilities whose appropriation—by the same
practices which generate them—meaningfully articulates the domain of inquiry.
Making external subjects, issues, problems, etc., to fit the intrinsic possibilities of
doing research within the domain—and thereby incorporating the external demands
into inquiry’s interplay of practices and possibilities—proves to be the intrinsic
device of preserving the hermeneutic circularity through which the domain of real-
ity becomes disclosed in scientific inquiry.23
23
One should stress the significance of taking interpretive internalism into consideration when
discussing the subjects of legally relevant scientific knowledge. Though this knowledge is assumed
to be authentically scientific, it is always extra-scientifically re-contextualized, thereby becoming
unavoidably interest-laden knowledge. Sheila Jasanoff (1997, 209) observes that willingness to
accept a particular scientific knowledge as providing testimony for the courtroom “amounts to an
expression of confidence in the institutions and practices that produced it.” Yet the criterial base of
this confidence reflects only the interests of the parties in dispute. (The law’s view of what consti-
tutes authentic scientific knowledge is an artifact of the legal system’s contingent ability to inter-
rogate scientific communities.) There is no longer any scientific knowledge in the courtroom (as in
any extra-scientific space of institutionalized social life). There is only knowledge isolated from
the facticity of scientific inquiry. This isolation is the reverse process to that of internalizing
3 Hermeneutic Realism and Interpretive Internalism 31
themes, values, and goals in the articulation of domains of inquiry. According to another important
observation of Jasanoff’s, courts produce the bulk of their scientific testimonies not from estab-
lished (standardized) scientific knowledge, but from fragmented, contested, and fluid theoretical
constructions and experimental results. The view of interpretive internalism states that not only the
production of knowledge but also its withdrawal from the process of inquiry and designing as
standard scientific knowledge take place within the interplay of scientific practices and possibili-
ties for doing research. Courts very often—by ignoring science’s interpretive internalism—usurp
the prerogative of scientists to decide what has the status of standard scientific knowledge.
24
Thomas Crump (2001, 346) is absolutely right when observing that the environments of “the old
Cavendish Laboratory at Cambridge and Los Alamos belong to different worlds.” Yet the need for
arranging instrumental environments is what remains constant in the transition from classical
(small-scale) science to Big Science. The search for a detection of gravitational waves as predicted
by general relativity is no exception. The technology measuring movements in identical gold-
platinum cubes caused by gravitational waves as it is installed on LISA Pathfinder arranges its own
instrumental environment and contexture-of-equipment that is located in a circular orbit at an
altitude of 1450 km.
32 Introductory Chapter: On the Very Idea of Hermeneutic Realism
through the configurations of its practices, to distance itself from what is directly
registered and read through the use of instruments, and to constitute research objects
by modeling and saving phenomena. It is the procedural distancing from the imme-
diate manipulation of what is instrumentally ready-to-hand that enables and war-
rants the autonomy of the process of inquiry as this autonomy is epitomized by the
thesis of interpretive internalism. Having a (reflexively controllable) theoretical dis-
tance from what is directly ready-to-hand in inquiry allows one not only to make
theoretical predictions when saving phenomena, but to devise and construct new
instruments for verifying the predictions, thereby setting up new environments of
immediate manipulation. But the way of distancing is informed by the immediate
manipulation and occurs within the environments of direct instrumentation. It is this
instrumentation that produces distance from what is ready-to-hand in scientific
inquiry. Therefore, arranging instrumental environments of data collection and (sta-
tistical) processing of data, on the one hand, and distancing from these environ-
ments for the sake of creating more sophisticated configurations of scientific
practices, on the other, are events involved in relations of a mutual reinforcement.
The (constructivist) attempts to come to grips with these relations by employing
models of strongly successive activities—from immediate manipulation of what is
ready-to-hand to theoretical conceptualization—are doomed to failure.
The approaches to inquiry developed in science studies (SSK and STS) that pri-
oritize practices over knowledge exclusively work with the concept of (scientific)
practice as rule-following and goal-oriented actions. Accordingly, these approaches
are firmly tied to the aforementioned objectivist paradigm of conceptualizing prac-
tices as discrete (factual) units. In this paradigm, any particular practice forms a
contexture-of-equipment in which all entities enacted by instruments become ready-
to-hand. Designated by various expressions, the notion of a contexture-of-equipment
plays a crucial role, especially in the conceptions of New Experimentalism. It serves
an important function in hermeneutic realism as well. Nonetheless, this is only a
subsidiary function. The picture of scientific inquiry as a diversity of discrete and
self-enclosed contextures-of-equipment is not in harmony with the interpretive-
phenomenological approach to scientific inquiry, where the accent is placed on the
continuity and the openness of the research process. Obviously, a laboratory’s envi-
ronment as structured around the research instruments provides the most typical
case in point for a contexture-of-equipment in the process of inquiry. This is the
environment in which science “brings objects ‘home’ and manipulates them on their
own terms” (Knorr Cetina 1999, 27). The entities within this environment are ready-
to-hand and subjected to the conditions of the local social order of a laboratory.
Yet the notion of contexture is extendable to the empirical (objectifying) sciences
which are working with controlled observations rather than with repeatable experi-
ments. Most of the observatories might be considered as environmentally circum-
scribed contextures-of-equipment. The ground-based astronomical observatory
equipped with a permanently mounted Newtonian reflector for lunar and planetary
observations is the classical example. However, in many types of observatories the
condition of environmental localization of data collection and data processing via
instruments is either not fulfilled or strongly modified. These are observatories with
3 Hermeneutic Realism and Interpretive Internalism 33
or imitate a reality that is somewhere beyond the process of inquiry. Phrased differ-
ently, the readable technologies of these practices do not render objective factuality
that is beyond—and not constituted within—the facticity of inquiry. Social con-
structivists seem to hold that it is the other way around. They consider the laboratory
milieus as technological and semiotic embodiments of natural orders. Thus,
according to Karin Knorr Cetina (1999, 26–32), the “natural order” becomes recon-
figured as an order of signs in a laboratory contexture-of-equipment (which by itself
is characterized by a local social order). From the reconstruction of natural events
and processes through instruments of experimentation—so her argument goes—
physicists creates variables (as second-order signs referring to data as first-order
signs) that are designed to be employed in the formal models of theoretical physics.
The reconstruction of natural orders and the production of signs are construed in
terms of practices of representation (in a sense more or less related to representa-
tional epistemology). In summary, the semiotic orders created within the socially
organized environment of experimentation somehow reproduce something that is
“out there”, and thus, what is studied becomes technological and semiotic artifacts
constructed under laboratory conditions.
Accordingly, the semiotic reproduction and representation of natural orders is
universally valid for all kinds of scientific inquiry. Knorr Cetina provides the exam-
ple of astronomy as a discipline that has been transformed (after the use of photo-
graphic plates) from a kind of research that surveys natural phenomena (or
observational field research) into a research enterprise that processes images of
these phenomena. The insistence on such a transformation, however, still implies a
strong opposition between manipulable entities and natural phenomena. The effects
and images produced through laboratory manipulations should (somehow) repre-
sent the natural phenomena. This is the point of the “enculturation of natural
objects” conception. The hermeneutic realist denounces this opposition because it
contradicts the thesis of interpretive internalism. All phenomena studied in the envi-
ronments of scientific practices are meaningfully constituted within these environ-
ments. They are neither outcomes of transformations nor do they represent
something that by itself is deprived of meaning. They are phenomena of the reality
disclosed and meaningfully articulated by scientific practices. Knorr Cetina wrongly
admits, in my view, that there is an initial process of imaging the natural phenomena
that precedes the articulation of meaning within the laboratory contexture-of-
equipment. There is no room for an absolute (non-contextualized) distinction
between natural and “cultural” in scientific research, since the very distinction is
always already “encultured” and properly carried out in the contexts of inquiry and
not beyond them.
In anticipating more extended discussions, I should like to cite a claim that prima
facie makes hermeneutic realism a kind of interpretive constructivism: All phenom-
ena supposedly entitled to be saved in the research process are meaningfully pro-
duced within this process. (This claim is nicely defended by Paul Teller (2001),
who—in contrast to Bas van Fraassen—argues that the phenomena to be saved are
not to be directly described by empirical substructures of theoretical models. What
data models describe and measure are idealized and laboriously constructed
36 Introductory Chapter: On the Very Idea of Hermeneutic Realism
phenomena that have little to do with the descriptions of phenomena predating data
models. Yet even these—more intuitive than methodically ruled—descriptions in
the process of inquiry are always already contextualized by scientific practices. In
admitting that scientific instruments create new phenomena, van Fraassen (2001)
seems to accept Teller’s argument.)25 From a constructivist viewpoint, scientific
inquiry turns out to be enclosed in a large cycle that involves observable and unob-
servable phenomena, data models that measure phenomena, theoretical models that
save phenomena, theoretical entities that supposedly receive empirical interpreta-
tions through saved phenomena, and predictions about the existence of new phe-
nomena that can be saved if they are constructible by instruments.
In contrast to constructive empiricists, social constructivists promise a way out
of this cycle. Andrew Pickering and many others argue that behind every phenom-
enon lies a set of practices. This is an attractive formulation that implies multiple
ways of arranging data, phenomena, models, and theoretical models, depending on
the social contexts of inquiry. But it is burdened with an unpleasant problem con-
sisting in the unclear status of “behind”. If practices are behind phenomena, then the
former are causing the latter. Since practices supposedly “pertain” to culture, and
phenomena are manifestations of nature, then the unavoidable conclusion is that
culture is causing nature. The hermeneutic realist categorically rejects such an
absurdity implied by the mysterious way in which practices are put behind phenom-
ena. She insists that all phenomena are contextually revealed within contextualizing
practices. Revealing-phenomena-within-practices is neither culture nor nature,
and—what is much more important—it is not a causal (or whatever) relation of
determination. It is rather a kind of hermeneutic circularity of meaningful articula-
tion within the facticity of inquiry.
At this point an essential specification is needed. I agree, all phenomena are in a
sense constructed—by selecting and proceeding patterned data—within contextures-
of-equipment by employing instruments of experimentation. These phenomena, as
measured by data models, become saved by theoretical models constructed within
theories that have predicted the existence of the phenomena. However, the whole
constellation—the selection of data, the discovery of patterns in the data outputs,
the construction of data models, the measurements of phenomena, the conceptual
work of making theoretical predictions, the construction of explanatory models by
specifying theory’s mathematical formalism, the search for a morphism between
data models describing phenomena and explanatory models, and eventually the
theoretical way of saving these phenomena—takes place “always already” within a
context of scientific practices in which the phenomena are revealed and projected
25
Some constructivists of the Erlangen-Konstanz school radicalize this role of the instruments for
experimentation, and argue that the commonplace view that technology is applied natural science
has to be reversed: natural science is applied technology. According to them, only when the scope
of the natural scientific experience is strongly determined by the technological infrastructure of
measuring, experimenting, and constructing phenomena does scientific inquiry begin to deploy the
techniques of “idealizing stylization”. On that account, technology is not a particular sphere of
social life or a particular “symbolic form” (in Cassirer’s sense). Technology is a dimension of the
teleological essence of human existence and culture (Janich 2015).
3 Hermeneutic Realism and Interpretive Internalism 37
26
However, one might raise the question as to how an intra-active phenomenon “embraces” the
causal intra-actions constituting it. Is this “embracement” to be attributed to a “global causal
effect” created by all relevant intra-actions? Or is there a non-causal intra-action that elicits the
synergy of causal intra-actions? This strategy of questioning can be continued in the following
manner. For Barad, (1) the intra-active phenomena are not predetermined by dichotomous differ-
ences (like the subject-object one) that preexist them, and (2) the causal intra-actions taking place
in them produce differences that are always contextualized. In combining (1) and (2), one con-
fronts two questions. Is the force of contextualization to be derived from the causal intra-actions?
Or should one admit that this force operates in a non-causal manner?
40 Introductory Chapter: On the Very Idea of Hermeneutic Realism
27
Against the first assumption, the hermeneutic realist argues that the primary place where reflexiv-
ity comes into prominence is not the inquirer’s cognitive activities, but the interrelatedness of sci-
entific practices. (Ascribing reflexivity solely to the inquirer as epistemic subject is also not in full
harmony with Barad’s post-humanist agenda.) The second assumption is wrong since it unjustifi-
ably binds reflexivity to the physicalist notion of reflection. In criticizing the models of reflexivity
in the Strong Program, Barad misses the opportunity to approach non-physicalist (in particular,
hermeneutic) concepts of reflexivity. It is no accident that she suggests another physicalist notion,
that of diffraction, as an alternative to reflexivity: The non-representationalist “diffractive
methodology”—i.e., the methodology which looks for differences within entangled states—has to
replace the reflexive methodologies. This requirement is simply a corollary to Barad’s naturalist
attitude.
4 Scientific Inquiry from the Viewpoint of Hermeneutic Realism 41
describing the two subsystems. The states of these subsystems are regarded as being
entangled with the state of the composite system. Consequently, there are physical
properties that are not derivable from measurements on the subsystems; they can be
measured only on the composite system. With regard to quantum mechanics’ non-
classicality, the concept of entanglement refers to a type of interaction (between
physical systems) that is not based on causal relations. It is an interaction grounded
upon quantum correlations, i.e., correlations implied by the probabilistic structure
of quantum mechanics and its theory of measurement. However, when one delin-
eates as an object of study not the entangled state of a composite system, but the
composite system-environment state, then one has to take into consideration the
kind of system-environment entanglement. By implication, quantum coherence
should be ascribed to the system-environment state, which leads to a violation of
quantum superposition and decoherence. This is why entanglement underlies
decoherence.
Like the subsystems of a quantum system—and so the heuristic analogy I am
going to draw—a particular practice of inquiry (as located in its instrumental envi-
ronment as a contexture-of-equipment) and a particular configuration of practices
(as creating a context of inquiry) cannot be regarded as individual entities (existing
per se) when what is at stake is the ongoing meaningful articulation and objectifica-
tion of a scientific domain. Both the single practice and the context of inquiry are
entangled with the totality of the domain’s articulation/objectification. This totality
is not to be reduced to what the sum of all particular practices and all contexts of
inquiry might achieve. There are “quantum correlations” between single practices
and contexts of practices (as well as between single contexts and the whole of co-
referential contexts) that take place in the articulation and objectification of a scien-
tific domain. Here is an illustration of such a “quantum correlation”: When a certain
result is obtained by a particular practice of inquiry, the implications of this result
are immediately spread out (delocalized) and scattered over a range of (not neces-
sarily directly interconnected) contexts of the domain’s articulation. If the quantum
entanglement asserts the nonlocal character of microphysical reality, the kind of
entanglement invoked by hermeneutic realism implies the nonlocality of scientific
practices’ factual outcomes within the facticity of inquiry as disclosing the domains
of reality. In the course of this study, I will bind the heuristic analogy with the
quantum-mechanical concept of entanglement to the discussion of issues like
endogenous reflexivity of practices, the characteristic hermeneutic situations in the
research processes, the semiosis and textualizing of scientific domains, and the situ-
ated transcendence of the production of objectified factuality within the facticity of
inquiry. (The concept of scientific domain as the interrelatedness of practices that in
their contextuality disclose a domain of reality will play a central role in the remain-
der. I strongly distinguish this hermeneutic-ontological concept from Dudley
Shapere’s (1984, 273–276) purely epistemic notion of domain.)
It follows from the considerations in the preceding section that a particular sci-
entific practice—composed of a range of actions and activities operating in a
contexture-of-equipment—does not provide the necessary conditions under which
a domain of inquiry might exist as a reality sui generis. If this practice were to
42 Introductory Chapter: On the Very Idea of Hermeneutic Realism
become isolated from the inquiry’s texture of orchestrated practices, it would lose
its meaning and its role in the process of meaningful articulation. A scientific prac-
tice gains (and manages to maintain) its existence (and reproduction) only through
its being entangled with the processual interrelatedness of scientific practices within
a domain of inquiry. Only this interrelatedness turns out to be endowed with autono-
mous (ontologically self-sufficient) existence, and accordingly, with the capability
to disclose a distinctive domain of reality.
When the hermeneutic realist argues that the interrelatedness of scientific practices
of the process of inquiry enables the opening of the domain’s meaningful being, she
strongly distinguishes this being from the total (ontic) scope of possible entities,
events, and phenomena that can be objectified and constituted as a domain of inquiry.
The scope of a domain is first and foremost a scope of objectified factuality that is
constructed by means of empirical and/or semantic interpretation of theoretical objects
and structures. A plausible way of identifying this scope extensionally is through the
set of all possible data models that might (empirically) interpret the theoretical models
derivable from the domain’s basic theory. Although this is a (potentially) infinite set,
the total scope of a domain thus (semantically) delineated is an actual presence. It is
fixed by a formal structure of objectification: the theory’s formalism (and all specifica-
tions it undergoes in the construction of particular theoretical models). The family of
all models interpreting this formalism delimits the domain in terms of the theory’s
validity. (A model is a structure that satisfies the theorems of the theory.) This delimi-
tation can be achieved via the two main formal-semantic approaches: the one based on
the specification of “set theoretic predicate” (Sneed-Stegmüller), or the “state space”
approach (van Fraassen, Suppe). In the second case, a domain (with one basic theory)
would become delimited by delineating configurations and trajectories on the state
space, granted that the theory describes a dynamic of the system —which presumably
covers the domain’s empirical content—in terms of its possible states. (Generally
speaking, the semantic approaches to scientific theories are important to hermeneutic
realism since they provide images of scientific knowledge’s structures that are rele-
vant to the constitutional analysis of meaning within configured practices of inquiry.
Hermeneutic realism addresses scientific knowledge as fore-structured and meaning-
fully constituted by these practices. The semantic approaches identify structures with-
drawn from the ongoing fore-structuring.)
In contrast to the extensional-semantic (and the extensional-empirical) delinea-
tion and delimitation of the domain’s scope as the latter is determined by the basic
theory’s postulates (and their symmetry and invariance group), the processual inter-
relatedness of scientific practices opens the domain’s being as an ongoing meaning-
ful articulation that never becomes a mere presence. Disclosing and articulating
reality within the facticity of practices is guided by a kind of reflexivity. On several
occasions, I will argue in the remainder that this reflexivity is due more to the “logic
of practices” than to the reflexive behavior of inquirers. Scientific practices consti-
tute the contexts of inquiry—and accordingly, the contexts of a domain’s meaning-
ful articulation—by pursuing the ways of creating possible configurations within
their interrelatedness. By implication, their interrelatedness does not build an
independent structure of relations that preexist the arising contexts of inquiry. The
4 Scientific Inquiry from the Viewpoint of Hermeneutic Realism 43
28
I am using here the term “supervenience” in a manner similar to that in which analytical philoso-
phers use it in characterizing the relationship (say) between moral properties and natural proper-
ties, or between mental characteristics and physical characteristics. In this context, altering
something in the regime of meaningful articulation of a scientific domain necessarily alters some-
thing in the procedural objectification of that domain. Changes taking place in the former neces-
sarily entail changes appearing in the latter, granted that the relation of entailment does not exhaust
the relation of supervenience. If formulated as a necessary condition for having a relation of super-
venience, the entailment of changes is possibly met by the relation between articulation within
scientific practices and objectification through procedures. Yet several analytical philosophers
show that the relation of supervenience is a non-symmetric relation. By contrast, the relation
between meaningful articulation and procedural objectification is presumably symmetric: A
change in the meaningful articulation of a phenomenon supervenes on a change in the regime of
its objectification.
44 Introductory Chapter: On the Very Idea of Hermeneutic Realism
cellular components, and separating plasmid DNA from chromosomal DNA are
carried out within a laboratory contexture-of-equipment. The execution of these
manipulations is entirely guided by the hermeneutic-as without making use of
objectifying predication. But within the same contextures one distances oneself
from what is manipulated, and predicates, say, that the double-stranded molecules
of non-chromosomal DNA contain genes for the production of degradative enzymes.
Furthermore, one embodies this result in a system of signs (sentences, graphs, dia-
grams, etc.). The way in which the apophantic-as works in this contexture results in
objectifying predication and its semiotic representation.
The result thus obtained becomes immediately dispersed in several configura-
tions of molecular-biological practices. In each particular context of inquiry, one is
working out the experimental result about the function of these non-chromosomal
genes again in accordance with the hermeneutic-as, which articulates meaning, and
the apophantic-as, which underlies the production of objectified factuality. Yet the
way in which both types of “as” complement each other on the level of the contexts
of inquiry essentially differs from their complementarity on the level of the particu-
lar contextures. I am not going to discuss this problematic now. It will be handled in
the chapter titled “Meaningful Articulation and Objectification of Reality in
Scientific Inquiry”. At the moment, we only note that addressing the complementar-
ity on the contexts level requires a much broader concept of hermeneutic-as than
that of the existential analytic. My point is that there is within a context of inquiry a
circulation of semiotic representations, each of them originating from a particular
contexture-of-equipment. The hermeneutic-as articulates meaning by mediating
between the semiotic representations. (The apophantic-as of theoretical predication
objectifies what is contextualized.) Thus considered, the hermeneutic-as contributes
to the entanglement of instrumental contextures with contexts of inquiry.
A possible objection against the complementarity of articulation and objectifica-
tion might be raised from the viewpoint of normative epistemology. According to
this viewpoint, what is meaningfully constituted through manipulation of entities
that are ready-to-hand only becomes subsequently identified via epistemological
criteria of objectivity. Before applying such criteria, there is no objectification. This
objection wrongly equates objectification with normative estimation of what is
objectified. It is the identification by means of criteria of objectivity—and not the
objectification itself—that is postponed by the complementarity of articulation and
objectification. Roughly, the complementarity takes place in the constitution of a
domain, while the application of epistemological criteria is a matter of justification
of what has been constituted.29 These criteria are applicable under the condition that
the particular space of representation is de-contextualized, and consequently, the
signs serving the representation function are treated as having firm references.
Under this condition, what is represented becomes identifiable as objective values
of quantifiable variables, as objective experimental results, as objective
measurements, and as objective data models that can be embedded in the
29
Here I mean the distinction between the “context of constitution” and the “context of justifica-
tion” as it is introduced and championed in Ginev (2000, 60–69).
46 Introductory Chapter: On the Very Idea of Hermeneutic Realism
certain organs. When the study of the urea cycle is confined to mammals, the loca-
tion is the cells of the liver and the kidney. A further step is its more precise identi-
fication in the intracellular fluid and mitochondria. This step requires the construction
of data models. Within the latter the object is specified as a series of enzyme-
catalyzed chemical reactions.
The metabolic function of the urea cycle is to convert two amino groups into a
nontoxic excretion product. Thus envisioned and specified as an object of inquiry,
the urea cycle is capable of laboratory measurement in various contextures-of-
equipment enabling, for instance, measurements of the kinetics of different enzyme
systems and regulatory factors, the compounds related to the urea cycle, the produc-
tion of N-acetylglutamate for the sake of establishing the role of this allosteric
cofactor in the urea cycle, the variability of glutamine as related to metabolic inhibi-
tors, the conversion of arginine to ornithine and urea, etc. The resulting data of such
measurements are represented through diverse semiotic means, e.g., screening
tables, images obtained by thin-layer chromatography, graphs, diagrams, represen-
tational devices of urine screening programs, and so on. The output of data repre-
sented by a system of signs becomes dispersed in (say) contexts of clinical inquiry
such as the quest for differentiating between types of ornithinemia, the early diag-
nosis of enzymatic defects causing disorders of the urea cycle, the development of
the “artificial liver” for studying enzyme systems embedded in fibrin membranes,
and the study of enzyme kinetics with regard to the role of inhibitors. In any of these
contexts a circulation of semiotic representations takes place. One contextualizes
the empirically and analytically identifiable properties responsible for the specific-
ity of the (clinically normal) urea cycle. Identifying such properties comes into
being through relating enzymological models to data models. At the same time, a
range of physiological, cytological, and biochemical phenomena are amenable to
being saved in the contexts in which the urea cycle is envisioned.
The preceding considerations provide an additional argument for the claim that
the interrelatedness of practices is not a structure of relations imposed upon the
readable technologies as operating in their contextures-of-equipment. The interre-
latedness owe its existence to the deferral and the interference of spaces of semiotic
representation and the concomitant transfer of semiotic systems (encompassing
signs as diverse as tables, samples, diagrams, equations, graphs, charts, and photo-
graphs, etc.).30 This is always an interrelatedness in the making. However, the over-
lap and the transfer mentioned take place within the horizon of possibilities upon
which the same practices project their interrelatedness. By implication, the produc-
tion of semiotic representations and the total semiosis of a scientific domain are also
predicated on a horizontal continuity.
The talk of meaning in the hermeneutic philosophy of science has two focal
points, related roughly to the semiosis and the fore-structuring of objectified
factuality. On the one hand, at issue is the meaning articulated in the facticity of
30
But vice versa, a requisite of the circulation of representational devices in the process of inquiry
is the mutual compatibility of practices and their reflexive capacity to form contextual
configurations.
48 Introductory Chapter: On the Very Idea of Hermeneutic Realism
inquiry. This is the meaning that fore-structures and becomes objectified in the pro-
duced factuality. On the other hand, one is dealing with the meanings originating
from particular practices and circulating within any particular context of inquiry.
The contextual circulation of meanings corresponds to the circulation of semiotic
representations. The meaning of signs produced by a certain readable technology in
its space of representation is made comprehensible by the representational device of
another readable technology.31 Thus, experimental measurements are made intelli-
gible by being represented as data graphs and data diagrams; the meaning of the
latter is comprehensible by being used in designing computer simulations; they
become meaningful by being related to new computational techniques; the meaning
of the output of applying these techniques is embodied in new data models; they
should receive meaning through their embeddability in theoretical structures; and so
on. Taken separately, each device/space represents signs referring to manipulable
entities. Granted that the manipulations within contextures-of-equipment are
accomplished to produce signs embodying meanings of objectified factuality, the
isolated space of representation refers to this factuality. Yet, placed in the whole
semiosis of scientific inquiry, a particular space of representation expresses a par-
ticular facet of the constitution of objectified factuality within the facticity of
inquiry.
The deferral of shifting and interfering spaces of representation within a rela-
tively closed configuration of practices also forms a relatively autonomous cycle.
After closing such a cycle, certain signs (or even whole semiotic systems) prove to
be eliminable in principle. Thus, the process of inquiry based on path analysis in
population genetics employs diagrams to visualize how simultaneously varying fac-
tors work in causal pathways. They become eliminable when the practice of solving
linear equations comes into effect. The semiotic system of equations not only trans-
lates but also eliminates the semiotic system of diagrams. However, James Griesemer
shows that this eliminability does not take place in the domain of population genet-
ics. Though they are mathematically replaceable by linear path equations, diagrams
are ineliminable since their implementation “has the side effect of making path
analysis more powerful than causally indiscriminate statistical methods lacking
such devices” (Griesemer 1991, 172). The use of alternative representational devices
is in several prominent historical cases tied to basic conceptual controversies in the
development of a scientific domain. Thus, Philipp Sarasin (2007) shows the impor-
tance of the devices of visualization in the dispute between Rudolf Virchow’s cel-
lular pathology and Robert Koch’s bacteriology. The opposite parties’ reciprocal
accusations of incapability to distinguish between facts and artifacts by means of
31
The different representational devices are characterized by different degrees of plasticity in mak-
ing comprehensible signs already produced by a readable technology. Thus, Roger Krohn (1991)
makes it clear that statistical graphs as a representational device reemploy the researchers’ powers
of visual perception and pattern recognition, which facilitates the creation of models. Statistical
graphs belong to a large class of scientific visuals (diagrams, drawings, maps, photographs, etc.).
An open question that deserves a separate study is the question of whether there is in the articula-
tion of a wide range of scientific domains a tendency toward amplifying the role of visuals in the
circulation of semiotic representations.
4 Scientific Inquiry from the Viewpoint of Hermeneutic Realism 49
32
With regard to his criticism of (scientific) realism, Rorty (1991, 63) argues that realists insist on
the idea that the object of inquiry has a context of its own, a context that is privileged by virtue of
being the object’s rather than the inquirer’s. For Rorty, privileging such a context provides the
broadest criterion for realism, a criterion that unites champions of scientism with non-ethnocentric
anthropologists and literary critics who still believe in structuralism. Interestingly enough, this
criterion is formulated in terms of a distinction that echoes the Cartesian dualism, namely the dis-
tinction between the object’s context and the inquirer’s context. The epistemological behaviorist
(being a pragmatic antirealist) sticks to the inquirer’s context, i.e., the context in which what exists
is whatever the contextually generated beliefs hold true for.
33
There is a kind of Derrida-like “economy” operating on various levels of the domain’s meaning-
ful articulation and abolishing any allegedly invariant structure of meaning (and/or allegedly static
presence of meaning). Defined by means of the “economy of differences”, meaning (of particular
items like measurements, observations, diagrams, data models, theoretical concepts, etc., as well
as of whole “texts”) is always “absent presence”.
52 Introductory Chapter: On the Very Idea of Hermeneutic Realism
between “text” and relevant context is not to be blurred, the hermeneutic realist
assigns the interpretive fore-structuring first and foremost to the horizon of inquiry.
In other words, this fore-structuring lays out the horizon of possibilities for the for-
mations of cycles of circulating semiotic representations and meanings. Textualizing
is the ongoing formation of relevant contexts for possible “texts”. The play of dif-
ferences, through which the particular “texts” are intertextualized, is always already
contextualized, i.e., carried out under the conditions of contexts that in their coref-
erentiality constitute the intercontextuality of a domain of inquiry. Accordingly, the
intertextuality dictated by the play of differences is subordinate to the intercontex-
tuality—a claim that will be discussed for several reasons in the remainder.
The usual way of opposing the strong textualism of poststructuralist literary criti-
cism to the strong contextualism of traditional historiography is basically irrelevant
to the conception of textualizing. At stake in this controversy is the strategy of
decoding texts. Hermeneutic realism has little to do with cultural studies of textual-
ized artifacts in science. The conception of textualizing cannot be reformulated in
such studies. Textualizing is not merely a creation of “cultural texts” or textualized
artifacts. It is first and foremost a contextual constitution of meaning that—by being
from the very outset scattered over an undetermined number of contexts—becomes
intercontextualized. On another formulation, textualizing in scientific inquiry refers
to the processual unity of factuality and facticity with regard to the way in which the
meaningful articulation of a scientific domain is related to semiosis. From this per-
spective, a claim already raised can be reformulated: In preserving the validity of
the text-context distinction—but stressing at the same time the priority of textual-
izing over both texts and contexts—the hermeneutic realist insists more on the
domain’s intercontextuality rather than on the “tracing game” taking place in the
relations among the “texts” in a scientific domain.34
Let me reiterate: A “text” stands for the (always unfinished and incomplete)
outcome of reading, representing and textualizing within a context of configured
scientific practices. In avoiding the essentialist image of a text-within-context, the
chapter titled “Meaningful Articulation and Objectification of Reality in Scientific
Inquiry” focuses on the sense in which a “text” is constituted by a circulation of
representations and a synergy of practices’ readable technologies. The Concluding
Chapter is entirely devoted to the concept of “text” as the unity of producing-
objectified-factuality-within-the-facticity-of-inquiry. The contextual constitution of
a “text” contains a kind objectification that—through intertwined reading and rep-
resenting—creates objectified factuality. Within a “text” isolated from the facticity
of inquiry, the objectified factuality only has actual presence as manifolds of values
of quantifiable variables. (A “text” withdrawn from the meaningful articulation of a
domain becomes theoretical knowledge structured by its semantic interpretation.
Taken in its isolation from the facticity of inquiry, this knowledge is amenable to
34
To claim that there is, in the articulation of a scientific domain, nothing outside the textualizing
intercontextuality amounts to defending a realism about the facticity of inquiry, since reality-as-
facticity—as disclosed, in particular, by the facticity of inquiry—projects the totality of its mean-
ing upon this intercontextuality.
4 Scientific Inquiry from the Viewpoint of Hermeneutic Realism 53
reconstruction in accordance with the norms which have governed the epistemic
procedures of its production.) In the process of inquiry, the kind of objectification
(involved in the “text”) is still entangled with (and fore-structured by) the domain’s
meaningful articulation. Conceptualizing a relatively autonomous “text” as being
open to re-contextualization and further fore-structuring requires an approach to the
meaningful articulation and objectification of a scientific domain based on a unitary
conception of textualizing.
The interpenetrating spaces of representation prompt the ways in which a syn-
ergy of readable technologies comes into play. What becomes meaningfully articu-
lated in a certain (relatively autonomous) context of inquiry is a unity of experimental
data, measurements, data models, observable and unobservable phenomena, and
theoretical model(s) entitled to save the phenomena. The hermeneutic realist does
not deny that this unity can be reconstructed as an intratheoretical process, or as a
process of theory construction. However, since this unity does not “exhaust” what
the “text” is about, and the “text’s” meaning is always already within a horizon of
possibilities, it would not be correct to state that the “text” itself is in its relevant
context. The reconstruction of the aforementioned unity of data, phenomena to be
saved, and models is the agenda of constructive empiricism (or structural empiri-
cism). With this agenda, scientific investigation ought to represent “the empirical
phenomena as embeddable in theoretical models, and those models are describable
only up to structural isomorphism” (van Fraassen 2006, 305). This is what scientific
representation is all about, provided that the process of inquiry is totally encapsu-
lated within the theory construction. The structural empiricist might also introduce
and work with an (intratheoretical) concept of text.. Accordingly, a text would be
that logically/semantically self-sufficient unity of lower level structures and proce-
dures which are necessary for embedding the empirical phenomena in the highest
level structures, provided that the embeddedness is describable only up to isomor-
phism (or at least to other kinds of structure-preserving morphisms).
Following the idea of the interpretive openness created by the interplay of prac-
tices and possibilities, the hermeneutic realist holds that any intratheoretical text
(thus defined) is always open to be re-contextualized within the facticity of inqui-
ry.35 Accordingly, a relatively autonomous “text” cannot be reconstructed as a unity
of discrete structures that is adequate to saving a phenomenon (or a class of phe-
35
By contrast, the constructive empiricist argues that all (non-theoretical) scientific practices must
be considered as a continuation of the theory construction by other means. Assuming that the
theory construction is situated within scientific practices would rule out the implementation of
empirical adequacy as a criterion for a successful way of saving observable (and unobservable)
phenomena. Notoriously, the search for empirical adequacy in constructive empiricism goes hand
in hand with the semantic view of scientific theories. Van Fraassen (1980, 64) clearly avers that
some models of a scientific theory are specifiable with regard to their empirical adequacy as “can-
didates for the direct representation of observable phenomena.” This kind of representation is still
in the spirit of representationalist epistemology. My point is that—despite van Fraassen’s efforts to
subject the search for empirical adequacy to the logic of the hermeneutic circle—the irremovable
remainder of this epistemology is due to the intratheoretic enclosure of the process of inquiry. (For
this criticism of constructive empiricism, see Ginev 2011a, 37–40.)
54 Introductory Chapter: On the Very Idea of Hermeneutic Realism
36
Let me say that in this perspective the factuality of the immediate contextures (as objectified, for
instance, in sociological terms) is not to be confused with the objectified factuality (experimental
data and measurements) as obtained within the particular contextures.
5 From Practices to “Texts” 57
the interrelatedness. Thus, the articulation takes place in the hermeneutic circularity
of projected whole and articulated units. It is this circularity that replaces the regula-
tive and teleological character of the activities composing a particular practice.
Because of this replacement, the interrelatedness of scientific practices cannot be
conceptualized in terms of motives, personal intentions, collective intentionality,
rules, norms, resources for performing activities, and goals. Accordingly, the mean-
ing constituted in configured practices of inquiry is entirely a kind of trans-subjective
meaning.
The interrelatedness of practices becomes detached from the socio-psychological
organization of actions and activities, and due to this detachment it manages to
reveal the being of meaningful articulation.37 The same is valid for the contexts of
inquiry constituted by the configurations. They not only cannot be reduced to the
contextures-of-equipment instituted by the particular (single) practices, but through
their changeability organize actions and activities into practices. The whole of a
contexture-of-equipment arising out of discrete actions and activities is fore-
structured by the continuity of changing and re-contextualizing configurations of
practices. In the narrow perspective of a theory of human agency, practices (includ-
ing scientific ones) have existence only through stable (normative) orders and orga-
nizations created by reflexive agents: Practices are in this perspective units of
(normative) intersubjectivity. In the perspective of hermeneutic realism, human
agents (including the members of scientific communities) are always already in
interrelated practices whose interrelatedness has a being in the interpretative circu-
larity of meaningful articulation, which in turn is enabled by practices’ changing
configurations. Practices in their interrelatedness and in the interplay with the pos-
sibilities they project are part and parcel of existential facticity. Both the interrelat-
edness (as distinguished by practices’ endogenous reflexivity) and the interplay are
trans-subjective aspects of facticity—or features of the situated transcendence of
ways of being within the reality’s meaningful articulation—and are not intersubjec-
tively constructed in accordance with a Habermasian universal-pragmatic norma-
tive rationality.
As already pointed out, the present study develops various arguments against the
splitting of the being of a scientific domain into the reality of meaningful articula-
tion and the reality of what becomes objectified (and epistemologically and seman-
tically delineated). The crucial argument for this thesis is to be sought again by
scrutinizing the research process as a process of textualizing a domain of inquiry.
The unity of meaningful articulation and the constitution of research objects and
structures (as incorporated in knowledge about objectified factuality) is “embodied”
in the “texts” of scientific inquiry. The essential ambivalence in the configured
37
Speaking in terms of a hermeneutic social theory, the cultural life forms articulated within an
ontologically self-sufficient interrelatedness of practices are characterized by ethos and habitus.
Yet these are not socio-psychological characteristics. Ethos and habitus rather refer to the way in
which the life form creates its kinds of intersubjectivity, its typical “thingness” (Sachlichkeit), and
its mode of historicizing that constitutes authoritative tradition. Ethos and habitus are ontological
characteristics of the way of being as situated transcendence.
58 Introductory Chapter: On the Very Idea of Hermeneutic Realism
interpretative circularity of creating data models as the next step towards reality’s
articulation. The chronological unfolding of the research process proceeds from the
collection of data to the construction of data models. From a hermeneutic view-
point, however, the collection of data is interpretatively fore-structured by the pos-
sibilities one chooses and appropriates when creating data models. Accordingly, the
acquisition of data is always already within the horizon of possibilities for present-
ing phenomena by means of data models. In the philosophy of science which serves
the tenets of hermeneutic realism, the construction of data models in the process of
articulation and objectification of a domain mediates between contextures-of-
equipment and contexts of configured practices.
At first glance, the construction of data models seems to be the (chronological)
next step towards extending the hermeneutic circularity of reading/representing by
taking into account practices and possibilities involved specifically in the process-
ing of data. The construction of data models is always already within the horizon of
saving possible (observable and unobservable) phenomena. As I pointed out, the
interpretative circularity that characterizes this saving appropriates possibilities of
embedding phenomena (as represented by data models) in theoretical models. From
the viewpoint of formal semantics, a data model becomes semantically meaningful
when it proves to be a substructure of a larger mathematical structure. On a central
claim of hermeneutic realism, always when a phenomenon is saved by fitting a data
model in a theoretical model, a theoretical object becomes partially envisioned
(read and represented) in the respective context of inquiry. This envisioning evolves
from its own interpretative circle, and is the most significant event in the meaningful
articulation of reality as it is disclosed in scientific inquiry. Before unfolding this
assertion, however, some summarizing considerations concerning the three stages
of disclosing, articulating, and objectifying a domain of research are in order.
The first stage takes place within the contextures-of-equipment of scientific
inquiry. But the acquisition of data is situated within configured practices of con-
structing data models. By the same token, the hermeneutic circularity attributed to
the process of saving phenomena circumscribes and orients the construction of data
models. Thus, each new stage in the process of articulation and objectification of a
domain fore-structures the previous one. The interpretative fore-structuring of the
reality disclosed in scientific inquiry consists in an integral interpretative circularity
of meaningful articulation that involves the detection and selection of data, the con-
struction of data models, and the theoretical saving of phenomena. The interplay of
practices and possibilities through which theoretical objects become partially/con-
textually envisioned via saving phenomena provides the broadest horizon of articu-
lation in scientific inquiry. Within this horizon phenomena become saved in
particular contexts. Saving a phenomenon by means of a theoretical model remains
situated in and transcended by the interplay of practices and the possibilities. Both
the data models and the theoretical models through which phenomena become
saved are expressions of the domain’s reality, and not representations (copies) of
this reality in the sense of representational epistemology. (James McAllister (2011)
frees the discussion of the relations between data models and theoretical structures
from the narrow methodological framework and places it in a much more interesting
60 Introductory Chapter: On the Very Idea of Hermeneutic Realism
The hermeneutic realist insists on the continuity and potential infinity of textual-
izing a domain of inquiry. The interplay of practices and possibilities is ever consti-
tuting new contexts, each of them situated in the facticity of inquiry and open to
revision and transformation. Since the interplay of scientific practices and possibili-
ties for doing research is a non-finalizable re-contextualization, the research process
which articulates a scientific domain is also potentially infinite. Pace the believers
in Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker’s “closed theories” that might finalize the intrinsic
development of scientific domains, there is no intrinsic reason in this interplay that
may finalize it. The end of a particular episode—cognitively marked, in particular,
by the experimental verification of a theoretical prediction, and socially distin-
guished by the attainment of a consensus between experimentalists and theorists
regarding the conditions under which a successful experiment should be counted as
a test—is always widening the horizon of possibilities for doing new research.
The Production of Objectified Factuality
Within the Facticity of Scientific Inquiry
I will resume in this chapter the discussion set up in the Introductory Chapter by
supplementing the thesis that hermeneutic realism is a realism about reality’s mean-
ingful articulation within (scientific) practices with the ontological stipulation that
human existence has a being in practices constantly and continuously constituting
meaning projected upon possibilities. The position of hermeneutic realism ought to
be discussed against the background of the “practice turn” in the realism debate.
This position is part and parcel of this turn, and should be juxtaposed with other
positions and doctrines emphasizing the role of practices. Actually, as the editors of
a recent volume devoted to analyses of scientific practices argue, there is no single
“practice turn” but rather “multiple practice trends” in the philosophy, sociology,
and history of science. According to them, a practice trend (like New
Experimentalism) emerges when one pays attention not only to particular classes of
practices of inquiry but to fundamentally practical facets of science in general. This
trend is a line of investigation that places primary emphasis on “the transformative-
technical-pragmatic dimension of science, with its material, somatic, skillful and
utilitarian aspects” (Soler et al. 2014, 9).
Another nice characterization of the experimentalist trend in the “practice turn”
allows me to undertake a further step in the attempt at locating the position of her-
meneutic realism. According to Mieke Boon (2015, 59), the New Experimentalists
“defend a philosophy that considers scientific practices, and they do not accept the
restriction to the logic of science … The traditional distinction between the context
of discovery and the context of justification … is abandoned. Instead, the New
Experimentalists aim at an account of the rationality of scientists in scientific prac-
tices that includes how scientists reason about experiments, instruments, data, and
theoretical knowledge.” Against the background of this panoramic characterization,
I would say that the deficiency of New Experimentalism consists in the deficit of
accounting for the being of “scientists in scientific practices”. Scientists are in
ecstatic unity with their practices: Scientists create scientific practices by being
“created” by these same practices. There is nothing mysterious in this formulation
if one takes into account that both scientists and scientific practices participate in the
hermeneutic circularity of inquiry. Though “creating” each other, neither practices
nor scientists determine or are determined. Being in hermeneutic circularity informs
the ecstatic unity of practices and scientists, granted that each of them is character-
ized by endogenous reflexivity. Boon is right that the New Experimentalists aban-
don in their work the traditional context distinction. Yet they do not overcome this
distinction. Overcoming it requires working out a new context beyond the dichot-
omy between purely factual (ethnographic, sociological, psychological, etc.) stud-
ies and rational (normative) reconstructions devised to reveal the “logic” of inquiry.
The hermeneutic realist suggests in this regard the “context of constitution”.
Roughly, one studies scientific inquiry in the context of constitution by putting the
aforementioned hermeneutic circularity first, thereby paying special attention to the
forms of endogenous reflexivity operating in this circularity.
Tentatively, the following disclaimer should be stressed: Hermeneutic realism
has nothing to do with the dictum that all facts are reducible to interpretations. This
dictum belongs to the repertoire of relativism. As a realist position, hermeneutic
realism strongly opposes any form of relativism. By the same token, hermeneutic
realism is not to be confused with the interpretative version of the dualism of con-
ceptual scheme and empirical content, which states that we are doomed to interpret
facts in frameworks. Not only the procedurally achievable facts (like the experimen-
tal facts) but the allegedly immediate facts (directly given to the perception) are
always already conceptualized. Like the design and the implementation of proce-
dures for achieving (theoretically predicted) facts, perceptions are working in
frames. In our empirical cognition and knowledge of reality—so the argument for
the scheme-content interpretive position goes—we are prisoners of our conceptual
frameworks. Being thus imprisoned, we have no direct access to facts per se: The
access is mediated by conceptually framed and theoretically laden perceptions that
unavoidably transform the alleged facts into interpretive artifacts. Discarding the
doctrine of the framed access to reality—opening the door for interpretive specula-
tions within the dualism of conceptual scheme and empirical content—leads to an
extended view about the constitutive role of facticity: The hermeneutic realist
admits that all conceptually framed interpretations are constituted within the reality-
as-facticity, and cannot be regarded as responsible for the interpretive constitution
of factuality.
In this chapter, central focus will be given to empirical scientific facts. Though
quite relevant to hermeneutic realism, I will skip for several reasons a discussion of
the non-empirical scientific facts. The mathematical theorems form the largest class
of such facts. Thus, for instance, it is a non-empirical fact that the equation relating
the triple integral as a volume integral over a volume in a three-dimensional space
with the surface integral over the boundary of that volume represents the relation
between the total vector field’s sources to the total flux across the boundary. By
holding a view that equates theorems in the formal sciences with non-empirical
facts, I am not trying to take a position in the philosophy of mathematics, or to
1 The Practice Turn in Science Studies 65
1
The special unity of these kinds of facticity and factuality is addressed in two brilliant studies,
accomplished from completely different positions: Lakatos’s (1976, 4) informal studies of “the
phylogenesis and the ontogenesis of mathematical thought”, and Eric Livingston’s (1986) studies
of “the living foundations of mathematics” (in particular, the “lived-work of the provers of math-
ematical theorems”). The most profound study of the facticity of mathematical inquiry (“mathe-
matical existence”) remains, in my view, Oskar Becker’s (1973, originally published 1927)
hermeneutic-phenomenological approach to the processes of mathematical construction. At stake
in this approach is the passage from a constructivist criterion for the existence of mathematical
objects to the facticity of the mathematical construction as an existential mode. Oskar Becker’s
“demon” (the Dasein of the mathematical existence) is not an absolute creator, but a creature that
is able to transcend its own finitude—not once and for all, but—a potentially infinite number of
times. This demon is doomed to exist in this way in order to constitute meaningful objects of a
certain type. Within a mode of existence that is deprived of the capability to transcend its own
death such objects (like transfinite numbers) would cease to be existentially meaningful. Yet
Becker’s demon is by no means a creature that—by overcoming once and for all its existential fini-
tude—would become able to directly face the presence of the infinite objects. In “transcending” its
own death, the demon has a mode of being as potentially infinite repetitions of the finite existence.
The constitution of the objects of transfinite induction and recursion assumes the historical trans-
subjectivity of “mathematical existence”. A Divine Creator does not need to constitute meaningful
objects. The Creator possesses all objects in their absolute (non-constituted) meaning. Constitution
of meaning can only take place in the modes of existence distinguished by death (finitude). The
objects of transfinite mathematics are also meaningful objects; i.e., they assume such a mode of
existence. Becker’s demon keeps the existential characteristics of the finitude as a prerequisite for
the constitution of meaningful objects. The mode of being of the subject of mathematical existence
(the mathematical Dasein) looks like a “recursive repetition” of the finite being-in-the-world as
thrown projection. As an epistemic subject it follows the epistemology of mathematical construc-
tivism. Regarding Becker’s formula for synergizing the constitutional analysis of hermeneutic phe-
nomenology with mathematical constructivism, see Ginev 2009, 2015a, 190–192.
66 The Production of Objectified Factuality Within the Facticity of Scientific Inquiry
limits leads to the view that the non-human reality (consisting of all non-human
collectives of actors) is always socialized and historicized, which is the quintes-
sence of historical realism (as a position closely related to actor-network theory).
Now, the argument for historicizing natural (non-human) reality must appeal to a
notion of historical time that cannot be on a par with the notions referring to the
natural reality which the standard realists have in mind. If historical time is a part of
this reality, then it would characterize natural processes, but would not be able to
historicize natural reality. In alleviating the limits (and thus universalizing) relativ-
ism, Latour tacitly refers to a notion of the historical temporality of meaningful
being-in-the-world (i.e., a notion of the historicity of meaning constitution). Yet
when he alleviates the limits of realism, thereby relativizing it, he appeals to a
notion of historical time that is entirely in line with naturalist objectivism. Latour
reconciles realism and relativism at the price of admitting (what Heidegger calls) a
“vulgar notion” of historical time and historicity, which makes his historical realism
an incoherent position. Had he implemented a non-objectivist notion of historical
temporality in relativizing realism, he would have had to undertake a much more
complex revision of standard realism. But the outcome would not have been the
version of historical realism he advocates.
The claim of the revisability of factuality within the facticity of ongoing mean-
ingful articulation—as this claim is adopted in hermeneutic realism—does not
amount to the epistemological claim that the (empirical) intuitions are unavoidably
conceptually prefigured. Seemingly, the rationales for both claims are rooted in the
finitude of human existence. Yet the claim of hermeneutic realism presupposes that
the constitutive role of existential finitude consists in enabling the way of transcend-
ing each particular context since the facticity of finite existence is always open to
possibilities transcending any state of being-situated-in-a-context. (There is always
an open horizon of possibilities that is potentially inexhaustible. In each particular
context, this horizon is restricted to a manageable leeway of possibilities. Yet the
contextual choice and appropriation of possibilities transcends the context and
opens a new manageable leeway. Within the new context a new regime of revealing
and concealing possibilities takes place. The horizon is constantly contextually lim-
ited to a finite set of possibilities, but because of intercontexuality it is potentially
infinite. This unity of contextual finitude and potential infinity corresponds to the
figure of situated transcendence. It is also this unity that informs the infinity of
meaning within the finitude of human existence.)
By contrast, the epistemological claim (which at least tacitly invokes the finitude
of humans) assumes that the conceptually framed accesses to factual reality are
strongly enclosed in themselves. Accordingly, any “enclosed access” prohibits the
openness to possibilities that are incompatible with the principles underlying the
respective access framework. More specifically, there is in this claim—that has its
roots in Kantian philosophy, and nowadays is most consequently developed in
Michael Friedman’s conception of the “relativized a priori”—a tacit commitment to
the following view: Regardless of whether the world-out-there comes in cognition
pre-divided into objects and “natural kinds” (as scientific realists assume) or the talk
of objects only makes sense with regard to cognitive discriminatory classifications
1 The Practice Turn in Science Studies 67
2
My point can also be summarized as follows. For Quine’s theory of translation (as well as for
Davidson’s theory of interpretation), Tarski’s metalanguage T-sentences are the very vehicles of
interpretation. Because there is no metalanguage devised to reveal preexisting meanings, the inde-
terminacy of translation/interpretation— undermining the notions of invariant meanings and
invariant reference—is irremovable. On this account, semantic truth is a basis for interpreting the
sentences. However, T-sentences—enacted through disquotation—might only play the role of “the
very vehicles of interpretation” if the reality of what is interpreted would have already been dis-
closed. Quine makes the case that interpretation is broader than translation, and that any actual
interlinguistic dictionary is a “manual of interpretation” (Quine 1999, 75). Guiding the construc-
tion of such a manual is the belief that all entities being denoted have identities (or are individu-
ated). But the entities’ factual identities are not to be postulated. They become constituted within
68 The Production of Objectified Factuality Within the Facticity of Scientific Inquiry
the facticity of practical existence. (Like Quine’s radical translation and Davidson’s radical inter-
pretation, Rorty’s epistemological behaviorism is unable to address this constitution of factual
identities.) In hermeneutic realism, only at a certain stage of the meaningful articulation of a
domain do the constituted identities allow the employment of denotations that are indispensable
for having Quinean translation and interpretation. The latter (qua a cognitive procedure) is enabled
by the existentially primordial interpretation involved in the world’s meaningful articulation.
3
See in this regard Putnam (2002), where he defends the claim of mutual dependence in respond-
ing to Rescher’s criticism.
1 The Practice Turn in Science Studies 69
4
For this criticism of Hacking’s conception, see also Woody (2014).
5
This approach to scientific practices is ideologically heterogeneous. The ideological and political
values behind its ontological, epistemological, and methodological suggestions range from stances
expressed by members of the Stanford School—in particular, John Dupré’s (2001, 183) anti-natu-
ralist and anti-reductionist stance that only a pluralistic model of scientific practices can be effec-
tive in combating scientism and replacing it with a non-scientistic view of science that “goes all the
way down to the basic metaphysical issues of causality”—to positions advocated by radical femi-
nists who look for a change in the traditional, objectivist identity of science by addressing scientific
practices.
70 The Production of Objectified Factuality Within the Facticity of Scientific Inquiry
6
Symptomatic for studying the uncertainties generated by the interaction of experimental and
theoretical practices is the work of Mara Beller. She nicely shows—by focusing on correspon-
dences between the pioneers of quantum mechanics—how “dialogical creativity” is enabled by the
interactive milieu of such practices. With respect to the approach I am discussing, Beller’s studies
of the origin of matrix mechanics, the emergence of Born’s probabilistic interpretation, and the
birth of Bohr’s complementarity are of special importance, since they bridge the investigation of
scientific practices with a kind of hermeneutics of scientific communication that lays emphasis
upon dissent and disagreement. Beller ascribes a mediatory role in the interaction of experimental
and theoretical practices to the rhetorical strategies of persuasion which “disguise arguments of
consistency as those of inevitability” (see Beller (1999, 199–206)).
1 The Practice Turn in Science Studies 71
7
On the concept of the “grammar of practices”, see Chang (2011).
8
The normative philosophy of science which social epistemologists have in view has to exercise
control over science by making scientific research self-conscious about its own practical normativ-
ity. On Steve Fuller’s account, “a self-consciously normative discipline is one that makes the ends
of its inquiry an ongoing subject for negotiation” (Fuller 1993, 211). Control achieved by means
of negotiations is the alternative (to the traditional cognitive autonomy) which social epistemolo-
gists try to figure out. Rouse’s conception is convenient for pursuing this goal since it implies that
the change in the regime of arranging scientific practices and their causal dependences changes the
normative way of saving phenomena as well. Thus, if the negotiations result in demanding a new
direction of the research process, then the change of the normative regime of saving phenomena
would be the adequate response to that demand. It is another question that such a normative control
72 The Production of Objectified Factuality Within the Facticity of Scientific Inquiry
over scientific inquiry may lead to the perfect combination of a bad scientification of social life and
a bad “democratization” of scientific inquiry.
9
As already indicated, this denial does not foreclose the possibility of a “naturalizing philosophy
of science” that is compatible with hermeneutic realism. See, in this regard, Ginev (2015a,
165–168).
1 The Practice Turn in Science Studies 73
that same world. To be sure, he is aware that in most cases the two standpoints resist
any attempt at intertwining them. But Nagel’s basic intention is to combat “the view
from nowhere”. Bringing the standpoint of personal being-in-the-world with the
objective rationalization of the world seems to be the appropriate means in this
regard. Juxtaposing the internal and external viewpoints provides him with the point
of reference for criticizing objectivism as it is most typically expounded by the view
from nowhere. In accentuating on the ineliminability of the subjective perspective,
Nagel (1986, 11) debunks scientism as an absurd ideology purporting that “every-
thing there is must be understandable by the employment of scientific theories” that
supposedly express the pure objectivity. But the weak point of Nagel’s approach is
its point of departure. Nagel starts with the firm differentiation between external
(third-person) and internal (first-person) standpoints, and subsequently admits that
this distinction is a matter of degree that covers a wide spectrum. Nagel’s approach
ignores that the degrees of objectivity of the “forms of thought” are differentiated
not by artificially juxtaposing two standpoints, but within existential facticity from
where all epistemic standpoints stem. His position assumes that the degrees of
objectivity result from a play of standpoints and have no existential roots. On her-
meneutic realism, the differentiation of such degrees takes place within the ecstatic
unity with the world, which enables the multiple engaging with the world on the
part of any particular person. It is the facticity of practices within-the-world that sets
limits of objectivity. In countering Nagel’s approach, the hermeneutic realist raises
the claim that it is not “the subjectivity of consciousness” but the hermeneutic situ-
ation of objectifying the world within-the-world that is an irreducible feature of
reality. The insistence that there is no coherent way in which reality can be viewed
from nowhere must be supplemented by a strategy of accounting for the existential
phenomenon of contextualizing objectivity in a hermeneutic situation.
Does such a strategy imply a kind of anti-epistemology? In recent debates, the
concept of anti-epistemology is associated with programs that seek a definitive
supersession of the inner/outer dichotomy in addressing the issue of how the direct
encounter with the surrounding entities of the world enables and grounds the accu-
mulation of knowledge. The champions of anti-epistemology state that there is no
propositional content that mediates the multiple practical ways of coping with real-
ity (Dreyfus 2004, 54). Charles Taylor seems to be the most radical exponent of this
doctrine. The figure of “absorbed coping”—as being in the world that is not based
on distant representations of the world, and mediated by propositional content—
cogently describes the quest for conceptualizing the basic relation to reality without
invoking the inner/outer dichotomy. Yet there is a paradoxical move involved in
developing the anti-epistemological position. Taylor pretends to be much more radi-
cal than Davidson and Rorty in discarding the traditional epistemological dichoto-
mies. Nonetheless, his anti-epistemology presupposes Cartesian dualism in order to
combat any form of Cartesian epistemology in the most radical way. The embodied
cognition of everyday experience is in a sense pre-epistemological, but—as Taylor
acknowledges—it is too elementary to provide a point of departure for addressing
the issue of realism in a post-metaphysical manner.
74 The Production of Objectified Factuality Within the Facticity of Scientific Inquiry
The anti-epistemologists are aware that in relying only on the picture of absorbed
coping with things that are ready-to-hand (and constantly evoking Merleau-Ponty’s
imagery) does not suffice when one has to account for forms of knowledge that go
beyond everyday experience. Still, they are not willing to rehabilitate propositional
content and/or beliefs as mediators in humans’ interaction with the world. Such a
rehabilitation would be a concession to epistemology. I completely agree with their
reluctance to admit that propositional content mediates the ways of practical coping
with reality. But should this eliminate any form of mediation operating in the practi-
cal encountering reality? Is not the practical coping with reality mediated by hori-
zons of practical understanding and interpretation? The phenomenological
description of the direct involvement with things is the way to overcoming episte-
mology. But this way describes a contingent reality that has nothing to do with the
robust reality of science. In reaching this conclusion, Merleau-Pontyan interactive
phenomenologists start to make serious concessions to science’s allegedly inherent
realism. For them, anti-epistemology has no place in the treatment of the objective
knowledge about the objects studied by “the best scientific theories”. This is why
Taylor’s anti-epistemology (in particular) is necessarily complemented by the
(already discussed) position of robust realism. They assume, at least tacitly, that the
production of objective knowledge requires not only robust realism, but also objec-
tivist epistemology.
Hermeneutic realism is the exact opposite of the (unhappy) combination of anti-
epistemology (based on a direct, embodied encounter with the reality of everyday
experience) and robust realism ascribing a structure to the universe. The common
denominator of the two extremes involved in this combination is the disavowal of
reality-as-facticity. (Clifford Geertz (1994, 86) is completely right when pointing
out that the coexistence of anthropologically grounded anti-epistemology and robust
realism is rooted in the scarce picture and the “tendency toward oversimplification”
of what natural science is. Geertz has in mind the lack of any view about the factic-
ity of post-classical-physics’ scientific inquiry, and all “non-classical events” it gen-
erates.) In the Introductory Chapter, I already spelled out the main argument of
hermeneutic realism against robust (and minimal) realism. However “minimalist”
minimal realism is, it cannot avoid (a) essentialism about the “ultimate reality”, (b)
the metaphysical presence of what is beyond all access practices, and (c) the priority
of the correspondence theory of truth over the concept of truth as aletheia.
Furthermore, the robust realist assumes that the characteristic practices of disclos-
ing a domain of reality are but a means for having “access to the structure of ulti-
mate reality”. These practices should be removed (and are always totally removable)
after gaining access in question. The robust realist seems to follow Wittgenstein’s
advice: He throws away the access ladder after he has reached the ultimate
reality.10
10
In addition to the previous characterization, I should like to state that robust realism presupposes
the accessibility of “ultimate reality” (understood as the totality of things as they are in them-
selves). But it rejects the arguments for this accessibility forged by standard realism. The coherent
defense of robust realism requires a supersession of relativism via embarking on the pluralism of
1 The Practice Turn in Science Studies 75
I will conclude the present section by specifying the argument against anti-
epistemology. The champions of the latter tend to forget that the “encounter with the
world” always takes place within the world, and that the world-of-the-things (that
are either ready-to-hand or present-at-hand) is always situated within the world-as-
horizon. In other words, they do not pay enough attention to the situatedness of the
practical encountering innerworldly entities within the world-horizon which tran-
scends and mediates this encountering. By implication, anti-epistemologists curtail
the coping with the world, reducing it to unmediated contact. In the anti-anti-
epistemology argument I adhere to, the situated transcendence of all forms of prac-
tical coping within the innerwordly environments amounts to a hermeneutic
mediation of practical experience. The (non-hermeneutic) phenomenological chi-
mera of unmediated contact with reality implying the elimination of any mediation
is to be dispelled. One can still find the subject-object cut behind the “unmediated
contact with reality”. Indeed, it is hard to imagine how both Merleau-Ponty’s phe-
nomenology and Taylor’s anti-epistemology can come to terms with a concept of
horizon that always already transcends and constitutes this cut.
Anticipating further considerations, I will posit for the moment that—although
all relations and structures envisioned through epistemological means are grounded
upon interpretive-practical experience—a kind of epistemology preserves its valid-
ity in the hermeneutic philosophy of science. More specifically, a kind of
non-representationalist epistemology of the formation of structures in scientific
theorizing is an indispensable counterpart of hermeneutic realism. Summing up,
access practices. Several lexicons—including some which are incompatible with one another—
can be constructed for ultimate reality, and each of them can be true. Nonetheless, there is no rela-
tivism following from the “acknowledgement that our practices are a more primordial form of truth
that makes truth as agreement possible” (Dreyfus 1991, 40). Because humans are finite beings—so
the argument goes—they are capable of discovering truth only by revealing in many ways things
as they are in themselves. Accordingly, several incompatible lexicons can agree with how things
are in themselves. No single way can assure a privileged access to ultimate reality and its absolute
factuality. Accordingly, the finitude of human existence invites the advocacy of plural (or multiple)
realism (Dreyfus and Taylor 2015, 130). An interpretation-free understanding of ultimate reality
does not make sense. The competing lexicons are constructed within characteristic access practices
(say, the practices of mathematical physics). Robust realists argue that the interactions with the
“defamiliarized strange” establish a “proto-theoretical space” distinguished by certain constraints
on what should be counted as significant relations. Within this space with its constraints, we
could—by employing the means of rigid designation—make sense of things independent of us.
Making sense is a prelude to investigating the essence of these things. On this account, a minimal
version of realism is indispensable for postulating the being of ultimate reality. The way in which
characteristic practices inaugurate a meaningful articulation of reality as facticity (in the sense of
the hermeneutics of facticity) is, as it were, super-structured over the picture of reality obtained
thanks to the access to ultimate reality. Dreyfus does not explicitly declare this view, but the com-
bination of his Heideggerianism and robust realism makes it unavoidable. Bluntly, pluralistic
robust realism accounts for how the essence of ultimate reality becomes specifically revealed in
any particular lexicon constructed by characteristic access practices. Accordingly, one should con-
clude that realism about facticity must rely on minimal realism about ultimate reality. Yet to admit
that the independent ensemble of things-in-themselves has a structure that becomes in different
ways, through imposing diverse access practices, a meaningful framework amounts to committing
a neo-Kantian, and not a hermeneutic-phenomenological position.
76 The Production of Objectified Factuality Within the Facticity of Scientific Inquiry
while rejecting any form of robust realism in approaching natural science, the her-
meneutic realist is not willing to dispense with analyzing the structures of knowl-
edge constituted within the facticity of inquiry.
11
Let me draw attention to the fact that I am speaking of “relativizable objectified factuality”.
Starting with social constructivism, many programs in science studies have laid claim to the depen-
dence of the way of obtaining factuality in scientific research (and the factuality itself) on social
negotiations, gender, contingent biases, historical prejudices, and so on. Yet these programs are
stressing in the first place not the revisability and relativizability of scientific factuality, but the
impossibility of having (epistemological justification of) independent objectification of factuality.
What they call into question is the objectification. By contrast, the post-empiricist philosophers
insist on factuality’s revisability and relativizability without casting doubt on the possibility of
objectification and the constitution of objectified factuality (within the frameworks of epistemo-
logically acceptable theories). This explains the strong protest of Kuhn and Lakatos—who other-
wise represent the two poles of post-empiricism—against the constructivist sociology of science.
78 The Production of Objectified Factuality Within the Facticity of Scientific Inquiry
12
It is important to underscore that, in contrast to “social construction of scientific facts” philoso-
phers, the hermeneutic realist does not imply that there is no distinction between justification and
discovery because evidence is always a social product. The point she makes is that the constitution
is not only completely independent of discovery and justification, but also that the former is an
ontological prerequisite for having the latter as socially organized epistemic processes.
2 Hermeneutic Realism as a Hermeneutic Philosophy of Science 79
13
In his earlier work Polanyi devises an outstanding argument for the implicit hermeneutics of
scientific inquiry. First, he makes the case that the natural laws cannot be formulated and defended
by applying explicit known operations to measurements. A mathematical function connecting
instruments’ readings could not constitute what one is accustomed to regard as a natural law.
Second, Polanyi (1946, 10) shows that the missing element for having a law-like formulation can-
not be compensated by the introduction of new operations, rules, and instruments’ readings, but by
the scientist’s intuition that “can integrate widely dispersed data, camouflaged by sundry irrelevant
connexions, and indeed seek out such data by experiments guided by a dim foreknowledge of the
possibilities which lie ahead.” Third, he argues that the formulation of a new scientific proposition
involves the reconsideration of known phenomena in a new context. It follows from these three
elaborations that no scientific proposition can be obtained from observational data, and “we must
therefore accept also that no explicit rules can exist to decide whether to uphold or abandon any
scientific proposition in face of any particular new observation” (Polanyi 1946, 15). The concep-
tion of personal knowledge is devised with the purpose of weakening epistemological normativity,
and to demonstrate that normatively stipulated objectivity in science is a “false ideal”. Yet in look-
ing for a position beyond Cartesian dualism without taking into consideration the ontological fac-
ets of the subjective-objective fusion in the production of knowledge, Polanyi’s hermeneutics of
scientific inquiry remains an uncompleted enterprise. It is the facticity of inquiry that provides the
(trans-subjective) terrain on which the fusion of the subjective and the objective occurs. Personal
knowledge operates by mediating between facticity of domain’s meaningful articulation and the
experimental, conceptual, and theoretical production of factuality.
2 Hermeneutic Realism as a Hermeneutic Philosophy of Science 81
(Grinnell 2009, 30–34). Leaning on Grinnell’s study, one should conclude that sev-
eral steps of “phenomenological epoché” ought to be undertaken to reach the
“everyday stream of practices”.
In order to flesh out the concept of characteristic hermeneutic situation as well as
some related concepts conceived so far in general terms, I will turn to an episode in
the history of post-war biochemistry. The following analysis of this episode does
not pretend to unfold (and does not meet the criteria for) a historiographical case
study.14 It serves only an illustrative function. The episode refers to the hermeneutic
situation in which the domain of vectorial metabolism has been disclosed in the late
1950s and the early 1960s. Before analyzing the hermeneutic situation, I have to
sketch out the historical situation of the domain’s formation.
The studies in vectorial metabolism were promoted by a novel context of bio-
chemical inquiry that nurtured a special style of scientific thinking. It is a style—
developed to a certain extent in conjunction with F.G. Hopkins’s holistic and
dynamic biochemistry, Marjory Stephenson’s enzymological approach to metabo-
lism, and Joseph Needham’s ideas for embryological morphogenesis—that lays
much emphasis on mathematical descriptions of matter and energy flows in living
cells. The implementation of images of spatial organization and vectorial motion
related to thermodynamic models of enzymatic reactions is a distinctive feature of
this style. The new context of inquiry came into prominence thanks to the research
work of Peter Mitchell, who was the most significant exponent of the corresponding
style (Prebble and Weber 2003, 49–53). To be sure, his work has a rich prehistory.
Ideas of (and research attitudes towards) vectorial processes in energy-requiring
metabolic reactions have been gaining currency since Elmer Lund’s pioneering
studies (from the mid-1920s) of the trans-membrane directive force in the formation
of new cell structures. Inspired by C.H. Waddington’s formal models about how
gene regulatory products could generate developmental phenomena, some bio-
chemists launched investigations of the topological arrangements of coupled meta-
bolic reactions that can prompt morphogenetic processes. A further important step
on the way to the domain’s formation was undertaken by Henrik Lundegårdh, who
in the mid-1940s suggested that cytochrome pigments might provide an electron-
conducting pathway across plant cell membranes so that oxygen could be reduced
on the one side while hydrogenated substrates were oxidized on the other side. The
spatial anisotropy in the movement of metabolites across the cell membrane was a
guiding theme in the work of J.F. Danielli in physical biochemistry.15
14
Elsewhere I elaborate on this episode as a case study entitled to show how the hermeneutic phi-
losophy of science works in the historiography of science. See Ginev (2014c).
15
Fritz Lipmann is usually not counted (in the historiography of biochemistry) as a forerunner or a
supporter of vectorial metabolism. He was one of the founders of the chemical theory of oxidative
phosphorylation, which opposed the anisotropic models of cellular and trans-membrane metabo-
lism. But the view Lipmann advanced (in the early 1950s) that the group-potential gradient is
transmitted between coupled reactions was of prime importance for several later studies in the
domain. Lipmann’s attention was concentrated on phosphate derivatives arising in the process of
group activation through phosphoryl transfer from ATP, which would become in the 1960s a para-
digmatic topic in vectorial metabolism. Another important event that anticipated the domain’s
82 The Production of Objectified Factuality Within the Facticity of Scientific Inquiry
The basic focus within the novel context of biochemical inquiry was the inter-
play of metabolism and transport situated in and spatially arranged by the mem-
brane. This interplay was at stake in Mitchell’s initial research work. After studying
the bacterial cytoplasmic membrane qua “osmotic barrier” and the role played by
enzymes on the outside and on the inside of the membrane, Mitchell did experimen-
tal research that specified essentially the whole context of inquiry I refer to. This
research led him to the conclusion that a reorganization of the protein in the mem-
brane is responsible for the transport of phosphate. The mechanism of transport
proceeds like an enzymatic reaction, and the reorganized protein is capable of pro-
viding a way through the osmotic barrier in the same manner in which enzymes
lower the energy barrier to metabolic reactions. It was the analogy between the
transport of phosphate across the membrane and the mechanism of enzyme cataly-
sis within the context of research practices devised to study the vectors in the trans-
fer of energy and molecules that opened a new leeway for doing research. Along
with the completely new possibilities, there were in this leeway possibilities that
have been excluded within the contexts of inquiry set up by the established research
programs in biochemistry, microbiology, cell physiology, and other biological dis-
ciplines. Roughly, the tendency to choosing, appropriating, and actualizing these
newly opened possibilities within the novel context of inquiry disclosed the domain
of vectorial metabolism. Mitchell’s chemiosmotic theory arose from actualized pos-
sibilities within this tendency. The theory provided models for saving spatially orga-
nized metabolic phenomena. By having such phenomena theoretically saved, one
was able to reveal the reality of vectorial metabolism and to represent it by means
of contextually objectified factuality within the facticity of inquiry.
The chemiosmotic theory is a theory about the respiration chain coupled to the
synthesis of adenosine triphosphate (ATP, a molecular unit that transports energy
for intracellular metabolism) and leading to oxygen reduction to water. (The synthe-
sis of ATP is from adenosine diphosphate, and it is catalyzed by the enzyme ATPase.
Experimental research measures the coupling of the respiratory chain and the syn-
thesis of the molecular unit of energy in terms of the ratio of the number of ATP
molecules and the number of atoms of oxygen reduced.) The investigations of the
process of coupling redox reactions and dehydration reactions, known as oxidative
phosphorylation, were launched in 1930 by Vladimir Engelhardt. He described for
the first time the mechanism of oxidative phosphorylation as a link between the
oxidation-reduction reactions and the synthesis of ATP. (It is worth mentioning that
the theoretical model of the phosphate bonds of ATP serving the function of the
basic source of energy in cellular metabolism was developed several years later by
Fritz Lipmann.) A decade after Engelhardt’s pioneering work, a series of experi-
ments demonstrated that cellular respiration using one oxygen atom can form two
ATP molecules. Thanks to the work of Albert Claude it became clear in the same
period that mitochondria can be isolated (from cell fractions) and experimental
research of the synthesis of ATP can be conducted on them alone. Experiments with
formation was the introduction of spectrophotometric measurements that indicated the existence of
anisotropic proton motive forces.
2 Hermeneutic Realism as a Hermeneutic Philosophy of Science 83
slightly damaged mitochondria showed that the latter can carry out respiration but
fail to synthesize ATP. In due course biochemists identified substances that inhibit
the coupling mechanism between the respiratory chain and the synthesis of
ATP. These “uncouplers” would play a prominent role in the construction of theo-
retical models for saving biochemical and physiological phenomena exhibiting spa-
tial directedness.16
Upon these investigations, a research trend predominated that aimed at discover-
ing chemical intermediates responsible for the link described by Engelhardt. It was
supposed that the mechanism whereby the transfer of electrons through the oxida-
tion reduction is coupled to the synthesis of ATP operates via high-energy interme-
diates. This supposition (made originally by Fritz Lipmann) became the kernel of
the chemical theory of oxidative phosphorylation, whose initial version was devel-
oped in 1953 by Bill (E.C.) Slater. According to this theory, there is no privileged
directedness of the synthesis of ATP (as specified by a certain gradient across the
membrane), and the link between respiration and that synthesis consists in chemical
substances. The long quest for substances—running from the model for substrate-
level phosphorylation of succinyl coenzyme A in the early 1950s to the late 1960s
when more than a dozen mechanisms of chemical transfer were under scrutiny—
capable of transferring energy from molecule to molecule turned out to be an unsuc-
cessful enterprise. Douglas Allchin (1996, 32) nicely summarizes the wrong
assumption of those biochemists who stressed the possibility of identifying stable
high-energy compounds in the phosphorylation of ATP: “Chemists wanted to iso-
late and identify a set of high-energy intermediate molecules, but found the task
unduly difficult. They began to suspect that the compounds might be tightly bound
to membrane proteins. That, at least, could account for their persistent failures.”
The chemical theory of oxidative phosphorylation might be combined with theo-
ries about the stereochemical transformations of enzymatic polypeptide chains.
This combination potentially enhances the explanatory power of the chemical the-
ory. Yet it does not make the latter empirically more plausible. The combination
does not create new chances for empirical verification of the chemical theory. Thus,
the conformation of ATPase as necessary for ATP synthesis was verified and widely
accepted as a phenomenon that is to be saved through a theory of molecular biology,
i.e., as a phenomenon independent of the success or failure of the chemical theory.
It is worthwhile mentioning, however, that the conformational changes in enzymes
(as initially studied by Paul Boyer in the 1960s) would be regarded in the 1980s as
indispensable for the synthesis of ATP. During his lifetimeMitchell (1920–1992) did
not accept the conformational model, and insisted on his idea that the proton passes
through the active side of the enzyme. (In his argument, the conformational model
is not able to specify the actual mechanism of coupling.)
16
The uncouplers do not affect the activities of electron flow and ATPase, but ATP synthesis cannot
occur. In particular, studies in protonophoric uncouplers that allow protons to cross lipid bilayers
revealed mechanisms of induction of biological activities by modification of the state of a specific
membrane protein. Such results subsequently promoted the extension of the domain of vectorial
biochemistry to cover studies in molecular and cellular morphogenesis.
84 The Production of Objectified Factuality Within the Facticity of Scientific Inquiry
To set the stage for my further discussion, I will tentatively argue that Mitchell’s
principal contribution to the new domain consists in the demonstration that the cou-
pling of respiration and ATP synthesis is mediated by an electrochemical gradient
of protons across the mitochondrial membrane. The emphasis was placed on the
causal link between the flow of electrons through the respiratory chain enzymes and
the translocation of protons across the inner mitochondrial membrane. This account
was deliberately forged as an alternative to the chemical mechanism of oxidative
phosphorylation, which appeals not to anisotropic flaws but to enzyme-bound
chemical compounds (Griffiths 1965).
Mitchell’s chemiosmotic theory was prepared within the new context of research
practices by experimental discoveries of patterns of anisotropic metabolic and phys-
iological processes.17 Within this context it was realized that the distinction between
vectorial chemistry and vectorial physiology is a matter of degree. A paradigmatic
example was a muscle contraction, whose directionality in cellular space expresses
a joint chemical-physiological spatiality. In addressing the question as to which are
the prime movers in metabolically coupled translocation reactions, the search for
patterns of spatially extended chemiosmotic proton circulation became a focal
topic. The experimental work of Mitchell and Jennifer Moyle on this topic in the
late 1950s demonstrated that enzyme systems are the conductors of membrane
transport and that metabolic energy is converted to osmotic work by the formation
of covalent links. More specifically, Mitchell and Moyle (1958) were able to dis-
cover a transfer of phosphate group vectorially through an enzyme. The idea of
metabolic directionality was introduced with respect to the different directions from
which the substrates are approaching the active site of an enzyme. Another possible
instantiation of this idea came from the supposition that the membranes of mito-
chondria act as chemiosmotic links between the media that they separate. In inves-
tigating the group translocation as a form of trans-membrane transport, Mitchell and
Moyle managed to integrate the metabolic inter-conversions and fluxes across the
various cellular membranes into a single mechanism. This was a decisive step in the
formation of the chemiosmotic theory. Parallel to Mitchell and Moyle’s research
work, Robertson carried out investigations of gastric acid secretion which were also
guided by an anisotropic spatial model of reactions. He assumed that the act of
17
To take up a motif already mentioned, Mitchell came to the scenario of “chemiosmotic coupling
in energy transduction” (the technical expression he proposed) by following the particular scien-
tific practice of drawing analogies. In his case, the analogy was between the osmotic translocation
reactions (for instance, the coupling of phosphate translocation against arsenate translocation) and
the enzyme-catalyzed group-transfer reactions (Mitchell 1972). There was nothing unusual in pur-
suing this thoroughly conventional scientific practice. Mitchell’s scenario was by no means an
exotic hypothesis, since the “primary chemical coupling” was known as early as the 1930s when a
research group reported on coupling in group-transfer reactions in studying the role of the NAD
coenzyme. A particular reason for resisting the theoretical conceptualization of the chemiosmotic
mechanism was the plethora of theoretical objects this conceptualization introduced. Cases in
point are “the trans-membrane electrochemical potential powering the enzyme of the mitochon-
drial ATPase”, “the anisotropic enzymes requiring two aqueous phases separated by a membrane”,
“the phosphorylation reactions driven by proton motive force”, and most of all “the electrochemi-
cally based physiological processes”.
2 Hermeneutic Realism as a Hermeneutic Philosophy of Science 85
secretion depends on the separation of positive and negative charge in the electron
transport system.
In trying to find a way beyond the wrong assumption and the persistent failures
of the chemical theory, Mitchell specified further the idea that the membrane plays
a “topological” role in oxidative phosphorylation: The removal of a molecule of
water in the synthesis of ATP from ADP follows two opposite directions: The hydro-
gen ion (proton) and the hydroxyl ion are removed to the opposite side of the mem-
brane. The osmotic potential provides the energy for ATP synthesis. The respiratory
chain in turn drives the flow of ions in the opposite direction. The reactions of this
chain also act vectorially. On this account, the enzyme ATPase that phosphorylates
ADP to ATP is responsible for the return of the protons, thereby enabling the energy
currency of the cell. The initial version of the chemiosmotic theory was formulated
in 1961 by unfolding (but not yet experimentally verifying) the hypothesis that ATP
is synthesized by membrane-bound ATPase through removal of a proton from one
side of the membrane and the removal of the negatively charged hydroxyl ion to the
other side (Mitchell 1961). In this version, the coupling between oxidoreduction
and phosphorylation systems is due to the channeling of translocation of protons
which could play the part of the donor/acceptor intermediate between the oxidase
and ATPase systems.18 The initial version of this theory required a complex experi-
mental verification that included investigations of mitochondrial membrane imper-
meability to protons, the “proton pump” created by the respiratory chain, the rate of
proton translocation during oxidoreduction, the magnitude of the total proton
motive force across the membrane, and the identification of proton-coupled porter
systems in the membrane that regulate the internal pH, thereby maintaining osmotic
stability. In fact, Mitchell’s (1962) ambition was not restricted to this verification,
but to developing a unifying framework for addressing the processes that underlie
metabolism, transport, and morphogenesis. With the rise of the chemiosmotic the-
ory the “vectorial mystery” of the cellular space became the new domain’s kernel
problematic. By the late 1950s it was a matter of belief in this mystery, a belief that
abstractly denied that there are unidentified molecules with a high-energy bond (as
was postulated in the chemical theory of oxidative phosphorylation).
The structure of the initial version of the chemiosmotic theory combined the
physiology of the mitochondrial membrane with the chemistry of moving ions
18
The story of the chemiosmotic theory’s formation might be told as a story of transforming a
hypothesis into a theory. The hypothesis in this case was that mitochondria ejected protons and that
proton gradient drives ATP synthesis. This hypothesis challenged the view that transport and
metabolism were essentially separate processes. The chemiosmotic theory (as a theory about the
process of energy conservation in mitochondrial and bacterial respiration and in photosynthesis)
conceptually unfolded the initial hypothesis, but it remained in need of experimental verification.
The theory’s postulate that the linkage between the coupled reactions catalyzed by two osmoen-
zymes depends on the electrochemical potential gradient generated by one reaction and consumed
by the other was for a long period without sufficient empirical support. Nonetheless, the initial
version of the chemiosmotic theory suggested conceptual resources and possible theoretical mod-
els for the articulation and objectification of the already disclosed domain of vectorial metabolism.
John Prebble (2001, p. 447) nicely argues that “the notion of vectorial metabolism is given its most
fulsome treatment almost concurrently with promulgation of the chemiosmotic theory.”
86 The Production of Objectified Factuality Within the Facticity of Scientific Inquiry
across the membrane. In 1966 Mitchell proposed an extended and elaborated ver-
sion of his theory. The new version was at the same time conceptually simpler than
the original one. According to it, the synthesis of ATP is driven by a proton that
passes through the ATPase. The models of this theory are entitled to save experi-
mentally measurable phenomena by explaining patterns of data as being caused by
a gradient of protons resulting from pumping protons from one side of the mem-
brane to the other, thereby creating an electrical potential. In the extended version,
the electron-carrying arm of the redox loop could include a photoelectric reaction so
that the potential of this reaction could be transformed into a proton motive force. In
the context of inquiry related to the new version, a focal topic became the issue of
how the conformational mobility of the translocation catalysts is associated with
their normal group-translocation and solute-translocation functions. Addressing this
issue in terms of chemiosmotic theory was consonant with several principal new
research trends in biochemistry and enzymology from the early 1960s, like
Koshland’s induced-fit interpretation of enzyme kinetic data, the hypothesis that the
activation energy for group transfer may be lowered by the balancing of stress-strain
relationships, and Perutz’s elaborations on conformational changes in hemoglobin
molecules during oxygenation. It was the association of the chemiosmotic theory
with these trends that enabled the integration of issues of morphogenesis in the
domain of vectorial metabolism. This is why many years later an outstanding bio-
chemist would remark: “Mitchell bade us to look upon cell growth as a grand sym-
phony of transport” (Harold 1991, 365). The idea had gained currency that the
cellular morphogenesis is a function of vectorial metabolism.
The focus of my discussion here is the role of chemiosmotic theory in the articu-
lation of the domain of vectorial metabolism. However, the prime impact of this
theory was upon the domains of bioenergetics and enzymology. The new conceptu-
alization of the link between the respiratory chain and ATP synthesis radically
changed the research work in these domains. This is why for several authors the
emergence of the approach to biochemical phenomena which emphasizes a gradient
of protons by pumping protons was a revolutionary paradigm shift in biochemis-
try.19 Yet it is hard to forge a simple historiographical narrative about this shift.
Though the chemiosmotic theory was (in the mid-1970s) a conceptually coher-
ent and complete construction, several historiographical case studies demonstrate
that one is not able to single out a particular historical moment at which the “ox-
phos controversy” could be counted as resolved in favor of this theory. As Marcel
Weber (2002a, b) shows, it was the change of the situation (thanks to the emergence
of new research practices) in 1975 which brought decisive arguments for the accep-
tance of the chemiosmotic theory. He analyzes the reasons why several experiments
in the 1960s and the early 1970s (including the earlier experimental search for
reconstituting oxidative phosphorylation in Racker’s laboratory) failed to resolve
the controversy (or failed to play the role of a crucial experiment), and reaches the
19
See, in particular Prebble and Weber (2003, 3), Weber (2002b), Gilbert and Mulkay (1984), and
Skulachev (1987). This view is supported even by Slater (2003), one of Mitchell’s major
opponents.
2 Hermeneutic Realism as a Hermeneutic Philosophy of Science 87
conclusion that while the role of the membrane was highly ambiguous around 1970
and impeded an independent test that can resolve the controversy, the experiments
with “cellular chimeras” (creating cellular artifacts from isolated components) in
conjunction with new knowledge about the membrane functions provided a suffi-
cient basis for ruling out the chemical theory and accepting the chemiosmotic one
(Weber 2002a, 43–45). In another historical case study, John Prebble (2001) lays
particular emphasis upon the research community’s “implicit knowledge” which
resisted the search for designing appropriate experiments for checking on whether
mitochondria ejected protons, whether a proton gradient would drive ATP synthesis,
and whether the mitochondrial inner membrane was impermeable to protons. More
specifically, the community’s implicit knowledge prevented (or at least restricted
the leeway for) the elaboration on research scenarios uniting chemical with physi-
ological mechanisms.20
With this conclusion in mind, I turn now to the characteristic hermeneutic situa-
tion of articulating and objectifying the domain of vectorial metabolism as it has
been disclosed in the initial context of inquiry. Let me reiterate that such a situation
is the hermeneutic fore-structuring of the domain’s objectification as specified by a
tendency to choosing, appropriating, and actualizing possibilities in the process of
inquiry. This tendency keeps its effectiveness in the proliferation of contexts of
inquiry. The research process in a characteristic hermeneutic situation constitutes
meaningful objects and structures related to the phenomena being saved in the
domain’s objectification. The hermeneutic situation characteristically manifests
itself through the triad of fore-having, fore-seeing, and fore-grasping these objects
and structures within the ongoing interplay of practices and possibilities.
Fore-having is the orientation toward constructing experimental phenomena that
show the way of being of objects like proton motive forces and trans-membrane
transport systems. This being as projected upon possibilities is approached within
20
The search for patterns of morphogenesis on the level of cellular physiology became a “natural
continuation” of the inquiry into the topology of enzyme-catalyzed reactions. Thus, the problem-
atic of the spatiality of growth, morphogenesis, and self-organization is intimately related to the
domain of vectorial metabolism. The contemporary studies in vectorial metabolism are dealing
with spontaneous emergence of regular spatial patterns. The notion of a morphogenetic field con-
sisting of diffusible molecules acquired a special importance. The spatial and temporal features
assure the passages between molecular biology and physiology. The ions play the role of cellular
morphogenes (i.e., genes dedicated to the task of cell shaping). A promising trend of inquiry in the
domain’s articulation is the investigation of how ionic currents localize morphogenetic events
(Goodwin and Trainor 1985). The latter are mediated by diverse enzyme activities (Harold 1990).
In this regard, one should point out experimental practices with “morphogenetic mutants” whose
aim was to establish the patterns of transition from molecular morphogenesis to cellular growth
and morphogenesis. To be sure, Prigogine’s dissipative structures—and more generally, the doc-
trine that thermodynamic consequences of metabolism are responsible for the spatial organization
of physiological processes—provide patterns and models in this regard. However, there is no con-
figuration of scientific practices that constitutes objects of inquiry through which nonlinear, auto-
catalytic chemical reactions might be connected to cellular morphogenesis. The integration of the
paradigm of self-organization at a chemical level in the domain of vectorial biochemistry remains
a desideratum. The same conclusion is to be drawn with regard to the study of the genetic specifi-
cation of biochemical topology.
88 The Production of Objectified Factuality Within the Facticity of Scientific Inquiry
the horizon of investigating the topologically arranged osmotic processes and ionic
currents. The contextual actualizations of these possibilities (including the possi-
bilities of exploring morphogenesis) transform these—initially introduced as hypo-
thetical—objects into meaningful entities (i.e., amenable to being read and
represented) within the domain’s articulation. The fore-having as orientation also
contours the scope of possible practices of inquiry whereby what is meaningfully
articulated might factually be objectified as the objective reality of proton circuits
and group translocation. The fore-having of the new biochemical and physiological
objects in the formation of the domain was informed by a configuration of practices
that provided readable technologies for making sense of molecular anisotropy in the
cellular space. Granted that the aqueous environment of the cell cytoplasm is an
isotropic medium, the fore-having of “anisotropic objects” oriented the research
work toward what may causally create molecular anisotropy. The fore-having oper-
ates via pre-judgments about the way of being of the hypothetical objects which the
process of inquiry has to determine by saving experimentally constructed phenom-
ena through theoretical models. As stressed above, even before the formation of the
domain of vectorial metabolism, pertinent pre-judgments—typically illustrated by
those involved in models of membrane semipermeability—were at work in the con-
ceptualization of anisotropic processes in cell biology and physiology. The pre-
judgments can only be effective if the initially hypothetical objects—as gradually
revealed by means of saved phenomena—are properly envisioned in spaces of sci-
entific representation.21 In saying this, I reach the next moment in the domain’s
fore-structuring as specified by a characteristic hermeneutic situation.
Fore-sight consists in the ways of making the hypothetical objects visible as their
way of being is projected upon the newly opened possibilities. Though these objects
may never become visualized entities, they are constantly envisioned in the process
of inquiry by various representational devices, signs, and symbols. Franklin Harold
provides a wonderfully picturesque description of how the believers in the chemios-
motic theory (as supplying a comprehensive framework for all bioenergetics) have
intuitively apprehended the reality of biologically important molecules: The “pro-
tein molecules are regular and shapely bodies, not blobs. They come with clefts,
cavities and sometimes channels, undergo ordered changes of conformation and
possess intrinsic asymmetry or polarity. This is a commonplace today, colourfully
illustrated in every textbook, but in the 1950s it was a speculative and pregnant
notion” (Harold 1991, 348–49). This statement documents the fore-seeing of what
will be inquired after the inception of the domain of vectorial metabolism. The new
fore-sight was instrumental in the evolvement of normal scientific research guided
by the intention to single out conditions under which scalar reactions (like most
21
Ron Naylor (1989) coins the appropriate expression “pre-empirical episteme” when dealing with
Galileo’s orientation toward the possible outcomes of experiments. Such an episteme is neither
informed by background knowledge nor is it stemming from the inquirer’s “personal knowledge”.
In Galileo’s case, the pre-empirical episteme sets the stage for the process of experimental reading
of the “Book of Nature” as it is written in mathematical language. More generally, the pre-judg-
mental episteme is a particular horizon of reading objects of inquiry through saving experimentally
constructed phenomena.
2 Hermeneutic Realism as a Hermeneutic Philosophy of Science 89
enzyme reactions) would become vectorial with regard to the reactants arriving on
one side of the membrane and the products left on the other. This was a routine
research in the horizon of expectations of obtaining semiotic representations of the
vectorial properties of the catalysts of the respiratory chain inlaid in the lipid mem-
brane. Initially, the fore-sight within the horizon of expectations was confined to
simple electrostatic envisioning of the electric potential difference caused by the
migration of ions. Later on, the domain’s normal scientific work brought into being
more sophisticated devices of envisioning and representing topological arrange-
ments of coupled reactions. Within the new spaces of representation the objects
which have been initially introduced as hypothetical objects (like proton motive
forces and trans-membrane transport systems) also gradually became envisioned.
More generally, the fore-sight guided the search for envisioning and representing all
objects hypothetically presupposed in approaching enzyme-catalyzed group trans-
fer reactions in terms of topological translocations of ions.22
The most decisive step in envisioning vectorial metabolism’s theoretical objects
was the emergence in the 1970s of experimental practices of producing “cellular
chimeras” (a mosaic of components stemming from different organisms that is enti-
tled to demonstrate how the cell production of ATP comes into play). Douglas
Allchin (1996, 34–36), who is the author of the philosophically most interesting
historical reconstruction of the “experimental and conceptual chimeras” in bio-
chemistry, draws attention to the fact that it was the failure to provide in vitro envi-
sioning of oxidative phosphorylation (as was the case with the experimental
visualization of the citric acid cycle, for instance) that brought into being the cre-
ation of “surrogate reality” in the attempts at identifying hypothetical objects. The
practices of production of “chimeras” (composed of fragments stemming from evo-
lutionary divergent groups like bacteria, plants, and animals) were designed to pro-
vide experimental envisioning of plots described by chemiosmotic theory. (The
artificial chimeric composition had to demonstrate how the mitochondrial vesicle
transfers the energy necessary for generating ATP.) At stake was the experimental
envisioning of how cytochromes create a proton membrane gradient.23
22
There is a pre-normative function of the fore-sight that poses requirements to the ways of read-
ing/representing theoretical objects: Given that the envisioning of these objects takes place in
spaces of representation, the objects’ treatment within the configuration of practices has to incor-
porate the topological arrangements of electron-carrying and hydrogen-carrying catalytic compo-
nents in the spaces of representations that envision the objects. The objects and structures
introduced by the chemiosmotic theory have a way of being that certainly has a counter-intuitive
character, which additionally strains their envisioning (see in this regard Orgel 1999). Interestingly
enough, for Mitchell, it was the quest for high-energy intermediate molecules that came into con-
flict with intuitively seeing and grasping the biochemical reality. This is why he, in a sense of
recapitulation, notes that what he has done is “a self-consistent research process based on simple
principles” (Mitchell 1991, 298).
23
This was an envisioning that broke the borderline not only between in vivo and in vitro experi-
ments, but between the factual and the artificial too. Eventually, each of the theoretical elements of
the chemiosmotic hypothesis was visualized by the artificial chimeric mitochondrial vesicles. Yet
this visualization would have been impossible without the fore-sight operating in the constitution
of vectorial metabolism’s objects.
90 The Production of Objectified Factuality Within the Facticity of Scientific Inquiry
At the end of the 1960s the domain of vectorial metabolism was characterized by
several spaces of representation and envisioning, such as equations representing
types of transfer mechanisms, flow diagrams representing the transpositions of ubi-
quinone couples, diagrams representing the topology of proton motive forces, elec-
tron spin resonance measurements, spectrophotometric measurements representing
stability constants, data models representing various types of mitochrondial cyto-
chrome systems, measurements of miniscule electric fields generated by single cells
in the surrounding medium, measurements of potential differences in the nanovolt
range, patterns of trans-cellular electric currents providing clues to the mechanisms
of generation of spatial order, etc. The fore-sight in the domain’s articulation oper-
ates in all spaces and devices of representation, constantly prompting an integral
envisioning that affords several theoretical images of vectorial metabolism: trans-
port systems that are linked through the thermodynamic parameters of substrate
concentration and electrical potential; slow diffusion of ions through cytoplasmic
space; transducting proteins of bacterial chemiotaxis; microtubules and microfila-
ments as polarized structures due to intrinsic asymmetries; molecular polarity con-
ferring physiological direction; enzyme kinetics based on molecular anisotropy and
coupled activities of osmoenzymes; sodium fluxes that support ATP syntheisis;
potential gradient as a driving force for the uptake of amino acids; ATPase that
expels potassium ions in exchange for hydrogen ions; and complementarity between
molecular asymmetries and cellular vectors.
Fore-conception of the domain’s meaningful articulation and objectification is
the anticipation of further possible contextualization of what has been articulated
and objectified in the initial context of inquiry. Thus considered, the fore-conception
refers to what I will later regard as a “textualization” of a scientific domain. In
another definition, the fore-conception is the anticipation which informs changes of
current agenda in the research process due to the implementation of new readable
technologies in new spaces of representation. Such changes imply revisions and
extensions of what has been articulated in the domain. The fore-conception operates
by fore-grasping the contexts in which the newly opened possibilities might be actu-
alized. A typical example of an early extension of the domain of vectorial metabo-
lism is the instituting of the context of inquiry—already fore-grasped in the
experimental work of Moyle and Mitchell—in which the focal topic was the differ-
ence between primary and secondary transport systems. By means of this research
a more resilient view about the balance between anisotropic and isotropic trans-
membrane transport was gained. The former was attributed to actions catalyzed by
osmoenzymes that create transport systems whose mechanism is based on covalent
bonds. Such a transport system is characterized by a mutual reinforcement of chem-
ical reactions and osmotic processes. By contrast, the secondary transport systems
do not involve covalent bonds and mediate the translocation of solutes isotropically
(Mitchell 1967).
Mitchell’s (1975) introduction of the model for the Q cycle provides another
illustration of an extension of the domain’s meaningful articulation. (This cycle is a
mechanism whereby protons, due to oxidation of ubiquinol to ubiquinone, move
across the membrane; or a mechanism by which the third complex in the electron
2 Hermeneutic Realism as a Hermeneutic Philosophy of Science 91
transport chain [the respiratory chain] pumps protons and generates a pH gradient.)
Fore-grasping the context in which the Q cycle is to be inquired and articulated was
almost impossible at the beginning of the 1970s because of the lack of evidence for
its existence in the established contexts of inquiry. Nonetheless, its way of being
was projected upon possibilities. (Even in the mid-1980s there still had not been a
general acceptance of the Q cycle. In fact, it was not Mitchell’s model of this cycle,
but a modified version of it that received the desired acceptance.) Thanks to the
fore-grasping of further re-contextualization—to note another important role of the
fore-conception—of the research process fore-conception, the transition from vec-
torial biochemistry to molecular and cellular morphogenesis became possible. Here
are some prominent examples in this respect.
The first one is the contextualization of the chemiosmotic mechanism within
practices of studying systems of biochemical reactions as dissipative structures by
means of appropriate mathematical models and computer simulations. At stake are
the discovery of stable patterns of chemical reactions that arise in systems far from
thermodynamic equilibrium. A second contextualization (starting with Wolpert
(1969)) is achieved through practices of exploring diffusible morphogen gradients
and positional information that include transplant experiments and experiments on
intercalation. Practices of studying morphogenetic fields (like endogenous electric
fields, see Nuccitelli (1988)) provide a third example of contextualization in which
spatial order is paralleled with a timeframe, and the whole time-space of morpho-
genesis is related to new conceptions of the cytoskeleton’s functions. However, one
should not ignore the skepticism which this kind of contextualizing of the chemios-
motic mechanism has provoked. Thus, Davies (2005, 8) argues that “the idea of
morphogenetic gradients and fields is very useful for providing a high-level view of
events, but it cannot be a part of a molecular-level explanation because a gradient is,
by definition, non-local and cannot be sensed directly by a single molecule.” It is a
controversial issue as to whether accounts of the shape changes at the scales of cells
and tissues are to be given in terms of events that take place only at the scale of
individual molecules.
The continuous contextual reading of the hypothetical objects involved in the
mechanisms of vectorial metabolism is accomplished through readable technolo-
gies and spaces of representation that constitute three-dimensional objects of
inquiry. Cases in point are the “morphogenetic mutants” which are defective in the
cell division cycle. They are used in experiments in which growth is arrested at a
particular morphological stage. Some of them generate grossly aberrant shapes.
Quite pertinent to the passage from vectorial metabolism to cellular morphogenesis
are those mutants which are defective in enzymes (like adenylate cyclase) that cata-
lyze reactions at metabolic branch points (Harold 1990). Yet the identification of
“morphogenes” that are dedicated to the task of cell shaping is still a trend of
research in the domain as well as in all domains of developmental biology without
significant success. What is certain for the moment is only that molecular morpho-
genesis is directly gene-controlled.
It is quite possible that the task bridging the gap between vectorial biochemistry
and topological physiology is not to be resolved within the present characteristic
92 The Production of Objectified Factuality Within the Facticity of Scientific Inquiry
hermeneutic situation. A turn in the domain’s articulation that will open a new hori-
zon of possibilities for doing research will also change the fore-having, fore-seeing,
and fore-grasping of the articulation and objectification. To sum up, the “external
observer” receives the impression that the domain is waiting for a new configuration
of scientific practices in which a “text” will be constituted capable of uniting the
topology of the biochemical autocatalytic reactions systems characterized by self-
organization with cytological mechanisms of the ways in which cells can translate
commands to make shapes into that shape itself. These mechanisms which operate
on a physiological level belong supposedly to the repertoire of morphogenesis.
Indications that the new configuration will arise provide the interrelatedness of
experimental and theoretical practices of studying phenomena of vectorial metabo-
lism in terms of adaptive self-organization. A configuration of practices that will be
capable of appropriating the possibilities projected by it, and of reading and repre-
senting the objects of inquiry it constitutes still does not guarantee that it will bridge
the gap I mentioned. Yet in revealing the mechanisms in question, it will integrate in
a unitary “text” supramolecular complexes and morphogenetic processes in indi-
vidual cells. This is an indispensable step in the transition from vectorial biochem-
istry to topological physiology. Undertaking this step promises to give meaning to
the concept of emergence of a topological arrangement that runs through molecular,
cellular, and supracellular-physiological levels.
In concluding this section, let me take up a claim I formulated in the beginning
of this study: The hermeneutic realist does not try to single out a particular class of
entities as having (exclusive or privileged) existence in physical reality. Her task is
to address the existence of entities—regardless of whether they are empirically
identifiable or not—as meaningfully articulated. Put alternatively, the hermeneutic
realist is preoccupied with the modes of existence of meaningful entities within the
reality of interplaying practices and possibilities. Regardless of whether they can
factually be identified, the meaningfully constituted entities of scientific inquiry
have a being in the facticity of interplaying scientific practices and possibilities for
doing research.
At a further stage, after elaborating on the distinction between factuality and
facticity, I will generalize this claim by putting forward the thesis that hermeneu-
tic realism is a realism about facticity as fore-structuring the procedural produc-
tion of objectified factuality. While the objectification of factuality is an
epistemological issue, the revealing of facticity in its continuous
(re)contextualization is to be attained by means of hermeneutic ontology. Thus
considered, factuality and facticity are split between two supposedly incommen-
surable enterprises. The hermeneutic realist does not try to hold a coherent posi-
tion by finding a way out of the dramatic divergence between epistemology and
hermeneutic ontology. The unity of factuality-within-facticity—the being of the
empirical in the perspective of hermeneutic realism—is not achieved by removing
the existing tension between the two enterprises. The task is rather to conceptual-
ize this unity beyond the existing tension.
3 The Empirical in the Interspace Between Epistemology and Hermeneutics 93
The thesis that scientific facts have genesis and development in the facticity of sci-
entific inquiry can easily be misconstrued and confused with the epistemological
claim that the historical destiny of scientific facts hinges on the historical dynamics
of scientific theorizing. From a post-empiricist point of view, the rebuttal of a dis-
covered fact as related to a saved phenomenon and the subsequent rehabilitation
and/or modification of the same fact is a paradigmatic example of such a destiny.
The way of thinking along the lines of post-empiricist historicism would imply that
the historical dynamics of theorizing—involving proliferation of competing theo-
ries that allegedly refer to the same factuality because they share the phenomena
they are trying to save—enables in the first place the discovery of scientific facts,
and subsequently justifies, authenticates, refutes, disproves, restores, modifies,
revises, and generalizes, etc. what has been discovered. Admittedly, this dynamics
determines the “destiny” of scientific facts. Thus considered, however, the “destiny”
has nothing to do with the meaningful constitution of facts, as this constitution is
taken to be inherent in the reality qua empirical unity of facticity and factuality. One
has to differentiate clearly between the epistemological issue of putting the norma-
tively designed theories-factuality relationship in a diachronic framework and the
hermeneutic issue of the articulation and objectification of scientific factuality.
(Thus, for instance, the refutation of established scientific facts through new theo-
ries is not to be confused with the event of emptying scientific facts of their mean-
ing—or making them meaningless—within the interplay of practices and
possibilities of inquiry. As a rule, scientific facts losing importance have not been
procedurally refuted or invalidated. They have become rather meaningless within
the facticity of inquiry. Phrased otherwise, accepted scientific facts often become
meaningless within inquiry’s interplay of practices and possibilities not because
they are extinguished by refuting procedures, but because they do not fit the articu-
lation of meaning within contextually opened horizons.)
The hermeneutic realist argues that the genesis and development of scientific
facts is an integral part of reality as an empirically manifested difference-within-
the-unity of facticity and factuality. A genuine defense of realism cannot avoid
addressing the “factogenesis” of reality. In raising this claim, the hermeneutic real-
ist further develops the view that scientific factuality is always situated in and tran-
scended by the facticity of inquiry, and that the objectified factuality never represents
something that has a “mere presence”. The genealogy of objectified factuality is
inherent in scientific inquiry’s mode of being. Accordingly, objectified factuality is
generated and developed in and through textualizing the domains of inquiry. It is my
contention that the methodological relativization of factuality—as promoted by
94 The Production of Objectified Factuality Within the Facticity of Scientific Inquiry
24
When stating this, I refer to post-empiricism as a tradition of historicist-epistemological theories
about the rationality of science that are distinguished either by descriptive (structuralist, function-
alist, or evolutionary) approaches or by normative-reconstructive methodologies. This remark is
necessary, since in recent years the view has gained currency that post-empiricism is a post-war
intellectual movement that includes conceptions leading to the “end of epistemology” and concep-
tions that enter into “a still-fulminating compound with poststructuralism” (Zammito 2004, 273).
It is my contention that this view does not do justice to the historical tasks and specificity of post-
empiricism as the tradition of the “angry young generation from the late 1950s” in the philosophy
of science. Generally speaking, the internal plurality of post-empiricism has been elicited by the
different ways in which the logical-empiricist view of confirmation of intratheoretical logical rela-
tion has been replaced by alternative historical views of confirmation in which the historically
established background knowledge plays different roles (Musgrave 1974).
3 The Empirical in the Interspace Between Epistemology and Hermeneutics 95
25
No doubt, Lakatos’s methodology of scientific research programs “dynamizes” and historicizes
the facts obtained in scientific inquiry without jeopardizing their objectivity. In this conception,
factuality is not predicated on a “mere presence”, but nonetheless it is not treated as something that
approximates features of facticity. Lakatos was after a methodological construction of factuality
that does not dogmatically rest on an “empirical psychology of perception”. He addresses the
objectified factuality as resulting from processing theoretically laden data in accordance with codi-
ces of rationality. In the “sophisticated version of methodological falsificationism” (as a brand of
conventionalism), factuality (qua the “empirical content” of rivaling and superseding theories or
research programs) might only be achieved via a historical reconstruction of the empirical theo-
ries’ rivalry in the development of a scientific domain. More specifically, factuality is the theoreti-
cally laden facts that meets the criteria for excess of empirical content of a new theory over its
predecessors, and for verifiability of this excess content (the criterion of theory’s independent test).
The excess content consists of “novel facts” predicted by theory, and enabling one to perform an
independent test of the theory’s validity. Though existing only potentially, the novel facts are part
and parcel of factuality. This potentiality-for-facts involved in factuality makes it methodologically
different from a mere factual presence. Being a methodological construction, factuality is not
entitled to falsify theories. A theory can only be falsified by means of a rival theory. This version
of falsificationism accepts the conventionalist postulate that as science conceptually grows, the
adjudicative power of the empirical diminishes since the empirical becomes transformed into con-
ventionally constructed factuality. Yet, again, this transformation does not go far enough to take
into account the facticity of inquiry. Regardless of the radical historicism of his methodological
conception, Lakatos has never resigned from the view that there is no other but normatively epis-
temologically codified factuality. As already pointed out, Proofs and Refutations—the work that
has recourse to the facticity and historicity of mathematical inquiry—is a significant exception.
96 The Production of Objectified Factuality Within the Facticity of Scientific Inquiry
in each particular type of inquiry. The closer the inquiry to the pole of total objecti-
fication, the less the objectified factuality hinges on constructability. Since the
aforementioned degrees depend on the interpretive leeway for inquirers, the whole
continuum of the types of inquiry might be addressed in terms of a (constructive)
cognitive hermeneutics. The epistemic subject in all types of inquiry is distinguished
by different forms of inter-subjectivity. Generally, Arbib and Hesse’s integration of
principles of philosophical hermeneutics in the philosophy of science (grounded
upon genetic epistemology) does not cross the threshold of cognitive constructivism
combined with the replacement of subjectivist epistemology with a theory of knowl-
edge based upon communicative inter-subjectivity.
Stephen Toulmin’s orientation to hermeneutics—as compared with Arbib and
Hesse’s program—resulted in much deeper innovations: Post-empiricist theses
were recast in terms of a theory about reflexive historicity and reflexive rationality
of science. In his later work—in treating Kant’s first Critique as a “preparatory
move toward a hermeneutics of physics”—Toulmin even tended to develop his posi-
tion in terms of a hermeneutic theory of science. The rational reconstruction of sci-
ence’s development and change—so his argument goes—ought to be concentrated
on differences among the hermeneutic situations of doing research and constructing
factually interpretable competing theories.26 At the same time, Toulmin’s commit-
ment to an interpretive theory of scientific inquiry’s facticity is not to be exagger-
ated, since he more or less equates the hermeneutic situations with epistemic
positions.
The hermeneutic realist makes the case that the whole factuality constituted in a
domain of inquiry constantly stands on “shaky ground” because it is being interpre-
tatively fore-structured (not by theoretical frameworks and models, but) by domain’s
meaningful articulation. Due to its constant hermeneutic fore-structuring, scientific
factuality is immanently historicized. In stating this, I am not trying to deny that
scientific facts are always discovered facts. Yet the point is how the word “discov-
ered” in this expression should be understood. My proposal is that one has to appre-
hend this word with regard to its etymology and literary meaning: Something that is
otherwise covered becomes—within a certain mode of meaningful articulation
(mode of being)—un-covered and procedurally exposed. A scientific fact is dis-
covered within the meaningful articulation of a domain of inquiry. A prerequisite for
dis-covering a scientific fact is a dis-closure of a domain. From the viewpoint of
hermeneutic realism, a scientific fact—as situated within the interplay of practices
and possibilities—belongs to a factuality that is incorporated in a relatively autono-
mous “text”. When this “text” becomes isolated after retrieving it from the domain’s
ongoing articulation, the discovered fact can be presented as existing per se.
According to a tacit stipulation of scientific realism, if one were not willing to
sacrifice the objectivity of factuality, one should not admit that scientific facts have
their own “genealogies”. They also do not have proper historical developments.
26
Fortunately, Toulmin (2002) left a short paper about his vision of a hermeneutic philosophy of
science. It is my contention that this paper attests Toulmin’s commitment to the idea that such a
philosophy ought to be developed as a theory of the facticity of scientific inquiry.
3 The Empirical in the Interspace Between Epistemology and Hermeneutics 97
Post-empiricists who profess the view that scientific facts are theory laden—and
observation reports are semantically prefigured—share this stipulation. For those
who believe that the status of factuality is normatively codified and fixed by a codex
governing—logically and historically—the factuality-theories relations, only the
intellectual process of discovery (involving the vindication and the acceptance) of a
scientific fact might be distinguished by a development that can be rendered by a
certain historiographic narrative. This narrative would include attempts at discover-
ing the fact in the past, the formation of the background knowledge that proves to
be a necessary condition of the discovery, competing theories that reject the discov-
ery by prohibiting the fact’s existence, series of successful and failed experiments,
other discoveries that call into question the existence of the discovered fact, debates
about what should be counted as experimentally verifiable predictions of the theory
supposedly assisting the discovery, and so on. Constructing such a historiographic
narrative assumes that “the scientific fact” is a Platonic entity out there, and the
“dramatic history” of the intellectual process of its discovery is (or should be) ren-
dered by a narrative plot. By implication, only historiographic narratives about dis-
coveries of scientific facts might be “emplotted”.
To ascribe an inherent plot to the facticity of dis-covering inquiry—and to the
factuality fore-structured by this facticity—would not make sense in both the con-
text of discovery and the context of justification. (To reiterate, the talk of scientific
inquiry’s facticity makes sense only in the “context of constitution”.) True, any
“drama” of a scientific discovery refers to something that can be captured by a genre
of intellectual history. The facticity of inquiry cannot be captured in this vein, and a
dramatic development cannot be ascribed to inquiry’s mode of being. But is it rea-
sonable to distill the intellectual history of discovery from approaching inquiry’s
historicity/facticity when what is at stake is the issue of the interpretive fore-
structuring of dis-covered facts? In addressing this question, the hermeneutic realist
raises the claim that the dis-covered facts are undetachable from the facticity of their
dis-covering. Since scientific factuality is immanently historicized, she holds the
view that the objectified-factuality-within-the-facticity-of-inquiry is distinguished
by a kind of pre-narrativity, i.e., by “emplotted” organization that (pace Hayden
White and Frank Ankersmit) exists before any descriptive historiographic narrative
or normative rational reconstruction of how factuality has been theoretically
received and transformed into theory-laden facts. What then becomes “emplotted”
is the historicized factuality-(fore)structured-within-facticity.
To be sure, Kuhn’s engagement with hermeneutics is much deeper than the descrip-
tion of it he offers in the introduction to the German edition of The Essential Tension.
Historians (consciously or not) are—Kuhn’s leitmotif in this description—all
98 The Production of Objectified Factuality Within the Facticity of Scientific Inquiry
“practitioners of the hermeneutic method”. Hermeneutics deals with the many ways
of reading texts and the “plasticity of texts”. What Kuhn has in mind is the correct
understanding and interpretation of the (textual) works of important thinkers. In this
regard, he faces the central problems of the traditional (methodical) hermeneutics,
such as the role of historical distance, the balance between external contextualizing
and immanent interpretation of the received work, the ways of decoding apparent
absurdities and “obscuritas” in the work, the rhetorical structure of the interpreted
texts, the “emancipation” of the work from the author’s intention, the accumulation
of secondary meanings in the history of the work’s reception, and so on. The
Essential Tension adduces strong evidence of how Kuhn copes with such problems.
In his efforts to understand the texts of past thinkers, Kuhn seems to be committed
to a position that is not far from Gadamer’s (1989, 269) argument that the interpreter
projects a meaning for the text as a whole as soon as some initial meaning emerges
in the text. And like Gadamer, he seems to believe that the text’s initial meaning—
during the exegetical work—emerges only because the interpreter approaches the
text with particular expectations in regard to the work she wants to understand in a
proper manner. Each interpretation of a text begins with a fore-conception of the
text’s meaning that in the course of interpretation is replaced by a more suitable one.
Generally, “the movement of understanding and interpretation” (Gadamer) in the
constant projection of the text’s meaning characterizes Kuhn’s work as a historian
studying classical texts of the past.
Yet, again, Kuhn’s engagement with hermeneutics exceeds the scope of textual
exegesis. A preliminary exemplification of this statement is the way in which Kuhn
implicitly does justice to the idea of the fusion of horizons in the history of science.
The hermeneutic doctrine of the fusing horizons is the strongest antipode of the
semantic/epistemological doctrine of incommensurability. It is hard to trace a
defense of the former in Kuhn’s philosophical work. Yet different kinds of fusing
horizons are addressed in his historiographic studies. Thus, for instance, the main
function of the practice of thought experiments is twofold: On the one hand, it inter-
prets previous interpretations incorporated in an accepted conceptual apparatus, and
on the other, it helps one to comprehend contradictions in past conceptual strategies.
Thought experiments are performed with the aim of understanding what is handed
down as interpretive tools in the process of inquiry. In analyzing Salviati’s thought
experiments in Galilei’s The Dialogue concerning the Two Chief World Systems,
Kuhn (1977, 250–256) actually demonstrates how the structure of this work presup-
poses fusing horizons of different traditions. I would say that Sagredo is the charac-
ter who specifically expresses the processes of understanding by being able both to
ask questions within the horizon of Salviati’s thought experiments and to comprehend
Simplicio’s misunderstanding of these experiments. Now, the main argument for the
claim that Kuhn is engaged with hermeneutics that exceeds the scope of textual
exegesis concerns the concept of normal science.
In admitting that scientific factuality is a paradigm-dependent construction, pro-
duced by normal scientific practices, and exposed to essential change through the
scientific revolution’s Gestalt-switch, Kuhn’s doctrine proves to be not on a par with
the epistemological doctrines that enclose the production of factuality in the
3 The Empirical in the Interspace Between Epistemology and Hermeneutics 99
relations between the empirical and the theoretical. More specifically, he convinc-
ingly shows that scientific factuality is not methodologically and conventionally
constructed by means of pertinent demarcation criteria, but is constituted (in a sense
close to that of phenomenology) within scientific communities’ routine work, where
tacit factors of collective mentality play a significant role. In coupling the construc-
tion of factuality with the research work’s everydayness, Kuhn manages to put his
views in a hermeneutic context (Ginev 2004). Thus, in contrast to Lakatos’s purely
methodological constructivism combined with conventionalism, Kuhn—who was
characterized by Lakatos (1999, 30) as “a rather ad hoc footnote to Polanyi and
Merton”—admits that the factuality of inquiry is produced in accordance with para-
digmatic rules of interpretation accepted by the members of a community.27 In view
of this admission, Kuhn’s position should be titled “interpretive constructivism”.
The image of normal science as a tradition-bound work guided by “exemplars”
(solutions of concrete problems that do not call into question the existing horizon of
expectations) belongs to the achievements of his constructivism about factuality. It
is this image that makes Kuhn’s idea of scientific rationality close to that of
phronēsis-rationality. With the concept of disciplinary matrix Kuhn intends to show
that the stress he lays on the role of particular exemplars is not in conflict with the
use of general models and structures in the process of inquiry. The practical ratio-
nality of scientific inquiry mediates between the general and the particular. The
disciplinary matrix does justice to this mediation precisely, and not to any kind of
factuality’s normative codification. In this regard, Kuhn’s view of normal scientific
rationality resonates the claim—raised by a celebrated hermeneutic philosopher—
that given “a community in which there is a living, shared acceptance of ethical
principles and norms, then phronēsis as mediation of such universals in particular
situation makes good sense” (Bernstein 1983, 157).
In a well-known thesis advanced in Kuhn’s later work, the natural scientific
inquiry has a “hermeneutic base”—the conceptual vocabulary in which the con-
struction of factuality is rooted—but is not itself a hermeneutic enterprise, i.e., a
critical inquiry that is able to escape a routinization in the form of normal science.
If I am understanding Kuhn correctly, the “hermeneutic enterprise” succeeds in
escaping such a routine due to its reflexivity and reflexive problematization and
defamiliarization of the accepted hermeneutic base (Kuhn 1991, 22–23). For him,
the human sciences provide the model for a critical-reflexive inquiry that avoids a
conservative stabilization of the normal scientific work. This is the key to under-
standing Kuhn’s (1970, 209)—otherwise apparently disprovable—claim about the
27
To be fair, there is a prominent case in which Lakatos is unfaithful to his methodological norma-
tivism. It is to be found in the lectures on the demarcation problem he gave at the London School
of Economics in 1973. Lakatos observes that the inability of Darwinism to conform to norms for a
good theory does not make it a bad theory (i.e., a pseudoscience similar to, say, the theories of
Soviet Marxism or the post-Freudian theories of psychoanalysis). Lakatos subscribes to the well-
known position of Popper regarding the status of Darwinism. Yet there is also an essential nuance.
In contrast to Popper, he is not stating that Darwin’s natural selection is a “metaphysical research
program”. He is rather drawing attention to the special character of the factuality in this theory. The
factuality of Darwinism is always in the making, and cannot normatively be codified.
100 The Production of Objectified Factuality Within the Facticity of Scientific Inquiry
classical physics. Kuhn is highly successful in showing how the texture of interpre-
tations is crossing various research traditions, programs, and projects. The logic of
question and answer, and the fusing horizons constantly overcome the semantic
boundaries between conceptual frameworks.28
In contrast to the ontological approaches to interpretation, Kuhn’s position is tied
to the collective-mentalist picture of shared rules of interpreting facts that a com-
munity of inquirers encounters through employing certain Gestalts of envisioning
reality. Thus considered, interpretation is not a part of facticity. It belongs rather to
an extended framework of conceptualization that involves practical elements. Kuhn
defines (what he calls) “normal research projects” by the conjunction of two epis-
temic processes: an adjustment of existing theory or existing observation in order to
bring the two into closer agreement, and an extension of existing theory to areas that
it is expected to cover. Interpretation operates in the adjustment and extension; i.e.,
it is enclosed in (and not transcending) the epistemic processes of theory-determined
conceptualization. Consequently, interpretation is deprived of the capability to fore-
structure the relationship between facts and theories. To reiterate, what Kuhn sug-
gests is a doctrine of the interpretive construction of factuality (within scientific
community’s work) that avoids any preoccupation with the production of factuality
within facticity. This is why his hermeneutic view about science’s constructed fac-
tuality does not go beyond the repertoire of relativism. (Any kind of interpretive
constructivism that ignores the facticity of inquiry—as this is fore-structuring the
relations between theory and facts – is doomed to end up in semantic and/or epis-
temic relativism.)
In prioritizing the semantic analysis of incommensurability, Kuhn victimizes his
analysis of inquiry on the level of scientific practices. Accordingly, paradigm-guided
normal science becomes a process of inquiry not within an interpretive horizon, but
within an interpretative framework. Kuhn tends always to replace hermeneutic
interpretation (as appealing to facticity of practices within horizons of normal sci-
ence) with semantic interpretation (dealing with translatability, stability of refer-
ences, and intensional and extensional shifts). To sum up, like other post-empiricists,
Kuhn only touches occasionally upon the facticity of scientific inquiry. Being con-
structed on a “hermeneutic base” (i.e., constructed within a conceptual framework
of interpretation), objectified factuality represents the presence of something that
exists out there in itself. Like the factuality in methodological falsificationism and
conventionalism, Kuhn’s scientific factuality is not predicated on a mere presence,
but refers to (or represents) something that is an essence in itself characterized by a
variety of actual manifestations. In leaning on this observation, one has good rea-
sons to countenance the Kantian reading of Kuhn’s approach to factuality
(Hoyningen-Huene 1993, 35).
For Kuhn, scientific factuality becomes re-conceptualized and semantically re-
interpreted after periods of crisis and revolution. But the empirical facts do not
cease to be conceptually and semantically determined. He attributes interpretative
28
For a more detailed analysis of the clash between Kuhn (as a philosopher of incommensurability)
and Kuhn (as a historian of physics), see also Klein et al. (1979).
3 The Empirical in the Interspace Between Epistemology and Hermeneutics 103
historicity to science’s “theoretical worlds”, but strongly denies that this might be
assigned to the factual level of scientific inquiry which he always conceives of as
fixed within conceptual and semantic frameworks. (Scientific facts are changeable
only because their constitution is a function of theoretical worlds’ historical dynam-
ics.) Kuhn is convinced that his characterization of the physical sciences’ nature
approximates the Kantian ways in which Max Weber and Ernst Cassirer describe
the construction of unique “individual wholes” in the cultural-historical disciplines.
To be sure, he has good arguments for this conviction. In commenting on Charles
Taylor’s way of drawing demarcation between the human and natural sciences,
Kuhn renounces the view that entities like rock patterns and snow crystals have no
meaning—nothing that they express. When these entities becomes constituted—so
Kuhn’s argument goes—as objects of inquiry, then they gain the character of enti-
ties that are meaningful for the community of inquirers who have procedurally
accomplished the constitution.
Kuhn even sharpens this argument by arguing that there are no culture-
independent (not only social, but also physical) entities. Thus, he writes that “no
more in the natural than in the human sciences is there some neutral, culture-
independent, set of categories within which the population—whether of objects or
of actions—can be described” (Kuhn 1991, 21). Though rejecting a “brute data
vocabulary”, he is committed to the view that there is an absolute presence of the
reality represented by “pure factuality” which scientific communities make—each
of them within the horizon of its own research work—a meaningful reality by
endowing meanings to meaningless (pre-constructed) factuality. By the same token,
looking through different “conceptual spectacles” upon the same pure factuality
constitutes different objects of inquiry. Accordingly, what Kuhn has always in mind
is semantic meaningfulness (of a conceptually constructed factuality) and not her-
meneutic meaningfulness in its ongoing articulation within interplaying practices
and possibilities. In his Denkweg Kuhn has been hovering between cultural relativ-
ism and a soft version of scientific realism. Only a Kantian framework (in the broad-
est sense) might have assured a peaceful coexistence of such extreme positions
whose common denominator is the hypostatization of the subject-object relation—
the same framework in which the post-empiricists rehabilitated the synthetic a priori
once officially forbidden by the logical empiricists.
Before concluding this section, I have to note that—unjustifiably enough, but for
completely understandable reasons—post-empiricism outshone a tradition where
what was at stake was the study of scientific factuality in a historical-epistemological
manner that takes into account the facticity of inquiry and the historicity of scien-
tific objects. The champions of this tradition are Francophone phenomenologists
like Gaston Bachelard, Jean Cavaillès, Georges Canguilhem, and Jean Ladrière.
Michel Foucault (1991, 8) differentiates between “two modalities according to
which phenomenology was taken up in France”—one typically represented by the
early work of Sartre and Merleau-Ponty, and another by the constitutional analysis
of discourses, historical entities, normative fields, and forms of rationality, etc., sug-
gested by Cavaillès, Koyré, Bachelard, and Canguilhem. Various aspects of sci-
ence’s historicity (historicized facticity) are at issue in this analysis. The authors
104 The Production of Objectified Factuality Within the Facticity of Scientific Inquiry
The quest for “genesis and development” of scientific facts is strongly prohibited by
Kuhn’s doctrines. All that is allowed is the study of conceptual genesis and develop-
ment of the discoveries of scientific facts. For Kuhn, the constitution of conceptual-
ized factuality by and large coincides with the semantic interpretation of vocabularies.
Conceptually schematized factuality is a product of semantic interpretation. In his
final work he often makes a point of lexical taxonomies (in which sorts of natural,
artifactual, and social kinds are specified) when discussing issues of realism, thereby
underscoring his favored thesis that the ability to learn a language “does not guar-
antee the ability to translate into or out of it” (Kuhn 2000, 92). The process which
29
On the role of the constitutional analysis in the Francophone historical epistemology, see also
Hyder (2010), Rheinberger (2005), and Rheinberger (2010b).
30
The programs of historical epistemology—Canguilhem’s program in the first place—pose the
question of the historical genesis of the (epistemic) norms. It is this question that transgresses the
frame of historicized normative epistemology, and puts the study of historicity—in the form of
genealogical studies of normativity—on the agenda.
3 The Empirical in the Interspace Between Epistemology and Hermeneutics 105
31
Fleck is convinced that quite often the complexity of this whole gains its homogeneity through
(what he calls) a kind of “harmony of illusions”. The latter is not a particular mental state. It is
rather an inherent feature of science as a cultural life form.
3 The Empirical in the Interspace Between Epistemology and Hermeneutics 107
constructivism. Patrick Heelan (1986) was the first author who opposed this recep-
tion, and suggested a construal in terms of hermeneutic phenomenology. In this
construal, the constitution of scientific facts within the horizons of thought styles is
not an empirical (in the sense of empiricism) process of social construction, but an
event that should be considered on the model of interpretation led by fore-structures
of understanding. (Heelan demonstrates why attempts at construing Fleck by com-
bining the historically established versions of [social and/or methodological] con-
structivism with versions of [holist, non-representational, structuralist, and
standpoint] epistemology are doomed to failure. His reading shows that a thought
style is more a mode of being of a thought collective than a dimension of socially
determined cognition.) After touching upon issues important for hermeneutic real-
ism that have been forgotten in the tradition of post-empiricism, I will delve into a
hermeneutic construal of Fleck’s work with the intent to show how he manages to
investigate the empirical as a processual unity of factuality and facticity.
Fleck advances an essentially different image of scientific inquiry as compared
with the post-empiricist portrayals of it. In his basic tenet, scientific facts have a
historical life (and “destiny”) of their own. Scientific factuality as reported in scien-
tific papers (and much more in textbooks and handbooks) is always de-contextualized
(petrified) facticity of scientific inquiry as existing through its re-contextualization.
In contrast to Kuhn, Fleck does not follow the theses of theory-ladenness and
semantic incommensurability, which more or less reduce hermeneutic interpreta-
tion to semantic interpretation.32 For Fleck, it is not the scientific lexicon of natural
kinds’ terms that determines what one can count as meaningful factuality. In his
conception of the genesis and development of scientific factuality, he departs from
a sort of interpretative constructivism (akin to that advocated by Kuhn) only to
move to a hermeneutics of scientific inquiry’s trans-subjectivity as a kind of herme-
neutics of facticity. As I will argue in the remainder, Fleck is interested not in the
conceptual relativity of scientific factuality, but in the interpretive re-contextualization
in scientific inquiry that also defines the ongoing constitution of inquiry’s empirical
basis as part and parcel of a certain kind of historicized facticity. Accordingly,
scientific facts are addressed in their interpretive flexibility and resilience.
Addressing scientific facts as produced in inquiry’s facticity provides him with good
arguments against cognitive/conceptual relativism.
Stephen Toulmin nicely comments on the issue of how for Fleck scientific factu-
ality has a life of its own. Factuality is produced by Denkkollektiven but cannot be
explained by referring to the cognitive and non-cognitive characteristics of scien-
tific communities. In its anonymity the life of scientific factuality alienates from the
social milieu of its production, and no social constructivism is able to restore the
process of production in a manner that would be prone to accounting the epistemic
specificity of the produced factuality. In this regard, the life of scientific factuality
(within the facticity of scientific inquiry) has not only a super-individual, but also a
super-communal status. For Toulmin, the insistence on scientific factuality’s
32
Regarding the advantages of Fleck’s conception over that of Kuhn when what is at stake is the
issue of scientific factuality’s historicity, see Babich (2003).
108 The Production of Objectified Factuality Within the Facticity of Scientific Inquiry
33
Gadamer (1991, 434) recognizes a line in the philosophy of science that tries to capture the “her-
meneutic dimension of the natural sciences”. The main stations of this line are Moritz Schlick’s
attack of the “dogmatism of protocol sentences”, Polanyi’s displacement of normative methodol-
ogy in favor of the “logic of questioning”, Kuhn’s stress on scientific inquiry’s presuppositional
character, and Toulmin’s analysis of the concept of phenomenon. One should regret that the author
of Truth and Method has not been acquainted with Fleck’s work, especially because in this lecture
(held in English and entitled “Natural Science and Hermeneutics: The concept of nature in ancient
philosophy”) he—in criticizing Popper—deals with the irreducibility of the natural sciences’ her-
meneutic dimension to the “psychology of invention”. He uses the same type of argumentation
against psychologism which Fleck employed in his work.
3 The Empirical in the Interspace Between Epistemology and Hermeneutics 109
scientific facts. His Durkheimian position is most typically manifested in the way in
which he seeks a proper delimitation of a new discipline, the comparative sociology
of scientific knowledge. Fleck’s image of the epistemic subject of scientific inquiry
greatly resembles the Durkheimian homo duplex: It is an image of the individual
scientist inextricably involved in the sociality of a thought collective. Any attempt
at dissolving the unity of this homo duplex would destroy the integrity of sociology
of scientific knowledge’s subject matter. The individual creativity in scientific
inquiry is by no means to be ignored. Yet it ought to be explained sociologically. (It
remains to be seen to what extent Fleck leaves Durkheimian essentialism about the
relation between collective representations and sociological facts behind when he
deals with the “genealogy” of factuality.)
Along with his admonition about the risk of reifying phenomena revealed by
natural scientific research, Fleck is acutely sensitive to the threat of a hypostatiza-
tion of social phenomena. In a hypothesis I will follow in this section, in order to
avoid this threat, he unfolds lines of argument that in their conceptual unity can be
referred to as a “hermeneutics of trans-subjectivity”—a program that remains
implicit in Fleck’s work, but plays a crucial role in bringing together “the cognitive”
and “the social” in his delineation of what the “comparative cognitive sociology”
should be. I have to specify right away what is being said, lest my study be seen as
an attempt at making Fleck a hermeneutic philosopher: The hypothesis thus formu-
lated can only be partially validated. Though there are plenty of hermeneutic ideas
in Fleck’s work, the reconstruction of a full-fledged hermeneutics of trans-
subjectivity from his published and unpublished texts only is an impossible mission.
This is why Fleck’s program should be extended with hermeneutic motifs that do
not stem from the intrinsic logic of his theorizing, albeit they have correlates in his
work and are congruent with the tenets of his historical epistemology and cognitive
sociology. Integrating these motifs in his program complements the reconstruction
of Fleck’s implicit hermeneutics with a critique that aims at reclaiming the missing
links between thought styles and practices of scientific inquiry. Such a critique
serves the program’s goal of demonstrating how stylized practices disclose and con-
stitute fields of research. It is my contention that the aforementioned missing links
are to be spelled out in terms of a trans-subjective—as opposed to inter-subjective—
interpretative experience. In questing for these links, I will follow the thread of
Fleck, who alludes to several interpretative aspects of scientific inquiry that might
mediate between the cognitive and the social. Making these aspects explicit in a
coherent way is a prerequisite for a critical extension and modification of Fleck’s
program.
For Fleck, the unfoldment of the sociological program he aims at must be
achieved through radicalizing the existing sociology of knowledge: a radicalization
that would allow one to study the genesis and development of scientific facts. With
regard to this radicalization Fleck reaches the conclusion that the pioneers of this
discipline (Emile Durkheim, Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, Ludwig Gumplowicz, and
Wilhelm Jerusalem) “commit a characteristic error. They exhibit an excessive
respect, bordering on pious reverence, for scientific facts” (Fleck 1979, 47). By his
account, the sociology of knowledge should study the articulation of norms and
110 The Production of Objectified Factuality Within the Facticity of Scientific Inquiry
standards (within the whole modes of existence of thought collectives), and not
established forms of inter-subjective normativity. The genesis and development of
scientific facts do not conform to the normativity that preexists these processes. The
aforementioned “signal of resistance” can only be received by a thought style that
changes its normative shape resiliently enough. Scientific facts are generated (and
expressed) by thought styles in close cooperation with the articulation of styles’
norms and standards. It is a task of cognitive sociology to conceptualize the mutual
reinforcement of facts’ development and epistemic norms’ articulation. This claim
can be regarded as a crucial argument against normativist versions of post-
empiricism before the latter was even born.
Let me now formulate some claims whose appropriate qualification will be
accomplished later. Scientific facts are distinguished by a potentiality-for-being
(i.e., a being “inscribed” on a horizon of possible changes, re-readings, and re-
descriptions), and not by an actually given presence at hand. Due to the radicaliza-
tion of Wissenssoziologie,an interesting expansion of the Durkheimian concept of
sociological facts takes place in Fleck’s work. The facts achieved by the sociologi-
cal analysis of the social production of (scientific) knowledge are obviously socio-
logical facts in the Durkheimian sense. However, this analysis assigns to the facts
discovered in scientific inquiry itself—so Fleck’s radicalization goes—also a quasi-
Durkheimian status: Entangled with the cognitive life of the thought collectives,
scientific facts exist, as it were, in their interpretive openness. Stated alternatively,
there are no scientific facts beyond the purview of thought collectives’ styling of
what is under investigation. This styling is to be conceived in terms of hermeneutic
constitution rather than regarded as an outcome of social construction.
It is my contention that Fleck is more interested in the stylizing constitution than
the social construction of scientific facts. In stating this, I do not intend to downplay
the constructivist elements in his program. My aim is rather to argue that his meth-
odological position manages to avoid the kind of “sociological naturalism” typi-
cally advocated by constructivists: the claim that one should not explain nature
through society, but should give accounts of how nature exists socially by revealing
the causal social factors for the construction of natural scientific knowledge.
Cartesian dualism becomes specified in social constructivism (most typically, in the
Strong Program) as a dualism of the totality of nature (in David Bloor’s generalized
sense that includes the social) and the (normatively organized) inter-subjectivity. It
is the rehabilitation of this dualism on the grounds of sociological naturalism that
prompts the cognitive sociologists to devise causal explanations about the construc-
tion of nature (not in the above-mentioned generalized sense, but as a subject matter
of natural science) within the social being of scientific knowledge. Instead of scru-
tinizing the contextual engendering of subject-object cut in the different forms of
knowledge, which should be the central task of cognitive sociology, the Strong
Program postulates a special version of this cut in order to advocate the tenets of
sociological naturalism.34
34
It is no accident that Bloor (1999, 82–83) insists (in his criticism of Latour) on the preservation
of (a version of) the subject-object relation in science studies. It is this residual Cartesian dualism
3 The Empirical in the Interspace Between Epistemology and Hermeneutics 111
35
A scientific fact is supervenient upon a non-fixed number of actual and potential combinations of
contingent facts and data. If it were only supervenient upon a single combination, it would also be
a contingent fact.
3 The Empirical in the Interspace Between Epistemology and Hermeneutics 113
conceptual relation” which might be cast in historical and psychological terms, but
“cannot be substantively reconstructed in toto” from historical and psychological
viewpoints (Fleck 1979, 83), (e) can be expressed through the means of communica-
tion of a thought collective (Fleck 1979, 102), (f) can react upon other facts consti-
tuted in the same field, thereby participating in the interwoven texture of the field’s
facts, and (g) can be characterized by certain patterns displayable by all classes of
interconnected contingent facts and data corresponding to the situations in which the
relevant phenomenon has been revealed. The “factuality” (Fleck’s expression) of the
investigated phenomenon never becomes a mere presence. It comes forward as a
“maximizing thought constraint” (Fleck 1979, 98).
The scientific fact related to the Wassermann reaction (and its relation to syphi-
lis) refers to a phenomenon revealed by practices of “chemistry, physical chemistry,
pathology, and physiology” (Fleck 1979, 52). Nonetheless, none of these disciplines
is entitled to constitute the scientific fact in question. This fact is to be seen—so his
argument goes—by the “serological touch”, which is much more important than
(and irreducible to) any procedural identification under laboratory conditions that
represents the phenomenon by experimental results, measurements, calculations,
and controlled observations. Prima facie the “serological touch” resembles what
phenomenologists call “the intuition of essence” (Wesensschau): Only the thought
collective of serologists is able to grasp the “factual essence” of a phenomenon
represented by a multitude of observations. However, this analogy is not quite apt,
since the descriptive-phenomenological ideas behind the intuition of essence are
completely alien to Fleck. The touch he is interested in is predicated on interpreta-
tive experience capable of recognizing patterns. (In this regard, the serological
touch has much to do with the phronēsis of practical experience. Fleck refers often
to this experience in the research work by ascribing to it a meaning similar to what
it has in philosophical hermeneutics. He opposes practical experience to the narrow
epistemological notion of experience related to isolated experiments. The texture of
practical experience in science consists of “many successful and unsuccessful
experiments, much practice and training, and—epistemologically most important—
several adaptations and transformations of concepts” (Fleck 1979, 98). Fleck’s term
of experience also connotes the stylization of the routine everydayness of a thought
collective.)
It is the “serological touch” that might put into play the unity of the seven [(a–g)]
characteristics. The way in which observations (contingent “facts” and data) repre-
sent the phenomenon in changing situations makes the meaning of scientific facts
variable.36 Yet this conclusion is not to be confused with a version of theory-
ladenness of observation. As I pointed out in the preceding chapter, the very formu-
lation of a theory-ladenness thesis assumes a static relation between theoretical
framework and “empirical content”. By contrast, Fleck’s approach to the depen-
36
Fleck’s case study shows the varieties of observable (experimental) representations of the scien-
tific fact about the relation of the Wassermann reaction to the diagnosis of syphilis. The study takes
into consideration “all fields related to the Wassermann reaction until, with disregard for theoreti-
cal questions and the ideas of individuals, the reaction became useful” (Fleck 1979, 73).
114 The Production of Objectified Factuality Within the Facticity of Scientific Inquiry
37
It is not by chance that Ian Hacking (2009, 85) asserts that with regard to the balance between
contingency and stability in science “mon Fleck est plus clair, plus élégant et plus net que tous ses
successeurs.”
3 The Empirical in the Interspace Between Epistemology and Hermeneutics 115
disentangled from the way in which phenomena are revealed.38 (In fact, thought
style and investigators’ dispositions are not separated in Fleck’s reasoning. He suc-
ceeds in bridging the style’s anonymous power with the investigator’s dispositions
precisely by means of reflexivity operating in scientific inquiry.39 In this regard, one
is to find in his views motifs anticipating reflexive sociology. Fleck’s thought style
might be read as an open system of dispositions in the same way in which Bourdieu
reads the concept of habitus. In all cases in which Fleck invokes the idea of a sociol-
ogy that—in a comparative perspective—has to deal with the thought styles in sci-
entific inquiry, he assumes a reflexive mediation between the stylistic constraints
and the investigators’ dispositions. Thus, the investigators are determined by a
thought style only to the extent that they reflexively determine themselves as agents
who make the choice to work in this style. Like habitus, Fleck’s thought style is a
structuring and structured structure. Accordingly, interpretive experience in inquiry
is stylizing and stylized.)
Among the functions which the thought style is entitled to serve is that of con-
straining the possibilities for revealing phenomena and constituting scientific facts.
At the same time, the style sanctions the choices and the ways of decision making.
A thought style imposes on the particular members (of a scientific community)
restrictions in choosing possibilities of doing research. Fleck is inclined to unfold
the concept of thought style by laying more emphasis upon its negative, inhibiting
function. A thought style serves this function, but not in a normative-epistemological
manner. It constrains the thought collective’s research work by integrating its mem-
bers in a “mood of thought” (Denkstimmung) as a prerequisite for their “mental
readiness” (Denkgewohnheiten) for producing knowledge and constituting scien-
tific facts of a certain kind (Fleck 1986, 66). Thus considered, a thought style (start-
ing from the stylization of observations through Gestalts) shapes the routine
practices of a thought collective, and sanctions the directedness of the research
process. Stated alternatively, a thought collective (as characterized by its mood of
thought) comes into being when researchers become immersed in practices whose
routine performance is specified by a directedness of inquiry and a tendentious
restrictedness of the choices of possibilities for doing research.
The commitment of a thought collective to the truth about scientific facts is not
to be disentangled from the communal belief in the existence of certain theoretical
objects. Only through this belief are the thought collective’s members able to
observe and describe the facts they claim to be true. Furthermore, the communal
belief in the existence of theoretical objects is of central importance for a domain’s
38
At the very outset of his book, Fleck (1979, xxvii) argues that in the lack of reflexivity “we feel
a complete passivity in the face of a power that is independent of us.”
39
Claus Zittel (2012) astutely observes that Fleck’s concept of thought style is not akin to Wölfflin’s
morphological concept of style as a general characteristic of an epoch in the history of art. Like the
structuralist notion of style, the morphological one has a being in itself. In morphological perspec-
tive, a certain style as embracing a firm configuration of historical and cultural phenomena and
events is something like a quasi-natural kind. (For an example of such a configuration, see Wölfflin
(1908, 195–225).) By contrast, Fleck’s thought styles have a being non-detachable from the prac-
tices of inquiry and the dispositions of inquirers.
116 The Production of Objectified Factuality Within the Facticity of Scientific Inquiry
identity. To put it quite cautiously, the belief in these objects bears resemblance in
several respects to religious faith. The members of a religious community try to
make (by means of ritual practices and exegesis of sacral texts) the transcendent
authority immanent in community’s everydayness. Although the Transcendent
never becomes an actual presence in the everyday life, it “participates” in all of the
community’s activities, thereby endowing them with sacral meaning. In this regard,
the Transcendent becomes the most immanent authority in the day-to-day comport-
ment of a religious community. By the same token, the “believers in theoretical
objects” try to make these transcendent objects the most immanent entities in a
scientific community’s everydayness. This is why the thought collective’s everyday-
ness of inquiry seems like (from an external viewpoint) a variety of ritual practices
that are performed in accordance with the belief in the existence of theoretical
objects. The thought collective resists to a great extent changes in its thought style
because this belief plays a leading role in the community’s stylization of knowledge
and inquiry.40 At the same time, however, the articulation of scientific domains (like
those which Fleck investigates: bacteriology, immunology, or clinical biochemistry)
progressively rationalizes the communal belief in the existence of theoretical
objects. It is this rationalization of belief during the domains’ articulation that sets
clear limits on the agenda of questing for analogies with religious faith: In contrast
to scientific belief in unobservable entities, religious faith does not need rationaliza-
tion in order to be effective. The more this faith resists rationalization, the stronger
it consolidates a religious community.
In agreement with this observation, Fleck stresses important differences when
juxtaposing thought collectives in science with religious communities. Thus, he
makes the case that the “religious thought collectives” are normally in a situation in
which “secretiveness and dogmatism” (Geheimtun und Dogmatik) dominate
because there is no democratic pressure on the elite from outside (Fleck 1979, 105–
106). By contrast, scientific communities manage to obviate rigidity in the research
work (despite the intrinsic conservatism of their thought styles) thanks to the exo-
teric circles and the laymen’s public opinion, which prevent the elites from follow-
ing the tendency to self-isolation. Nonetheless, the quasi-religious belief in the
existence of objects that can be seen only through the eyes of the initiated in a
thought style remains a distinctive trait of science’s thought collectives. As I pointed
out, the belief in theoretical objects is by no means based on a metaphysical contem-
plation or intuition. It is rather a belief that constantly requires the procedural
“transference” of these transcendent objects in the everyday situations of research
as they are circumscribed by interrelated practices and spaces of representation.
Like scientific fact itself, scientific truth is predicated on a genesis and it under-
goes a development that depends on contextual interpretations in the research pro-
cess as well as on the forms of re-stylization of knowledge. Yet scientific truth’s
genesis and development do not provide a rationale for holding epistemic relativism.
40
From the viewpoint of philosophical hermeneutics, a thought community is conservative because
of its extreme unwillingness to abandon its prejudices (both as Vorurteile and Vorverständnisse) of
interpretation.
3 The Empirical in the Interspace Between Epistemology and Hermeneutics 117
knowledge production are better than others as starting points for devising strategies
to maximize objectivity.
From the perspective of standpoint epistemology, the observation that all scien-
tific knowledge is socially situated serves as a chief argument for the thesis that
cognition is inevitably determined by socially located epistemic positions as they
are distinguished by special interests and values. What this perspective fails to take
into consideration is the open horizon of possibilities that always already transcends
each particular kind of knowledge production’s situatedness. Consequently, the
philosophical assumptions of standpoint epistemology prevent one from coping
with the complexity of knowledge’s situated transcendence, and more generally,
with the facticity of knowledge production. The champions of this program are not
able to overcome the fixation of the subject-object relationship. Multiplying the
social loci of knowledge production pluralizes the forms of existence of this rela-
tionship, but does not undo the fixation in determining social structures. The epis-
temic relation (in its pluralism of socially determined forms) of standpoint
epistemology is a strongly Cartesian one. In relativizing this relation, the supporters
of standpoint epistemology posit a plurality of fixed Cartesian cuts. They address
the “objective truth” by attributing it to the epistemic position distinguished by the
highest critical reflexivity and capacity to maximize objectivity. Unlike Fleck,
standpoint epistemologists replace the facticity of objectifying inquiry with a rela-
tivist plurality of social locations of knowledge production.
Fleck stresses the priority of the “event of truth” over the statically defined objec-
tive truth. His concept of “creative human truth” is not epistemological in the first
place. Since there is a tacit appeal to the open horizon of scientific research, it is
rather a hermeneutic concept.41 Truth takes place in the cognitive life of a thought
collective as a result of the interplay of revealing and concealing possibilities for
doing research and the way this interplay is regulated by confronting the resistance
in choosing possibilities. As already pointed out, Fleck assigns to the phenomenon
of resistance a decisive role in the constitution of a scientific fact. He (1979, 95)
writes that at first “there is a signal in the chaotic initial thinking, then a definite
thought constraint, and finally a form to be directly perceived.” Thus considered,
truth is an “event in the history of thought”, and not a relation between an epistemic
position and reality out there (as this relation is devised by the proponents of
41
No doubt, this statement is an exaggeration. Yet by committing the “event of truth” to the thought
styles’ trans-subjectivity, Fleck tends to recast truth in terms of aletheia: an event of revealing and
concealing phenomena that can be constituted as scientific facts. One may assume that Fleck’s
purported cognitivism compels him to admit that the event of truth takes place in the cognitive life
of thought collectives. However, the scenario of his case study about the Wassermann reaction
contradicts in several respects the strongly cognitivist attitude. In fact, the extended interpretation
of the event of truth in terms of the interplay of revealing and concealing—interplay that tran-
scends the scientific communities’ cognition, thus obviating the narrowness of cognitivism—is
completely in line with his social epistemology. The latter implies that truth is not a dynamic rela-
tion of correspondence between “beliefs” (in the sense of analytical epistemology) obtained from
an epistemic position and what one assumes (from this position) to be the reality out there. Truth
also has nothing to do with the relativization of a cognitive product to the circumstances and condi-
tions under which it is created.
3 The Empirical in the Interspace Between Epistemology and Hermeneutics 119
42
Standpoint epistemologies have unfolded certain motifs of Karl Mannheim’s sociology of
knowledge. The basic attitudes and orientations of the collective thought of a social group can be
derived from the group’s life conditions. More specifically, the champions of these epistemologies
adhere to Mannheim’s argument that the view of relationism (relating forms of knowledge produc-
tion to social positions) does not imply epistemological relativism. In trying to answer the question
of how is it possible that Fleck at once proposes a relativist interpretation of truth and denies that
truth is relative, Markus Seidel (2011, 224) reaches the conclusion that “Mannheim’s description
of his purported relationist solution is not just similar to but in its basic idea nearly the same as
Fleck’s treatment of the issue.” In my opinion, there is a difference between the programs of
Mannheim and Fleck that has to be conceived as a matter of principle: Mannheim tries to overcome
cognitive relativism by means of epistemic relativization, whereas Fleck develops his argument
against relativism by referring implicitly to different sorts of hermeneutic circle of knowledge
production.
120 The Production of Objectified Factuality Within the Facticity of Scientific Inquiry
43
An inferentional interpretation of Fleck’s concept of thought style in terms of inferentionalism
has its raison d’être. In this interpretation, all states of mental activity (as distinguished by moods
of thinking) are inferentially dependent within their respective thought styles. There is no founda-
tional cognitive state in any thought style. All states and moods of thinking are inferred or inferable
from other states.
3 The Empirical in the Interspace Between Epistemology and Hermeneutics 121
44
Fleck nicely characterizes this context by citing a fragment of Wassermann’s memoir about his
discovery. Wassermann describes the input which the head of the Ministry has been provided at the
start of his research on syphilis. The competition between French and German research institutions
in finding diagnostic devices and a therapy of this disease has been a crucial factor for supporting
the research on syphilis. In analyzing these historical-political circumstances, Fleck (1979, 68)
concludes that “from the very beginning the rise of the Wassermann reaction was not based upon
purely scientific factors alone.” He additionally stresses “the special moral emphasis on syphilis”.
In comparing the research on syphilis with that on tuberculosis, Fleck observes that the latter “sim-
ply did not receive as powerful an impulse from society. There was no corresponding social tension
seeking relief in research” (Fleck 1979, 77).
122 The Production of Objectified Factuality Within the Facticity of Scientific Inquiry
45
It is another question that Fleck (1979, 179–180) emphasizes the significant role of the changing
Gestaltsehen (“the mood-conforming gestalt-seeing”) in the process of scientific discovery: Due to
the different Gestalt-seeing and the switch of mood, “one can no longer even understand how the
previous form was possible and how features contradicting it could have gone unnoticed. The same
situation obtains in scientific discovery, only translated from excitement and feverish activity into
equanimity and permanence.”
46
For a view about how hermeneutic commensurability and dialogicity play a crucial role in the
development of scientific knowledge, see Kiss (2006).
3 The Empirical in the Interspace Between Epistemology and Hermeneutics 123
For scientific realists, the theoretical statements about objective factuality of unob-
servable entities must be taken at face value, regardless of whether future scientific
theories—supposedly approximating the truth more closely—might disprove the
existence of facts discovered or predicted by contemporary theories. Standard sci-
entific realism is a position that can consistently be defended by appealing to the
actual status and achievements of theories. It is the belief in the capability of suc-
cessful theories to yield knowledge about objective factuality that underlies all vari-
ants of scientific realism. This factuality stands for reality-out-there. Conceding that
objective factuality results from objectification within the practices of inquiry runs
against this belief. The standard realists assume that scientific theories—as distin-
guished by their degrees of success or degrees of truth approximation—differ in
their capacity to catch the objects in themselves. The introduction of a distinction
between the facticity of inquiry and the factuality produced within this facticity
poses crucial questions that challenge the reasonability of making the concept of
realism dependent on the status and achievements of theories. In contrast to scien-
tific realism, hermeneutic realism is not a position that primarily deals with the
nature of scientific knowledge. Even less can hermeneutic realism be described as
3 The Empirical in the Interspace Between Epistemology and Hermeneutics 125
47
Defining scientific realism as an epistemic attitude is the source of an essential uneasiness. The
realist should regard the epistemic relation as that part of reality (the natural world) which circum-
scribes the place within which reality becomes factually revealed. (Otherwise, this relation must be
treated as a “transcendental condition” for defending scientific realism, which is hardly in line with
any doctrine of scientific realism.) Naturalizing the epistemic relation in accordance with the epis-
temological requirements of scientific realism is a second-order naturalism. More generally, cast-
ing the subject-object relation as part of the natural world is an explicit or implicit ingredient of any
program of naturalizing epistemology. Yet even the most stubborn scientific realist ought to con-
cede that this relation evolves both in the social history of mankind and in the culturally dependent
development of the individual cognitive faculties. Only a highly evolved form of the epistemic
relation may reveal reality scientifically. But if so, the scientific realist has to admit that a socially,
culturally, and historically constructed form of the subject-object relation grounds the belief in the
reality-out-there. It remains an open question as to whether the coherent version of scientific real-
ism should appeal to a naturalized socio-cultural history of the epistemic relation, or perhaps to
(what Kuhn calls) a quasi-Darwinian evolutionary epistemology.
126 The Production of Objectified Factuality Within the Facticity of Scientific Inquiry
48
At this point I have to mention again the special case of methodical constructivism as represented
by Erlangen-Konstanz school. Instead of scrutinizing particular processes of reaching consensus
about scientific facts, the adherents of this school address the constitutive role of life-world’s prac-
tices. Contra this form of constructivism I argued that the “methodical order” is always already
fore-structured by facticity. But the methodical constructivists could object by stressing that the
so-called proto-sciences they put forward are precisely dealing with the facticity of inquiry. I
would not agree with this rejoinder. The proto-sciences are entirely concerned with normative
factuality, and not with facticity. They develop normative theories of measurement that - in connec-
tion with the construction of scientific (measuring) instruments – take into account the determina-
tive force of normativity embedded in the life-world’s practices.
3 The Empirical in the Interspace Between Epistemology and Hermeneutics 127
49
Latour and Woolgar (1979, 176) argue that the process of construction involves devices whereby
the traces of production are made extremely difficult to detect. For them, using such devices
belongs to the way of stabilizing scientific facts. As a result of the process of stabilization, an
important new event begins to take shape: The statement about a stabilized fact becomes a “split
entity” that contains, on the one hand, words referring to something out-there, and serves the func-
tion of a correspondent to an object in itself, on the other. The stabilization of scientific facts
invokes the duality of objects and statements about objects within the laboratory life. Latour and
Woolgar pay special attention to the inversion that takes place: “the object becomes the reason why
the statement was formulated in the first place.” Thus, stabilization (of constructed facts), hiding
the story of construction, singling out “split entities”, and inversing of the process of construction
are moments of the discovery of scientific facts. But where are these moments and the whole pro-
cess of construction—the question which the hermeneutic realist poses—to be located? Within the
reality of laboratory life’s social dynamics would be the answer of the authors of Laboratory Life
(The Construction of Scientific Facts). Though there is nothing wrong with this answer, it triggers
a serious aporia for those who ignore that social construction is always already within the constitu-
tion of meaning. Latour and Woolgar are highly inventive in studying the splitting of objects and
statements about objects within the laboratory life. Yet they do this at the expense of admitting an
initial split of reality into reality-as-processes-of-construction and reality-as-something-pre-con-
structed. There is in their study no answer to the question of how both realities are united or
entangled. In contrast to their view, Fleck starts with the “united reality” of the ways in which
thought collectives articulate scientific facts by being involved in their thought styles.
50
In saying this, I am not trying to downplay or underestimate the long tradition of attempts at
bridging forms of constructivism with phenomenological conceptions of constitution. Hugo
Dingler, Hermann Weil in his earlier work, Oskar Becker, Paul Lorenzen, Carl Friedrich Gethmann,
128 The Production of Objectified Factuality Within the Facticity of Scientific Inquiry
and several members of the Erlangen school belong to that prominent tradition. Examining the
unended dialogue between forms of philosophical constructivism and hermeneutic phenomenol-
ogy of science requires a separate study.
3 The Empirical in the Interspace Between Epistemology and Hermeneutics 129
51
The radical-constructivist thesis that there are no natural facts but only cultural artifacts does not
escape having to spell out the opposition. Otherwise, the thesis would be meaningless. The herme-
neutic realist as a realist on facticity copes with this predicament by addressing natural kinds and
constructed artifacts as two kinds of objectified factuality. The opposition between the natural and
the artificial (the constructed) makes sense by being introduced with regard to the production of
factuality within facticity. This opposition is not to be regarded as a primary one (i.e., as preexist-
ing the facticity of meaningful articulation).
130 The Production of Objectified Factuality Within the Facticity of Scientific Inquiry
52
Latour and Woolgar use the term “anthropology” as denoting the importance of bracketing the
familiarity with what is studied. Anthropological study must make strange those aspects of scien-
tific activity which are readily taken for granted. Creating anthropological strangeness, however,
unveils “exotic” factuality but does not break with the paradigm of objectification. Indeed, Latour
and Woolgar try to go beyond this paradigm by integrating reflexivity in their study: The methods
they implement for creating de-familiarization are dependent on the methods of the practitioners
they study. Thus, the factuality about the scientific activity studied ceases to be pure presence and
becomes contextualized in accordance with the way of exercising reflexivity. This is a necessary
premise for approaching facticity. Yet it can be made effective if the integration of reflexivity in the
anthropological study leads to double hermeneutics, which is not the case of the ethnographic stud-
ies of the construction of scientific facts.
3 The Empirical in the Interspace Between Epistemology and Hermeneutics 131
naturalism. They respectively state that all artifacts are to be viewed in the final
reckoning as compounds of natural entities,53 and that—from a methodological
point of view—the social has to replace the natural and to occupy the place of
explanans in the social-constructivist explanations. Reversed naturalism is restricted
to the methodological code of cognitive sociology, and entirely refers to the logic of
explanation, while second-order naturalism is an ideological (weltanschaulich) doc-
trine that should revoke the accusations of sociological essentialism (and ontologi-
cal primacy of the social) one can make against the explanatory strategy of social
constructivism.
To a great extent, the constructivist annihilation of facticity follows from the
adoption of these naturalist doctrines as necessary for having an explanatorily com-
prehensible and empirically tenable form of social constructivism: If the reality of
the natural is explanatorily derivable from the reality of the social, and the transfor-
mation of the natural facts into social artifacts is a second-order natural process,
then there is no room for facticity that transcends the naturalized sociological factu-
ality and the second-order factuality that refers to the global natural status of the
social. A possible rejoinder to this claim would be the statement that the position of
second-order naturalism is no more than a decorative ornament adopted by some
schools of constructivism for conventional reasons. Yet this is not true. In basing the
reality of scientific entities on processes of construction—in particular, social pro-
cesses of negotiation—one already commits oneself to a position of objectivist
naturalism: In order to be used for constructivist purposes, these processes are to be
naturalized (objectified as factual processes). Processes of construction involved in
the constructivist scenarios are only to be caught by objectifying their factual mani-
festations. Consequently, a coherent version of constructivism has to address the
specificity of the natural scientific factuality in terms of another kind of (natural-
ized) factuality, which is the kernel of objectivist naturalism. Both kinds of factuality
appearing in this statement are on a par with the empirical as understood from the
viewpoint of empiricism, and are irrelevant to the empirical as the processual unity
of facticity and factuality.
At this point, I briefly have to tackle a further disclaimer. The preceding discus-
sion may give the impression that in criticizing the way in which the subject-object
relation is introduced—through an epistemological justification that normatively
fixes this relation—in the realism debate, the hermeneutic realist adopts a concep-
tion that is (if not the same, at least) similar to the conception of the Natural
Ontological Attitude. Yet this is a wrong impression, because Arthur Fine’s NOA is
quite effective in discarding the externalist epistemologies of realism and antirealism,
53
Second-order naturalism does not legitimate, however, explanatory scenarios in which natural
processes explain social phenomena. This doctrine rather admits that the social en bloc is explain-
able in terms of a global naturalistic theory of human life like, for instance, the theory of gene-
culture coevolution. Thus, there is from the constructivist viewpoint an asymmetry between both
doctrines: While reverse naturalism legitimates the sociological explanations of the scientific con-
struction of nature without admitting ontological primacy of the social over the natural, the second-
order naturalism legitimates the ontological primacy of the natural over the social, at the same time
prohibiting naturalist explanations of contextualized social activities.
132 The Production of Objectified Factuality Within the Facticity of Scientific Inquiry
but like all parties in the realism debate it completely ignores the facticity of inquiry,
and starts with the hypostatization of a “minimalist” (de-contextualized) subject-
object relation. But before developing this criticism, a few words about what will be
criticized are in order. Fine argues that NOA is the common core of all epistemic
attitudes involved in the controversy about the acceptance of the best theories and
the best ways of saving phenomena. These (secondary) epistemic attitudes are char-
acterized by epistemological and metaphysical “additives” which are alien to the
stance taken by the participants in scientific inquiry. By contrast, NOA is scientists’
interpretive stance without “additives”. Following this line, one might state that
NOA is that “natural” stance to the reality under investigation which the inquirers
take when they become involved in the facticity of scientific inquiry. In an extended
formulation (that Fine definitely would not accept), NOA commits the inquirers to
the reality of a domain as it is disclosed in a characteristic hermeneutic situation.
Notoriously, earlier interpretations of the concept of NOA focused on its compat-
ibility with scientific realism (Musgrave 1989). Yet Fine himself not only opposes
such interpretations, but raises the claim that a “hermeneutic understanding has to
be gained from the inside. It should not be prefabricated to meet external, philo-
sophical specifications. There is, then, no legitimate hermeneutical account of sci-
ence, but only a hermeneutical activity that is a lively part of science itself” (Fine
1996, 148). Despite the fact that the adjective “hermeneutic” is mentioned three
times (and attributed to three different substantives) in this statement, Fine’s con-
cept and conception of the natural ontological attitude is by no means a version of
philosophy of science guided by the primacy of interpretation in the process of
inquiry.54 However, he most definitely advocates—in the context of analytical phi-
losophy—the same tenets of interpretive internalism which were discussed earlier.
For this reason, the conception of NOA and hermeneutic realism share important
views and (most of all) the quest for a radical anti-essentialism (Ginev 2012).
NOA is first and foremost an anti-essentialist approach to the philosophy of sci-
ence that alludes to the model of immanent literary criticism. Fine (1984) draws
attention to another parallel: In the same way in which minimalist art is an imma-
nent criticism of art, the conception of NOA (worked out as a series of critical case
studies) is an operative criticism (of tendencies and choices) within scientific
inquiry. The minimalist philosophical encroachment upon science’s own leeway
should be instrumental in settling long-standing methodological debates—an option
typically illustrated by Fine’s excellent studies in the history of quantum mechanics.
In his provocative dictum, the work on NOA is a non-realist immanent criticism of
science for post-realist times (Fine 1996, 254). Fine’s core conviction is that to pos-
sess the natural ontological attitude toward the natural world amounts to interpreting
54
Though Fine has never touched upon the work of any author from the tradition of the hermeneu-
tic studies of science, he is quite clear about why he is not willing to subscribe to that tradition: It
is too elaborated philosophically and threatens to burden the intrinsic analysis of scientific inquiry
with undesired “additives”. By the same token—this time, however, explicitly—he rejects any
proximity and commensurability of NOA with the phenomenological characterization of die
natürliche Einstellung.
3 The Empirical in the Interspace Between Epistemology and Hermeneutics 133
scientific practices. If there were no scientific practices, this attitude would not exist
either. It is an interpretive attitude that belongs to the whole of having-meaning-in-
scientific-practices, and to the way in which scientists form “beliefs about the
reality-out-there”. In this regard, the interpretive attitude I am speaking about is
neither a pre-epistemic nor a non-epistemic state of scientists’ mindset and intel-
lectual activity. It is rather a characteristic of the very process of meaningful
articulation.
To defend this view requires a critical revision of Fine’s conception that I am
going to adumbrate.
In the main point of this revision, the natural ontological attitude is not a minimal
epistemic stance toward the (natural) world—this is still a rudimentary essential-
ism—but a practical interpretation of what becomes disclosed within configured
practices. NOA is the interpretive attitude which comes into being when practitio-
ners (researchers in a domain) reflexively appropriate (and become aware of) the
characteristic hermeneutic situation of their mode of being. This attitude accompa-
nies the research work in all contexts of inquiry (thereby operating in all readable
technologies and spaces of representation) in a domain’s articulation, and is incor-
porated in all “texts” constituted by the process of inquiry-as-textualizing. In bor-
rowing a distinction introduced in ethnomethodology, one may state that the natural
interpretive attitude mediates between reflexivity of practices (as interplaying with
possibilities) and practitioners’ endogenous reflexivity. In playing this mediatory
role, it exists ecstatically—within practitioners’ “thought style” (Fleck) and outside
practitioners’ mental life (within the contextualized practices of inquiry). Without
such a practical-interpretive attitude that warrants the “naturalness” of the disclosed
domain, there would be no unity of reading, representing, and textualizing as was
depicted in the previous chapter.
Accordingly, something is natural when the hermeneutic situation allows one to
read and constitute it as natural within the ongoing articulation of meaning. The
naturalness does not preexist the natural scientific inquiry. And vice versa, there is
no naturalness and natural attitude of inquiry if the inquirers’ stance toward what is
disclosed in their practices becomes detached from the characteristic hermeneutic
situation of the process of inquiry. Detaching the former from the latter would inevi-
tably lead to a cognitivist reductionism. Fine’s conception still suffers from such a
reductionism. Minimizing and eventually undoing the “epistemological additives”
is not a remedy against it, since this minimization does not open avenues for study-
ing the constitution of the very epistemic relation.
In my revisionary reading of NOA, due to the mediation between practices’
reflexivity and practitioners’ reflexivity, the interpretive-practical attitude is
informed by the fore-having, fore-seeing, and fore-grasping (as specified by the
characteristic hermeneutic situation) of a domain’s meaningful articulation and
objectification. Thus, not “homely truths” (Fine) but instead a reflexively formed
attitude toward the appropriation of possibilities for doing research is the core of
NOA. Being informed by the ontological presuppositions (of fore-having, fore-
seeing, and fore-grasping), the interpretive-practical attitude is the source of pre-
normative reasonability and phronēsis in the research process. Though it has factual
3 The Empirical in the Interspace Between Epistemology and Hermeneutics 135
55
An analysis of Heidegger’s concept of “circumspective deliberation” might justify the view that
the pre-epistemic deliberative concern within-the-world is the starting point of reflexivity (Ginev
2015a, 153–158). Such an analysis would resonate motifs of Helmuth Plessner’s conception of
“ex-centric positionality”.
136 The Production of Objectified Factuality Within the Facticity of Scientific Inquiry
I will argue that the main issue involved in scientific realism’s strategy based on the
no-miracles argument has a counterpart in hermeneutic realism.
In contrast to scientific realism, the hermeneutic realist does not admit that the
growing success of science takes the form of a teleological process: a progressive
approximation to a presupposed absolute truth. Yet the hermeneutic realist holds
that this growing success indicates a progressive movement that has to be measured
by means of increasing truthlikeness. Yet the concept of truth presupposed in this
statement should not be confused with an epistemological concept defined within
the framework of a correspondent, coherentist, or consensualist theory of truth.
When speaking of the growing success of science, the hermeneutic realist presup-
poses the concept of truth as aletheia. This concept refers first and foremost to the
disclosure of a domain within the interplay of scientific practices and possibilities
for doing research. Yet the disclosure of a domain itself is still not aletheia. It is
rather a prerequisite for having a truthlikeness within the facticity of scientific
inquiry. Since the disclosure always takes place in a characteristic hermeneutic situ-
ation, truthlikeness of inquiry is unavoidably defined with regard to a tendency to
appropriating possibilities that corresponds to a tendency to meaningful articulation
(and objectification) of the disclosed domain. Hermeneutic truth (aletheia) is what
becomes at once revealed and concealed within the hermeneutic situation of a mode
of being. As a revealing of the meaningful being of a scientific domain, the herme-
neutic truth manifests itself through the procedurally objectified factuality produced
in the interplay of practices and possibilities. The way in which the objectified fac-
tuality is—so an alternative definition goes—interpretatively fore-structured by
projected (but still not appropriated) possibilities is the hermeneutic truth. Thus
defined, the hermeneutic truth of science is always contextually established—the
revealing and concealing of a domain’s being within a context of inquiry—but is
never enclosed in a certain context.
In contrast to the epistemological notions of truth, aletheia does not refer to a
discrete relation (like the semantic relation of signification, or the relation of confor-
mity of a judgment to the “external reality”, or the relation of coherence of a propo-
sition with a specified set of propositions) but to the continuity of contextualized
production of objectified factuality. By implication, the hermeneutic truth does not
refer to bearers (of truth-values) that are characterized by their discrete presence. In
referring to the continuous revealing and concealing of a domain’s being, the her-
meneutic truth never escapes its potentiality-for-being-deepened. But what does it
mean to deepen aletheia as a process of revealing/concealing within the facticity of
inquiry?
Revealing and concealing the being of a disclosed domain in a characteristic
hermeneutic situation is on a par with the meaningful articulation of reality.
Elsewhere I argue that the tendentious appropriation of possibilities is informed by
the pre-normative (constraining) force of the very situation (as this force should be
attributed to the fore-having, fore-seeing, and fore-grasping of the articulated mean-
ing) (Ginev 2013a, b, 67–104). Due to its constraining pre-normativity, the herme-
neutic situation conceals (pushes aside, forgets, sediments, etc.) possibilities for
3 The Empirical in the Interspace Between Epistemology and Hermeneutics 137
doing research.56 These possibilities are excluded from domain’s articulation. Yet
this does not imply that the characteristic hermeneutic situation plays a shrinking
role with regard to the horizon set up by the interplay of practices and possibilities.
The tendentious appropriation of possibilities constantly extends this horizon,
thereby intensifying the meaningful articulation of the reality studied. Stated differ-
ently, the revealing of a domain’s being in a characteristic hermeneutic situation
strongly dominates the concealing of possible paths of the domain’s articulation. It
is this asymmetry between revealing and concealing—as induced and maintained
by the characteristic hermeneutic situation—that I call a deepening of the herme-
neutic truth. The process of inquiry specified by a hermeneutic situation is distin-
guished by this deepening. The latter takes place in the facticity of inquiry. Yet it has
crucial consequences for a domain’s objectification and the constitution of objecti-
fied factuality.
While the deepening of aletheia distinguishes the facticity of inquiry, the conse-
quences I mentioned concern the truthlikeness of the procedural production of fac-
tuality. The richer is the hermeneutic fore-structure (the open horizon of possibilities)
of objectification, the greater is the truthlikeness of the cognitive practices instru-
mental in the production of objectified factuality. It is the progressing interplay of
practices and possibilities that enhances the potential of the facticity of inquiry to
fore-structure the procedural objectification (or, the truthlikeness of this objectifica-
tion), which is tantamount to enhancing the possibilities of revealing the meaningful
being of a scientific domain. This is why the greater the meaningful articulation
within the facticity of inquiry, the more objective becomes the process of inquiry,
provided that the degree of objectivity is determined by the range of objectified
factuality created via saving phenomena. Enriching the hermeneutic fore-structuring
of objectification, diversifying the meaningful articulation in line with the interplay-
ing practices and possibilities, and enhancing the range of objectified factuality (and
56
To reiterate, the conception of pre-normativity is alternative to any doctrine that admits the exis-
tence of a primordial normativity. The concept of hermeneutic pre-normativity refers to the inter-
pretive fore-structuring of normativity within facticity. There is no normativity—regardless of how
stable and lasting in history it might be—that escapes from being contextualized, situated in a
horizon, and interpretively constituted. Like all other innerwordly meaningful entities articulated
by modes of being, what counts as norms, taboos, sanctions, standards, criteria, instructions, assig-
nations, prescriptions, patterns, orders, and rules—to mention only a few normative matters—
becomes generated by the interplay of practices and possibilities. Any attempt at treating
hermeneutic pre-normativity as a variety of collective intentionality is doomed to failure. The
constraining power elicited by the characteristic hermeneutic situation enables collective moods,
shared patterns of envisioning, communal value orientations, and collective evaluative attitudes,
i.e., the traits of inter-subjective mentality to which collective intentions belong. Hermeneutic pre-
normativity is not a product of coordinately working and mutually reinforcing individual minds,
but a prerequisite for having inter-subjective mentality and collective intentions. Yet hermeneutic
pre-normativity is not by itself a phenomenon or a feat of inter-subjectivity. Collective intentional-
ity is ruled by inter-subjective normativity. But the latter is unavoidably fore-structured by the
world’s trans-subjectivity, i.e., by the pre-normativity of the hermeneutic situation of being-in-the-
world. The relationship between inter-subjective normativity and trans-subjective pre-normativity
is a central topic of hermeneutically oriented social theory, which I discuss elsewhere (Ginev
2014b).
138 The Production of Objectified Factuality Within the Facticity of Scientific Inquiry
the objectivity of inquiry) are indicators for deepening the hermeneutic truth. In
hermeneutic realism, deepening aletheia of a domain disclosed in a characteristic
hermeneutic situation is the criterion for progress in science.
There is another issue that occupies a prominent place in the realism debate: the
status of the theoretical objects. This issue is also a pivotal one for hermeneutic real-
ism, and I will address it in the next chapter.
way in which practices form configurations has little to do with individual and col-
lective intentionality. (Yet this does not mean that the actors are passively situated
in contexts of configured practices. From the viewpoint of a cultural theory based on
the hermeneutics of facticity—a theory I cannot discuss in this study—the actors
reflexively individualize their collective life form by being situated in shared
practices.)
In rejecting the role of intentionality in configuring practices, the hermeneutic
realist raises a claim that can be addressed in terms of both a cultural theory and a
hermeneutic philosophy of science: In undergoing continuous reshaping manifested
through changing configurations, the interrelatedness of practices in a certain
domain informs a tendency to choosing and appropriating possibilities of a certain
kind, thereby concealing or pushing aside other kinds of possibilities. As already
indicated, this tendency “announces” the emergence of a hermeneutic situation: the
anticipatory orientation in the articulation of meaning. But the hermeneutic situa-
tion takes place only when actors’ reflexivity makes the corresponding fore-having,
fore-seeing, and fore-grasping of articulated meaning more or less explicit.
Interpretive presuppositions of constituting meaning are “always already” there
when actors are situated in changing configurations of practices. Yet the meaningful
articulation of reality becomes distinguished by a hermeneutic situation when the
reflexivity of actors (embodied in judgments) brings interpretive presuppositions (as
“active prejudices”) to bear on the anticipatory orientation. At the same time, the
actors might change the hermeneutic situation of meaningful articulation by having
recourse to the “logic of practices”. (I am not saying that this logic informs—much
less determines—the hermeneutic situation. My point is that the latter results from
the “cooperation” of the reflexive logic of practices and the reflexive comportment
of actors—a cooperation in which the logic of practices has a preponderance.) But
before discussing this claim, let me return to the Heideggerian concept of facticity.
What is important to the agenda of Being and Time is the “factum” that facticity
is the fallen mode of being in its thrownness. In hermeneutic realism, facticity is the
empirical reality of existence which, however, is not reachable through objectifying-
empirical procedures, and not expressible in terms of presence-at-hand and
readiness-to-hand. “The empirical reality of existence” is the potentiality for being
as revealed in the interplay of interrelated practices and the possibilities upon which
the interrelatedness is projected. The interpretive approach to facticity allows one to
address the meaningful articulation of reality by analyzing the fore-having, the fore-
seeing, and the fore-grasping of the constitution of meaning wherever a regime of
re-production of routinely interrelated practices—as supporting a cultural life
form—becomes established.
According to Heidegger’s elaborations in the celebrated lecture course from
1923 (summer semester), facticity is the subject matter of ontology based on the
“phenomenological mode of research”—a mode that in this text decisively diverges
from Husserl’s program. Heidegger argues for the indispensability of a non- (or a
meta-) regional ontology that is the proper phenomenological ontology gained
through a “hermeneutics of human being” (Heidegger 1999, 83). From the view-
point of developing this ontology, the “field of being” is the totality of meaningful
140 The Production of Objectified Factuality Within the Facticity of Scientific Inquiry
57
Heidegger elaborates on the difference between experimentally constructed physical phenomena
that only gain ontic identity when becoming theoretically saved and self-sufficient existential phe-
nomena. Scrutinizing the former leads to constructive epistemology, whereas the conceptualiza-
tion of the latter provides the access to ontology. Yet his elaborations in the lecture on the
hermeneutics of facticity are not quite consequent, and at one point he blurs the difference between
the two types of phenomena by assuming that under certain conditions physical phenomena also
show themselves in the research process (Heidegger 1999, 54). If this were the case, then herme-
neutic ontology would be directly applicable to the experience of scientific inquiry. Because of the
blurring of the contrast between physical and existential phenomena, the early version of the
hermeneutics of facticity is not sufficiently effective in differentiating between factuality and fac-
ticity. (Interestingly enough, however, blurring this contrast is in harmony with Heidegger’s con-
142 The Production of Objectified Factuality Within the Facticity of Scientific Inquiry
58
Medard Boss tried to work out a comprehensive methodology of constituting ontological factual-
ity in studying psychiatric phenomena as existential phenomena. According to him, the first-order
factuality of the patient’s constricted being-in-the-world—the deficient mode of personal exis-
tence—becomes schematized in her narratives of her stereotypical dreams. The existential inter-
pretation of this kind of narrative translates the schematized (first-order) factuality into second-order
factuality referring to certain existential phenomena. This interpretation should be rich enough to
launch a therapeutic procedure. Obviously, what is translated ceases to be factuality and becomes
facticity of a pathological way of being. Nonetheless, the psychiatric existential interpretation
should offer procedures for objectifying what “could actually be observed in the patient” (Boss
1983, 172). In the case of “Heideggerian artificial intelligence”, the goal is the constitution of the
empirical basis of theorizing—the intellectual behavior of recognizing images, solving problems,
etc., within the world-as-horizon—by taking into consideration the non-representational experi-
ence guided by the hermeneutic-as of the “concernful” articulation of meanings.
59
There is an interesting exception. In Being and Time, there is a discussion—in fact, the most
extended discussion of a human science in Heidegger’s opus magnum—of the profile of an
“authentic historical science” that is on a par with the concept of authentic historicity. For a discus-
144 The Production of Objectified Factuality Within the Facticity of Scientific Inquiry
sion on the possibility to analyze this doctrine of Heidegger as allowing deviations from the forms
of factuality permitted by the dichotomy between ontic and ontological, see Ginev (2015b).
60
In the Natorp Report one is to read the following statement: “Facticity and existence are not one
and the same. The factical being-character of life is not determined by existence. Existence is only
a possibility that temporalizes itself within the being of factical life” (Heidegger 2005, 362). This
statement merits special attention since it shows the close relation of hermeneutics of facticity to
the concept of life. In the period 1919–1925 Heidegger elaborates on this concept by coping with
and incrementally transforming Dilthey’s philosophy of life. His transformative reading of Dilthey
culminates in the Kassel talks delivered in 1925 where the concept of Dasein becomes sufficiently
worked out to replace the concept of life (Heidegger 2002, 147–176). Parallel to this replacement,
there is a critique of the principle of the ontological in-difference of life that prepares the way in
which Heidegger in Being and Time will evaluate Count Yorck von Wartenburg’s conception of the
generic difference between the ontic and the historical. (Regarding the hermeneutic roots of
Yorck’s generic difference, see Kühne-Bertram (2015, 285–334).)
3 The Empirical in the Interspace Between Epistemology and Hermeneutics 145
has been downgraded to a methodical enterprise. Repeating this question leads him
to the conclusion that hermeneutics is to be understood ontologically as “the self-
interpretation of facticity”. Put alternatively, destructing the tradition of methodical
(mis)understanding of hermeneutics opens the door for ontologizing interpretation
as facticity’s interpretative reflexivity. Ontological hermeneutics deals with facticity
as something “capable of interpretation and in need of interpretation and that to be
in a state of having-been-interpreted belongs to its being” (Heidegger 1999, 11).
This hermeneutics should explicate the meaning of that “factical life” which consti-
tutes itself meaningfully by understanding and interpreting itself. It is a hermeneu-
tics that arises intrinsically in facticity and is not artificially imposed on the
constitution of meaning in facticity. Since interpreting belongs to facticity, the rela-
tionship between hermeneutics and facticity is an intrinsic relationship of interpre-
tative reflexivity.
To make facticity intelligible requires employing (a methodology of) double
hermeneutics. (Though not using this expression, Heidegger has this initiative in
mind when insisting that the task of interpreting facticity’s anticipatory-interpretative
constitution of meaning is not to take cognizance of something, thereby having
knowledge of it, but to speak out of interpretation and for the sake of it. He makes
the case that hermeneutics as interpreting facticity’s interpretation is the only way
of conceptualizing facticity—or, constructing concepts of “factical life”—without
succumbing to any kind of anthropological essentialism.) Double hermeneutics is
not a device of approaching facticity by juxtaposing the interpreter’s hermeneutic
circle with that of the factical life’s intrinsic interpretation. It is rather a position that
aims at creating a unitary hermeneutic circularity in which the continuity of inter-
pretation is not broken by the search for an extrinsic epistemic distance for the sake
of “interpretative objectivity”. Thanks to double hermeneutics, phenomenological
ontology should remain a “mode of knowing which is in factical life itself”
(Heidegger 1999, 14). Devising a unitary hermeneutic circle does not ignore the
need of distance from what is interpreted. Yet this distance remains (a) immanent in
the hermeneutic circle and (b) is controlled by the interpreter’s reflexivity. Being
integrated in the hermeneutic circle of facticity’s interpretation, the epistemic dis-
tance becomes absorbed by the ontological difference between what facticity reveals
and the factual manifestations of facticity.61 To sum up, what I call “double herme-
neutics” (in this context of discussion) is Heidegger’s way of thematizing the inter-
pretative being of facticity without committing the fallacy of objectifying facticity’s
empirical manifestations. This is why the interpretatively revealed characteristics of
facticity are not later additions resulting from external conceptualizations, but rather
express the facets of facticity’s interpretative-reflexive role of fore-structuring. That
61
Stressing the controlling role of the interpreter’s reflexivity is not a motif exposed in Heidegger’s
lecture course from 1923. This is a motif neglected also in the subsequent development of herme-
neutic phenomenology. Even more, it is a motif that is at odds with the dichotomous construal of
the ontic-ontological difference. In hermeneutic realism, in controlling and regulating the distance
from self-interpretive facticity, the interpreter also reflexively and contextually defines the differ-
ence between ontic and ontological. Thus, the ontological difference becomes a function of the
reflexively guided double hermeneutics: a thesis that will be at stake in the rest of this chapter.
146 The Production of Objectified Factuality Within the Facticity of Scientific Inquiry
62
This is a text composed in 1922 in connection with Heidegger’s application for associate profes-
sorship at the University of Marburg, and documenting Heidegger’s work on an unfulfilled book
project devoted to interpreting Aristotelian philosophy in the key of the hermeneutics of facticity.
3 The Empirical in the Interspace Between Epistemology and Hermeneutics 147
63
In his earlier writings Giddens repeatedly remarks that the introduction of the methodology of
double hermeneutics in the social sciences follows the need of rotating “two axes simultaneously”
in these sciences: In rethinking the interpretative character of human action, institutions, and their
relations, the social scientists have to bear in mind at the same time the interpretative turn of the
post-empiricist philosophy of science. In this regard, the “double hermeneutic of the social sci-
ences involves what Winch calls a ‘logical tie’ between the ordinary language of lay actors and the
technical terminologies invented by social scientists… The ‘logical tie’ implicated in the double
hermeneutic does not depend upon whether the actor or actors whose conduct is being described
are able to grasp the notions which the social scientist uses. It depends upon the social scientific
observer accurately understanding the concepts whereby the actors’ conduct is orientated”
(Giddens 1982, 12–13). In my view, this statement heavily mixes the problematic of the double
hermeneutics with that of the intertwinement of etic and emic dimensions of social-scientific
inquiry. The mixture is retained in some of Giddens’s later formulations of double hermeneutics.
No doubt, a consistent version of the methodology of double hermeneutics cannot ignore the etic-
emic distinction. Yet, however important it is, this distinction is neither terminus a quo nor termi-
nus ad quem in the development of double hermeneutics.
64
The first form of criticism focuses on Giddens’s appeal to frames instead of figures closer to
hermeneutics. Thus, some authors (like David Hoy) prefer to make the figure of the fusion of hori-
zons instrumental in the logic of interpretive inquiry, thereby formulating an effective criterion of
demarcation. Other authors (like Karl-Otto Apel and Mary Hesse) are inclined to discard the very
idea of a strong demarcation between objectifying and interpretive sciences in favor of a spectrum
of sciences ranged between the pole of strong objectification and the pole of the total sway of
double hermeneutics.
3 The Empirical in the Interspace Between Epistemology and Hermeneutics 149
65
Dreyfus (1980) suggests an alternative argument for using double hermeneutics as a demarcation
criterion: In contrast to the natural sciences, where the constitution of the objects of inquiry is only
dependent on explicit and implicit theoretical frames (including the background knowledge
3 The Empirical in the Interspace Between Epistemology and Hermeneutics 151
at stake in both the natural and the human sciences are produced within the interplay
of practices and possibilities. As facticity this interplay might be studied by making
the hermeneutic fore-structuring of factuality a theme of interpretative investiga-
tion—a task that in its formulation contains the intent to implementing double
hermeneutics. (Of course, this implementation is only for philosophical purposes. It
still does not provide a rationale for the necessity of double hermeneutics in the
actual process of inquiry.) Now, universalizing double hermeneutics with regard to
the production-of-factuality-within-facticity in all types of scientific inquiry does
not make it irrelevant to the search for basic differences between the research-
through-objectification and the research-through-interpretive dialogue. However,
the accent in this search has to be placed on the topic of reflexivity. To be sure, the
interpretive reflexivity of the actors studied does not per se make the interpretive
human sciences a methodologically and epistemologically distinctive enterprise.
Yet, in dealing with this kind of reflexivity, one is obliged to be reflexive about one’s
own conceptuality and epistemic resources employed in the research process, which
has profound consequences for the theory construction (Ginev 1998).
As Pollner argues, it is the inquirers’ (referential) reflexivity about the employed
conceptual resources that—by constantly calling into question the assumed postu-
lates, presuppositions, and ontic premises—makes the research process an infinite
dialogical contextualization that can only conventionally be finalized. The adjective
“dialogical” in this formulation alludes to the implementation of the interpretive
logic of question and answer. The inquirer contextualizes what she studies by ask-
ing a relevant question. At the same time, the way in which what is studied becomes
(re)contextualized is the answer the interpreter receives. The research process is
situated in—and formed by—interdependent and intertwined events of fusing of
horizons related to diverse cultural traditions and forms of life. The totality of the
events of fusing horizons institutes the effective-interpretive being of the research
process. Accordingly, this totality is an ontological (and not an epistemic) complex-
ity that properly distinguishes the historical human sciences. Note that on this
account, it is double hermeneutics combined with radical reflexivity that defines a
demarcation.
The discussion in the preceding considerations was centered around the link
between double hermeneutics and the demarcation criterion. Martin Eger was the
involved in objectification), the constitution of objects in the human sciences depends (not only on
the web of theoretical assumptions, but) also on the endogenous practical horizons within which
the actors studied form through self-interpretation customs, habits, life forms, and life-worlds of
their practical experience. To be sure, this argument is much more reliable than the argument
advanced by Taylor. (It deserves to be qualified as more reliable not only because it discards inter-
pretative intentionalism as a distinctive feature of human-scientific understanding, but also because
it weakens the dubious requirement of absoluteness concerning natural-scientific factuality.) But,
again, in order to be effective, Dreyfus’s argument needs to be supplied with evidence that the
process of inquiry in the natural sciences does not assume (what he calls) “practical holism”.
Dreyfus is not able to provide such evidence. By implication, he admits the same bad dichotomy
which Taylor advocates: the dichotomy between theoretically constructed factuality that refers to
the “bare objects in themselves” of the physical world and interpretive factuality mediating the
practical meanings constituted by the cultural life forms studied.
152 The Production of Objectified Factuality Within the Facticity of Scientific Inquiry
66
Habermas (1984, 110) casts doubt on the possibility that an ontologically extended version of
double hermeneutics might provide a reliable methodological position. For him, such a version
would lead to “hermeneutic idealism”. Of course, this argument does not make him an opponent
of doubly interpretive methodology. Habermas pleads, in particular, for implementing double
hermeneutics when the inquirer interprets—with a critical intent—the actors’ repressed needs
which are not transformed into motivations.
3 The Empirical in the Interspace Between Epistemology and Hermeneutics 153
from the constitution of objects of inquiry. He even claims that a wholescale address-
ing of natural scientific inquiry’s interpretative aspects demands the differentiation
of three hermeneutic levels: the experimental articulation of data which takes place
in a pre-interpreted world; the construction of theories that interpret data while
becoming interpreted by data models; and the inevitable interpretation of estab-
lished scientific results as a prerequisite for having effective scientific communica-
tion in which the rules for interpreting scientific results become part of the
professional academic ethos. In developing this “triple hermeneutics”, however,
Eger heavily draws on the subject-object dichotomy. His discussion implies that the
three levels of interpretation are, as it were, embraced by an overwhelming epis-
temic relationship. Strangely enough, the primacy of this relationship is vindicated
by Eger’s attempt at radicalizing hermeneutics. In opposing the champions (Giddens
and Habermas in the first place) of implementing double hermeneutics as a demar-
cation criterion, he argues that both the human and the natural scientists are not
“enveloped” in a “scientific fore-structure of meaning” (his expression). This makes
them different from the everyday (pre-scientific) agents who are always already
inside the original life-world (Eger 1999, 268). Scientists are in a situation that
compels them to enter scientific fore-structure of meaning by struggling with their
own received prejudices and indoctrinations.
At first glance, this seems to be a justified conclusion. Nobody is born within a
“scientific fore-structure of meaning”. Yet the idea of entering implies that this fore-
structure is a separate body, ready to be attended by neophytes. (In assuming an
originary presence of the fore-structure—presumably composed of discrete ele-
ments—such an entering is not on a par with the fusion of horizons which does not
break the continuity of the meaningful articulation.) Moreover, Eger assumes that
the “event of entering” is the initial hermeneutic event of scientific inquiry which
triggers the chain of events that should be covered by the “triple hermeneutics” in
question. The “scientific fore-structure of meaning” exists per se as something
located in between the entering subject and the entities which through “the event of
entering” will be interpretatively transformed into meaningful objects of inquiry.
The supposition that the “scientific fore-structure of meaning” is a separate body
that might be entered from outside commits Eger’s scenario to a kind of essential-
ism. In this scenario, the fore-structure of meaning inescapably turns out to be a
reified structure of determination deprived of interpretative-existential genesis. The
empirical “event of entering” might be psychologically motivated, institutionally
provoked, professionally demanded, socially promoted, or culturally conditioned
and patterned. But once objectified as an empirical event, it is no longer ontologi-
cally situated and horizonally transcended. By implication, this event—as it is
addressed by Eger—is deprived of the character of situated transcendence.
Attributing such a character to it is sine qua non for treating it in terms of hermeneu-
tic phenomenology. (The hermeneutic aspects, if any, of Eger’s entering the scien-
tific fore-structure of meaning could entirely be addressed in terms of Polanyi-like
cognitivist hermeneutics and/or in Markus-like cultural hermeneutics.)
In hermeneutic realism, every individual scientist—following the rites of initia-
tion—enters the professional milieu of an institutionalized scientific discipline.
154 The Production of Objectified Factuality Within the Facticity of Scientific Inquiry
A tendency toward ontology has recently grown in popularity in science and tech-
nology studies. It is a tendency that tries to extend the ethnographic description of
social entities and states of affairs (like the disease of atherosclerosis and the reality
of fish farming) as they are placed and enacted in complex milieus of artifacts, tech-
nological devices, and equipment settings. After it is enacted, the entity/state appears
to have a multiplied being, without becoming fragmented into many pieces. The
ontic diversity concerns the manifold of the entity/state’s modes of existence. The
enactment occupies the central position in this extension, since it creates the
dynamic unity of the entities and the milieus in which they circulate. It is precisely
the ecstatic nature of enactment that escapes a purely ethnographic description and
requires an empirical ontology of the whole complexity of social-entities-enacted-
in-milieus-of-artifacts. This very complexity has its being in social practices. It is
also a reality projected upon possibilities that are generated by the enactment of
entities in those practices. By undoing any strong demarcation between humans and
nonhumans in the complexity of enacted entities within particular settings of prac-
tices, the studies of empirical ontology present a new development of the actor-
network theory.
While welcoming the tendency toward empirical ontology in STS as part and
parcel of the post-metaphysical turn in social theory, in the next section I will oppose
the impetus to reduce the phenomenon of “situated transcendence” and the ontology
of facticity to empirical ontologies of factual orders. The claim will begin to emerge
that a kind of hermeneutic (non-empirical) ontological reflection has to complement
the studies of empirical ontology. My first task is to unfold the thesis that the
unavoidability of “ontological difference” – or the difference between the descrip-
tion of multiple entities in the factuality of actions and activities, on the one hand,
and the hermeneutic analysis of reality’s meaningful articulation, on the other – pro-
vides a crucial argument against the full-fledged empiricization of ontology. Stated
in this general form, the thesis will be advocated by taking up and further elaborat-
ing on Pollner’s concept of radical reflexivity in a manner that will turn one’s atten-
tion to a slightly modified version of the methodology of double hermeneutics. Yet
I will continue to spell out this methodology – with regard to the reflection upon
multiple entities and local interactive orders – by taking into consideration the onto-
logical difference as it has been discussed in the preceding chapters. In line with the
previous criticism of the mainstream of ethnomethodology, I will make the case that
the conjugation of endogenous reflexivity (generated by a network of humans and
nonhumans) and researcher’s radical reflexivity requires more than ontic/factual
description. This conjugation, recast in terms of double hermeneutics, allows one to
make sense of the local interactive orders in their potentiality-for-being.
On a central claim of the philosophy which grounds the studies of empirical
ontology, not only particular entities and state of affairs, but entire domains of real-
ity are enacted in practices (Law and Lien 2013). The multiplying reality of farmed
Atlantic salmon as a reality “without a single order” within fish farming practices is
the topic in John Law and Marianne Lien’s case study. Each practice is defined as
web of relations (“choreography”) among human and nonhumans. What becomes
enacted acquires the status of being “almost but not quite created”. The task consists
in unfolding an ontology relevant to the domain of fish farming practices. This
should be an empirical ontology of “contingent orders” that involve ordering pro-
cesses, disorders, and “unknowable fluidities”. Thus, the case study of these authors
1 Non-empirical Assumptions in the Radical Empiricization of Ontology 159
shows what farmed Atlantic salmon becomes in multiple, fluid, and indeterminate
configurations of practices. At stake is the multiplicity of a biological-species-in-
different-human-practices, a multiplicity in a situation that is precarious and uncer-
tain. The texture of practices manages to draw a demarcation between salmon and
humans, but this demarcation is not to be recast in naturalist-objectivist terms. In
their inextricable linkage with humans the farmed Atlantic salmon are ontologically
defined as “Other to the human”. But this kind of salmon is also Other to its “wild
cousins” in the Atlantic ocean. Human-salmon practices are practices of an ongoing
“Othering”. The empirical ontology of this multiple and “almost created” (but none-
theless) natural creature – which however strongly it is enacted in practices remains
biologically typified by a dorsal adipose fin posterior to the main dorsal fin and by
several other genetic, biochemical, ethological, physiological, anatomical, etc.,
traits – is also an ontology of a process of what environmentalists and environmen-
tal historians call “artificialization”. It is an artificialization within practices that
does not have a natural state (as a point of departure) and a state of something com-
pletely constructed (as a final point). This is a process that constantly runs between
hybrid (natural-artificial) states. I will return to Law and Lien’s ontology in another
context of discussion.
Empirical ontology is an initiative that promotes a way out of relativist-
epistemological perspectivalism. By putting all participants in a system of orches-
trated practices at the same level, the methodology of perspectivalism dissects each
particular entity enacted in practices, thereby representing it as a manifold of sepa-
rate objects whose existences depend on the practitioners/participants’ standpoints.1
By contrast, empirical ontology offers a holistic approach to practices, without
assuming a grounding order. The interrelatedness of practices has an ontic priority
over the practitioners’ positions which allegedly control and warrant the practical
order. Whereas perspectivalism relativizes and pluralizes the domain of configured
practices, empirical ontology tries to retain the unity of the network in which the
enacted entities become multiple with regard to their modes of existence. (From the
1
The temporal and spatial dimensions of the creation of local rational orders of social activities are
a persistent theme in all programs that aim to make ideas of hermeneutic phenomenology useful
for empirical social studies. For a long time the paradigm of perspectivalism has dominated the
attempts to introduce phenomenological concepts of rationality in these studies. Alfred Schütz’s
approach to the intersubjective constitution of meaningful realities is a case in point. Yet perspec-
tivalism has proven to have significant flaws, and it has been overthrown step by step during the
last four decades. It became clear that the local rational orders – whether they are homogeneous
orders like those in a scientific laboratory, a factory, a school, a small-scale industry, a religious
community, an artistic group, different kinds of “invisible colleges”, etc., or heterogeneous orders
like those created by the shared everyday life of a small urban community or a relatively isolated
emigrant community composed of members of different social origins – are not outcomes of an
progressive exchange of agents’ perspectives within the network of social interaction. The convic-
tion has gradually gained currency that the societal topos of interactive intersubjectivity does not
have a self-sufficient being. In general terms, the intersubjective rationality (as manifested in a
particular ethos) “takes place” within the horizons in which the interactive agents are “always
already” thrown. But how is this “place” to be approached and scrutinized? It is not a fixed site that
can be physically localized.
160 Intermediate Reflections: Reflexivity in Scientific Inquiry and Empirical…
2
Ashmore stresses also that Mol’s ontological approach to practices should not be read as endors-
ing the search for “ontics, designed and destined to replace the tired old routines of epistemics”
(Ashmore 2005, 829). In my opinion, the champions of empirical ontology are not looking for a
confrontation with epistemological programs. Yet, in contrast to older supporters of science-as-
practice, they are guided by the view that there is no hypostatized body of knowledge separable
from the epistemic practices. The latter, however, are inextricably implicated in the multiple reali-
ties that have to be studied ontologically. Thus, there is no knowledge that cannot be treated in
terms of empirical ontology (in particular, the units of knowledge are no more than specific “mul-
tiple entities”), and, at the same time, there is no knowledge that can only be approached/analyzed
from an epistemological point of view. The champions of empirical ontology manage to overcome
the traditional opposition between theory and practice. When Ashmore appeals in his review for
peace between epistemics (which is dealing with the hot side of science, with novelty and contro-
versy) and ontics, he still commits to the traditional opposition, thereby adhering to a sort of
Cartesian presuppositions.
1 Non-empirical Assumptions in the Radical Empiricization of Ontology 161
bifurcation of object and subject. The new system of coordinates has to be con-
structed – so Latour’s argument goes – by paying attention to multiple persistences
and multiple transformations taking place in local orders and contextures-of-equip-
ment. At issue in the new system is the ongoing meaningful articulation of entities
by obtaining continuity through the discontinuities informed by these persistences
and transformations. Latour’s concept and conception of plurality of modes of exis-
tence show how the long road starting from social constructivism and passing via
the ethnography of the laboratory life and actor-network theory reaches the point of
empirical ontologies in which the modes of existence are scrutinized by empiriciz-
ing Heidegger’s notions of work-world and worldhood.
One is not able to develop empirical ontology without a method. The ethno-
graphic method of thick description proves to be the preferable one for unfolding
empirical ontologies. The adherents of the ontological turn are very much engaged
with diagnosing the changes of meaning within practices constituting forms of life:
a diagnosing that should steer between “reading more into things than reason per-
mits and less into them than it demands” (Geertz 1983, 16). In the method of thick
description, the way of developing empirical ontology consists in scrutinizing the
practices involved in the making of a relatively autonomous domain. The best case
in point is Annemarie Mol’s ethnography of (the domain of) hospital Z, as this
descriptive work is entangled with another one: the“ethnography of atherosclero-
sis”. The ontological vision of the multiple reality is achieved by an ethnographic
description of how the enacted entities (a disease in the first place) become a part of
what is done within the interrelatedness of practices. (The conceptualization of the
ongoing interplay of “disease” and “illness” also essentially contributes to the
design of this ethnographic scenario.) The description in question should be carried
out in a manner that would prevent one from admitting the existence of passive
objects “in the middle” of the interrelated practices, “waiting to be seen from the
point of view of seemingly endless series of perspectives” (Mol 2002, 5). The body,
the patient, the doctor, the technician, and the technology among many other entities
are constantly reshaped and meaningfully re-constituted. The changing configura-
tions of practices (and not the particular standpoints of the participants) are only
responsible for objects’ emergence and disappearance. (This is also Mol’s argument
for the irreducibility and irreplaceability of the ontological approach to/by tradi-
tional SSK constructivist-relativist-epistemological approaches.)
Again, the entities do not become fragmented but multiplied, hanging together in
various ways. By implication, the changing configurations of practices constitute
ontic multiplications. The ethnographic thick description enables one to describe
the multiplication of an entity during its manipulations within a system of practices.
This description is not only a method but an act of integration in what gets described
as well. In this regard, Mol spells out the specificity of the ethnographic descrip-
tion’s normativity. At issue is the question of how the ethnographer should intervene
in the texture of practices in order to disclose the being (of multiple realities) which
becomes continuously constituted. Important here is what Mol categorizes as a
“third step” in the ethnographic description: the step of transforming this descrip-
tion into an ontology of practical constitution of meaningful entities. In performing
164 Intermediate Reflections: Reflexivity in Scientific Inquiry and Empirical…
this step, one realizes that making an ontology of a particular multiple reality is a
part of the ontic-ethnographic description of practices one is engaged with. Phrased
differently, distancing from disembodied contemplation requires that the research-
er’s descriptive practices become a particular focus point of the ontic description.
Unfolding empirical ontology is first and foremost a reflexive participation in the
described reality (Mol 2002, 153).3 The ontic study of the multiple entity of athero-
sclerosis as it is placed in the practices taking place in hospital Z has much to do
with the distinction between knowing in medicine (about disease) and knowing
about medicine (dealing with the etiology of illness). This is not an epistemic but an
ontic distinction (i.e., a distinction between two kinds of practices taking place in
the whole orchestration of the hospital’s practices). If I am correct in my reading of
Mol’s study, the researcher might manage to move successfully between “knowing
in” and “knowing about” only by means of her reflexive participation in the multiple
reality. This conclusion is closely related to issues of radical reflexivity, which I will
discuss later.
The ethnographic thick description dominates the landscape of empirical ontol-
ogy. Yet there is also another methodological tendency in the ontic studies typically
advocated by Latour. This tendency is inspired by the relevance of ethnomethod-
ological descriptions to interpretive-ontological studies. The nexus between ethno-
methods and the life-world’s orders implies an ontic dimension of the descriptive
work. However, this dimension is by no means amenable to the same description
which builds the core of the ethnomethodological work; rather it remains hidden in
this work.4 For Garfinkel’s followers, nothing in a social world can be taken for
granted as a de-contextualized presence-at-hand. All entities are described as con-
textually accomplished entities. In other words, the description prevents one from
hypostatizing objects. Prima facie there is no room for ontology (in the traditional –
more or less metaphysical – sense) when one is dealing entirely with lived,
immediate, unmediated, and congregational practices. There is no “ontological resi-
due” that escapes the immediacy of the ethnomethodological description. However,
studying the ways in which actors produce orders and manage the settings of their
everyday activities amounts to investigating the modes of being in everyday life.
3
The moment of empathy in this reflexive participation is not to be underestimated. Against the
background of Mol’s way of distinguishing between disease and illness, one is to state that the
more the researcher involves her own epistemic practices in the scenario of ontic-ethnographic
description, the more effectively she is able to understand the ways of “living with disease”, i.e.,
the particular illness as a psychosocial phenomenon (as opposed to disease as an object of
biomedicine).
4
In the tradition of ethnomethodology there are several interesting attempts at making the onto-
logical dimension explicit. One is Eric Livingston’s ontological approach to the mathematical
work’s life-world. However, such attempts have always been met with skepticism by those adher-
ents of the tradition who admit that the engagement with ontology would transform the enthometh-
odological description into interpretative theorizing, thereby restoring a sort of theoretical
essentialism (Ginev 2013a, 117–127).
1 Non-empirical Assumptions in the Radical Empiricization of Ontology 165
Following this strategy for empirical studies, radical reflexivity seems to be criti-
cal to ethnomethodology as well. It calls into question the immediate actuality given
in an ethnomethodological description since it casts doubts on the validity of the
“intuitions and criteria” about empirical immediacy. In exercising this kind of
reflexivity, one nullifies any uncritically accepted entity or state as “actually given”,
and attention is given to the ongoing constitution of what allegedly exists as empiri-
cally given. According to Pollner, a kind of (hermeneutic) analysis of this constitu-
tion should complement the empirical description and unveil the “empirically
given” as mediated by contextualized practices. As a consequence, one starts to
approach the actors’ endogenous reflexivity with regard to its potentiality to consti-
tute a meaningful reality. The potentiality for constitution is not externally (explana-
tory) added to what is actually present, but revealed as inherently operating in the
interrelatedness of practices which is at stake in the ontological study. Accordingly,
the first step mentioned above is put into effect: The ethnomethodological descrip-
tion is extended in a manner that allows one to go beyond “irremediable indexical-
ity” and look for the ontology of everydayness (constituted meaningfully through
endogenous reflexivity). Intensifying the preoccupation with radical reflexivity is
also a prerequisite for making the second step. The researcher begins to realize that
the physicality of nonhumans involved in human action and interaction participates
in the constitution of orders and life-words as well. The capability to effectuate (and
transgress) norms is to be assigned not only to the actors but to all “actants” (in
Latour’s Greimasian, semiotic sense).
The question I discussed with regard to Pollner’s referential (radical) reflexivity
can also be formulated as follows: Are the contingent orders of multiple entities
(and realities of enacting practices) characterized by an actual being in itself (a mere
factuality), or are they rather revealing – in their a potentiality-for-being – facticity
of configuring practices? One certainly might render evidence for the claim that the
new studies of ontology dispense with the concept of “being’s actual presence”.
Thus, the champions of empirical ontology are interested in unveiling worlds and
realities in the making. The empirical studies of ontology are seeking how entities
come to be in relational, fluid, and more or less indeterminate practical modes of
being-in-the-world (or “modes of existence”). Despite this evidence, however, there
are two crucial arguments (an epistemological and a hermeneutic one) stating that
(purely) empirical ontology cannot avoid a hypostatization of the actual being of
what it deals with. In the epistemological argument, the empirical immediacy is
inevitably shaped by non-empirical assumptions (or “prejudices”), and thus, it is
always mediated by such assumptions. According to the hermeneutic argument, any
empirically immediate state of affairs is the upshot of actualizing possibilities pro-
jected by interrelated practices upon horizons of practical existence. The “actually
given” as empirical immediacy is ineluctably “produced” within the potentiality of
existence (facticity).
It is my contention that the studies of empirical ontology do not have the resources
to deal properly with these two arguments. I am not going to elaborate on the critical
consequences following from the arguments. Let me only tentatively underscore the
1 Non-empirical Assumptions in the Radical Empiricization of Ontology 167
following point: Regardless of how strong the stress on processual ordering, the
search for a radical “empiricization” of ontology rehabilitates the priority of actual-
ity over potentiality as this priority is launched by “metaphysics of presence”. It is
impossible – so the epistemological argument goes – to have an empirical descrip-
tion without presupposing an epistemic-representational attitude, and accordingly,
to restrict the research work to dealing with an actual presence. (Thus, though rep-
resentational epistemology has been solemnly banished, the epistemic representa-
tion of what is actual comes through a backdoor in each program that struggles for
an “empiricization without remainder”. This is true even when epistemic represen-
tation is achieved by means of “practical intervention”).5 The above-mentioned atti-
tude inevitably places emphasis upon what actually becomes represented regardless
of whether the latter is a given (stable and static) state or processes of ordering. All
kinds of empirical investigations are epistemologically doomed to be committed to
thematizing actualities. This is why in a (purely) empirical-ontological study, there
is no room for radical reflexivity that radically might call into question all empirical
immediacy of what is described.
This criticism leads to the question: It is possible at all to address the task of
empirical ontology without committing to a version of (non-empirical) constitu-
tional analysis of meaning (in the sense of the phenomenological tradition)? There
is no doubt that the empirical stance in developing descriptive ontology should be
reflexively enlightened about its own non-empirical assumptions that “make possi-
ble” the empirical immediacy of each particular ontological study. In a reflexive
manner again, these assumptions have to be taken into consideration in constructing
the empirical ontology. Pollner’s radical reflexivity is to be implemented to the non-
empirical (epistemological) assumptions of empirical ontology as well. Yet in what
follows, I will pay attention exclusively to the hermeneutic argument, leaving aside
the meta-epistemological critique of the anti-epistemological position held by the
students of empirical ontology.6 In the perspective of this argument, radical reflexiv-
ity provides the access to scrutinizing those aspects of the constitution of meaning
(as an ontological issue) which are not amenable to immediate empirical study. In
enabling one to integrate an interpretative approach to the situated constitution of
meaning in the empirical description of a multiple reality – so my argument goes –
radical reflexivity paves the way for having recourse to ontological difference in the
studies of empirical ontology.
5
At this point I should like to reiterate a motif from my previous criticism of Hacking’s epistemol-
ogy. He puts much emphasis upon the contradistinction between representing and intervening.
However, being still committed to the primacy of the subject-object cut, his epistemology only
makes intervening a privileged method of epistemic representation.
6
I am using the expression “meta-epistemological critique” in order to emphasize that this critique
is not inspired by the search for an epistemological alternative to empirical ontology. The aim is
rather to uncover (by implementing reflexive-epistemological tactics) the “bad epistemology” tac-
itly involved in those versions of empirical ontology which insist on “empiricization without
remainder”.
168 Intermediate Reflections: Reflexivity in Scientific Inquiry and Empirical…
7
As I pointed out, Marres’s position is by no means an exception. As a rule, empirical studies of
ontology tacitly admit a difference between ontic description and ontological reflection. Mol is
seeking the difference between the ethnographic description of the “multiple body” (and other
multiple entities) and the constitution of multiplicity. She makes the case that if one begins to study
the interferences between the enactments of multiple entities (such as atherosclerosis and sex dif-
ference), then the complexities start to grow exponentially (Mol 2002, 151). The growth of com-
plexity is precisely the theme of the ontological reflection.
170 Intermediate Reflections: Reflexivity in Scientific Inquiry and Empirical…
8
In the Heideggerian tradition of hermeneutic phenomenology, empirical ontology (i.e., studies of
domains’ ontic structures) is dichotomously opposed to ”transcendental ontology” (existential
hermeneutics of the meaning of being). It is the methodology of double hermeneutics that manages
to overcome this dichotomous opposition. Regardless of how significant the difference is, there is
no cleavage between both types of ontology. Both types work in concert. The unfoldment of an
interpretative description (and narrative) of multiple entities enacted in a multiple reality of con-
certed practices requires a cooperation between empirical studies of ontic orders in the making and
ontological reflections about the integrity of a specific mode of being-in-the-world.
172 Intermediate Reflections: Reflexivity in Scientific Inquiry and Empirical…
(empirically) given. Nonetheless, the human-nonhuman network (in which for this
example a global recasting of an illness/disease takes place) presupposes the consti-
tution of a non-empirical temporal-spatial “fusion” of clinical, scientific, diagnostic,
technological, administrative-bureaucratic, and other practices. It is again a fusion-
creating-dynamic-unity that requires for its analysis a non-empirical ontological
reflection. A particular task of this reflection would consist in scrutinizing how the
new network of practices in which the illness/disease being recast becomes enacted
creates a new “chronotope”. The latter is a unity of practices’ temporality and spati-
ality that is never immediately given, but exists in horizons of temporalizing and
spatializing of the enacted entity. The chronotope of interrelated practices is some-
thing that belongs to facticity and not to factuality. The ontic, human-nonhuman
multiplication of what becomes enacted in the network of practices takes place in a
chronotope that is constantly in the making.
Following a tendency in STS tradition of empirical ontology, I tried to adumbrate
a move from radical reflexivity to double hermeneutics that integrates ontological
difference in the empirical studies of multiple entities and realities. This move is in
line, in my view, with the observation that the turn to ontology should not be seen
as a way of grounding the empirical study of practices in a theory of what is ready-
made (Woolgar and Lezaun 2013, 336). Doubtless, there is “idiosyncratic critical
sensibility” involved in the reluctance to take the world at face value. It is this sen-
sibility that has to be assisted by a radical reflexivity and a methodology of double
hermeneutics. Thus, while the turn to ontology should continue to be an essentially
empirical enterprise, critical sensitivity should be extended to cover the non-
empirical dimensions of ontological interpretation.
As indicated earlier, the studies of empirical ontology demonstrate a clear com-
mitment to post-metaphysical initiatives and agendas. The further engagement of
these studies with radical reflexivity, double hermeneutics, and ontological differ-
ence will enhance their dialogue with hermeneutic phenomenology and other tradi-
tions of interpretative theorizing in which this commitment is of prime
importance.
3 Concluding Remarks
As pointed out, the status of the “hybrid entities” – or the “artificialized natural enti-
ties” – occupies a central place in the studies of empirical ontology. Generally, these
entities are the objects of inquiry of technoscience as studied in STS, provided that
technoscience not only explores them but also operates in milieus populated with
hybrid entities. (By implication, the hybrid entities are not only distinguished by a
dualist status, but they – while being at once objects of inquiry and tools of techno-
science – are also technologically scientificated entities and re-naturalized scientific-
technological artifacts. This second-order duality was already touched upon when
what was at stake was the problematic of life-worlds’ scientification.) From the
viewpoint of hermeneutic realism, the hybrid entities are artifacts (not necessarily
174 Intermediate Reflections: Reflexivity in Scientific Inquiry and Empirical…
9
Cultural studies will often address the genesis and the circulation in practices of hybrid entities.
Yet, like empirical ontologies, cultural studies does this in a purely factual manner without taking
into account the ways in which the ontological difference between factuality and facticity operates
in the constitution of hybrid objects.
3 Concluding Remarks 175
constituted as objectified factuality – does justice at the same time to the problem-
atic of reflexivity as discussed earlier.
Following this line of reasoning, the issues that should be addressed first concern
the type of “texts” in which the constitution of hybrid entities – and the multiple
ways of their “enacting” in supposedly “natural systems” – as objects of inquiry
becomes recorded (again, as a constitution projected upon possibilities). My claim
is that the hybrid entities are conceptualized via re-contextualization of objects
already “textualized” as purely natural objects and represented by objectified factu-
ality.10 This re-contextualization conceptualizes the hybrid entities – by producing
objectified factuality for them – but it does not deal at all with the artificialization of
the systems in which they are enacted. The outcome of re-contextualization is the
constitution of “texts” that, on the one hand, incorporate structured knowledge
about the ways of saving phenomena through data models and theoretical scenarios,
and on the other, record the “destiny” of transformed natural systems – say, climate
systems in which “artificialized natural objects” (like “clouds reacting to global
warming” and “clouds taking part in tropical deforestation”) are enacted. By impli-
cation, documented in such “texts” are possible ways of artificializing climate sys-
tems in conjunction with the multiple enactments of hybrid entities due to the
forcings caused by human activity. Thus, to continue the example, greenhouse gases
(like carbon dioxide and methane) are natural entities per se. They interact with
another kind of natural entities – the clouds – and the result of this interaction is
artificialized climate changes.11
Thus considered, the changes affected by greenhouse gases are rooted in the
interaction of two kinds of natural entities (aerosols and clouds), and this interaction
brings into play the formation of hybrid entities, on the one hand, and their multiple
10
The phenomena observed and measured in this artificialized reality are saved (by meteorological
theoretical scenarios) as quasi-natural events that are registered by long-term weather statistics.
Thus, a climate forcing induced by human activities is “discovered” through taking measurements
of variables like soil moisture, temperature, flora distribution, or salinity.
11
Arguably, climatological objects of inquiry – more specifically, those creating (and created by)
climatic changes – are nowadays among the most discussed hybrid entities distinguished by a
“natural-artificial origin”. It would be worthwhile to carry out a special study of the constitution of
climatological “texts” in which – by means of re-contextualizing traditional objects of inquiry –
one tries to objectify factors of climate change related to human activities as mingled with natural
causes (such as solar radiation and volcanic eruptions) of these changes. In describing and measur-
ing climatic changes through data models, one is not obliged to look for a clear separation between
natural variability and human-technological interference (e.g., emissions of greenhouse gases and
aerosols). It is the theoretical scenario that by saving phenomena captured by these data models
one should establish the role of the interference mentioned. As a rule, the scenario “decides” what
is to be treated as an anthropogenic factor of changes. Yet the theoretical scenario remains indif-
ferent to the central subject of climate’s artificialization: how the ways of “enacting” artificialized
natural entities – that subsequently are multiplied due to various sorts of feedback – are artificial-
izing climate systems (including the global climate system consisting of the atmosphere, oceans,
land, and continental glaciers). Needless to say, the objectified factuality re-naturalizes the multi-
ple enactment of artificialized natural entities.
3 Concluding Remarks 177
out injecting ideological and value-oriented assumptions into the process of inquiry.
The constituted “texts” incorporate theoretical knowledge and objectified factuality
about (say) a change in energy flux at the tropopause (the boundary between the
troposphere and the stratosphere) that indicates the effects of an enactment of hybrid
entities. The structure of this knowledge does not differ from the structure of knowl-
edge incorporated in the usual “texts” constituted in climatology as a natural sci-
ence. Yet what becomes incorporated in these “texts” is objectified factuality about
forms of climate radiative forcing, which supposedly does not belong to natural
science. Identifying further the profile and the causes of the perturbation – as well
as of possible feedback – requires a further re-contextualization of the “texts” that
would be able to capture the production of precursors of aerosols, rendering possi-
ble the ways of “enacting” unwittingly artificialized clouds. The new “texts” would
also contain knowledge about how the rising concentration of anthropogenic aero-
sols in clouds changes the amount of energy reflected by the clouds thus artificial-
ized. The relevant context of this “text” can be made sensitive to studying (say)
relations between industrial production of aerosols and the behavior of artificialized
clouds that slam the atmospheric window. It is this kind of conceptualizing of the
forms of “enacting” – as related to forms of climate forcing conceived of as an
induced energy imbalance – that adduces evidence of the slow dying process of
global natural systems.12 The models or theoretical scenarios incorporated in the
constituted “texts” might be sufficient for diagnosing the state of deceasing. But
they do not have the resources for investigating the role of the systems’ artificializa-
tion in this state. The artificialization cannot be represented by the objectified factu-
ality produced through these models and scenarios.
In incorporating the conceptualization of climatic changes caused by unwittingly
artificialized clouds (like greenhouse substances), the “texts” are naturalizing the
multiple enactments of the hybrid entities in climate systems in a manner that pre-
vents one from seeing them as part and parcel of the artificialization of these sys-
tems. The multiple enactments are represented, for instance, as objectified factuality
about changes in the relative amounts of high versus low clouds that contribute to
reducing or enhancing the amplitude of the warming. An enactment is contextually
objectified (naturalized) by exploring the sensitivity of the climate system to a forc-
ing. Unwittingly artificialized clouds – obtained in the first place by the aerosol
12
The observation that pollution enhances the concentration of hygroscopic particles is not an
observation about the artificialization of a climate system. It is only an observation of how the
respective natural system reacts to external interventions by enhancing the amount of intrinsic
feedback. (More than half of the predicted warming will not be caused directly by greenhouse
gases but by feedback like the reduction in the fraction of incoming solar radiation reflected back
to space as snow and ice cover recede.) The naturalist extension of textualizing the domain of
nephology cannot capture the “enactment” and multiplication of hybrid entities like the unwit-
tingly artificialized clouds. It only objectifies artificially induced climatic changes. Capturing the
artificialization of climate systems should go much further than ending with the registration of
these changes.
3 Concluding Remarks 179
climate forcing – generate the most important global climate feedbacks as mecha-
nism of artificializing climate systems. In my knowledge, there is nowadays a lack
of good models for the effects of this feedbacks. But even if there were such models,
they would not be capable of conceptualizing the artificialization of climate sys-
tems. “Enacting” unwittingly artificialized clouds becomes naturalized when the
transformed climate systems are, for instance, described by models based on
aerosol-cloud physics. Nonetheless, such models tell us, in particular, that “enact-
ing” unwittingly artificialized clouds makes global warming spatially heteroge-
neous.13 They quantitatively describe how, depending on their areal dynamics, these
clouds amplify or reduce the effect of warming as associated in particular with sea
level rises.
What becomes objectified in these models is, inter alia, the increased tendency
toward drought and the increased rainfall rates as they are related to changes of
plant and animal habitat. Through the models in question, one gains theoretically
structured knowledge about the “multiple reality” – due to forcings – of the climate
systems in which unwittingly artificialized clouds are “enacted”. My claim is that
precisely these “texts” incorporating such theoretically structured knowledge docu-
ment the way of climate systems’ existence as projected upon possibilities. These
are at once possibilities in the systems’ “destiny”, and possible ways of studying the
artificialization of climate systems. More specifically, the possibilities of artificial-
izing natural systems are only to be explored by appropriating possibilities for doing
research revealed by the facticity of inquiry that constitutes “texts” in which the
multiple enactments of hybrid entities are objectified.
13
The unwitting formation of artificial clouds chiefly consists in the increased number of nuclei
and the tendency toward inhibiting the rainfall caused by smaller droplets, thereby increasing the
lifetime of the average cloud cover on Earth. Studies of climatic changes that conceptualize the
“unwittingly artificialized clouds” constitute the special kind of “texts”. These studies show that
the artificialized clouds are unwillingly “enacted” in climate systems as new absorbers and emit-
ters of terrestrial radiation. Anthropogenic sources of cloud condensation nuclei (like automobile
emissions, the burning of vegetative matter, and industrial combustion products) do not create but
“enact” unwittingly artificialized clouds. In another formulation, these are sources of turning natu-
ral clouds into anthropogenic aerosols within natural climate systems. To reiterate, several pro-
cesses and phenomena taking place in this situation can be contextualized by integrating new
research practices and forming new contexts in the domain of nephology. The “enactment” of
anthropogenic aerosols in climate systems is an artificial process that can be – on the level of theo-
rizing – “naturalized” by means of proper textualizing within the newly formed contexts. A case in
point are the studies modeling aerosol influences on precipitation by following “pollution tracks”
as viewed by satellite imagery. Such tracks are exhibited not only by warm clouds, but also by
clouds in areas where ice precipitation processes are prevalent.
Meaningful Articulation and Objectification
of Reality in Scientific Inquiry
1 Prelude
My starting goal in this chapter is to spell out in more detail the distinction between
contextures-of-equipment and contexts of inquiry as it was preliminarily depicted in
the Introductory Chapter. I will cite again the established/received view: A scientific
practice consists of actions and activities following a rule(s) in pursuing a goal. This
view implies a purely “humanistic” approach to studying science as practices. All
(non-normative and normative) elements of a scientific practice are determined by
cognitive, volitional, and emotive faculties and dispositions of humans. However, I
argued that the interrelatedness of (scientific) practices has ontological primacy
over each and every particular practice of inquiry. The “humanistic” approach is no
longer to be applied to this interrelatedness. The latter has a being in the interplay of
practices and possibilities understood as the facticity of inquiry. In another formula-
tion, the potentiality-for-being of the interrelatedness of scientific practices (dis-
closing a domain of reality) is always involved in a hermeneutic circularity. Thus
considered, the interrelatedness is not only a dimension of the trans-subjective fac-
ticity of inquiry, but also of characteristics that post-humanist trends in science and
technology studies (STS) describe. The interrelatedness of scientific practices is not
determined by human faculties, and for this reason, it can be characterized as a
“trans-human” facticity (i.e., transcending the human factors organizing the single
practices). It is precisely this characterization that seems to be in line with those
trends in science studies which advance strategies of deconstructing the imposed
borderlines between humans and nonhumans involved in technoscience.1
1
Like the “meaning of being” in hermeneutic phenomenology, the meaning informed by practices’
potentiality for being is not to be “anthropologically deduced”. In hermeneutic realism, all “human
factors” are particular meaningful entities, events, and processes that are enacted qua “factors” due
to particular contextualization. Humans are in a state of situated transcendence with respect to
contextualizing facticity.
2
See, for instance, Schtazki (2002, 189–208). Schatzki champions a position that tries to balance
between post-humanistic approaches and the “humanistic” theory of action.
1 Prelude 183
3
In line with Willem Hackmann’s (1989) study, one might state that the different types of scientific
instruments in the early modern time organize different interactive spatialities. In this regard, the
experimental construction of novel phenomena through “active instruments” (Hackmann) was also
a spatial event of interaction between experimenter and instrument. Of course, this interaction has
been embedded in an immense social space (also involving the marketplace of instruments-as-
184 Meaningful Articulation and Objectification of Reality in Scientific Inquiry
commodity) shared by all communities committed to the production and use of scientific
instruments.
4
As I argued, the relations between the worldness of the world and the work-world are a matter of
particular interest for the hermeneutic realist. These relations have much to do with the investiga-
tion of how the practices of any particular mode of being in the world arrange the worldness of the
world. The everyday-practical experience (of the average-inauthentic mode of being) maintains
through its circumspective concern the interlacement of environmental contextures-of-equipment
as a totality of a certain work-world. Depending on how the circumspective concern contextualizes
what is ready-to-hand, a particular “working arrangement” of the worldness of the world comes
into being. The relations between the worldness of the world and the work-world are touched upon
in Section 15 and Section 26 of Being and Time. But Heidegger does not study them in a systematic
manner. He assumes that a particular work-world – the work-world of the craftsman, for instance –
is an actual state of affairs within the worldness of the world. It becomes clear from his elabora-
tions that there is a manifold of work-worlds, each of them arranging the worldness of the world in
a specific way. Heidegger further concedes that the work with which one concerns oneself contex-
tualizes readiness-to-hand in both the “public world” and the “environing nature”. Thus, the
respective work-world always arranges the worldness of the world as an amalgam of contextual-
ized public-natural utensils ready-to-hand. Arranging the worldness of the world as a work-world
is an essential aspect of facticity.
1 Prelude 185
Though maintaining the rigid orders within their contextures, scientific instru-
ments (as “knowledge-producing machines”) follow “patterns of exchange, use,
and coordination” with other machines that sometimes are far from processes of
inquiry (Galison 1997, 51). These instruments acquire meaning not only through
arranging their laboratory environments, but also via their material links to other
laboratory spaces. Galison speaks of a movement of scientific instruments within
different “subcultures of laboratory practices” across various contextures-of-
equipment. It is this movement that puts into effect new practices of arranging the
“material culture of the laboratory”. Nonetheless, in contrast to the contexts of
inquiry, the contextures-of-equipment in scientific research are to a great extent
isolated from each other. This allows one to treat their environments as relatively
enclosed spatial structures. However, the price one has to pay for this treatment is
the factual objectification of the research process, which prevents one from address-
ing the issue of entanglement of contextures-of-equipment with contexts of inquiry.
A splendid illustration of the “environmentalization” of individual scientific
practices is provided by Steven Shapin’s investigation of the social-physical spatial-
ity of the seventeenth-century practices of experimentation, when the laboratory as
the site of doing experiments became socially institutionalized. Yet the laboratory
was at that time by no means the exclusive site (spatially arranged environment) of
experimenting and generating experimental discourse. Shapin (1988, 378) points
out that – along with private places like Robert Hooke’s place of residence – the
sites of experimental work “ranged from the apothecary’s and instrument maker’s
shop, to the coffeehouse, the royal palace, the rooms of college fellows, and associ-
ated collegiate and university structures.” All of these sites provided primitive
contextures-of-equipment for experimentation. The incremental institutionalization
of laboratory-experimental praxis upon the emergence of the Royal Society – as an
institution that for the first time determined the formal conditions of entry to the
spaces of experimentation – created the social-physical threshold for having pub-
licly recognized environments of the practices of experimentation. The threshold
was a mechanism that guaranteed models of space in which solitude – as a symbolic
condition for the experimentalist to claim authenticity for his work – was legitimate.
The spatiality of experimentation as enabling this solitude “defined the circum-
stances in which the new ‘priest of nature’ might produce knowledge as certain and
as morally valuable as that of religious isolate” (Shapin 1988, 387). The first impor-
tant caesura in this spatiality took place when Robert Hooke proposed to some
honorable fellows to see some experiments with an air pump at his lodging. In
analyzing this case, Shapin (1988, 404) concludes that “the normal pattern of move-
ment in seventeenth-century experimental science was reversed: those who wanted
to witness experimental knowledge in the making came to where instruments per-
manently lived, rather than obliging the instruments to come where witnesses lived.”
It is perhaps this caesura that marks the birth of a genuine environment of scientific
activities and of a contexture-of-equipment for inquiry.
Michael Lynch’s ethnographic studies of laboratory practices show how the
aforementioned concept of the social-physical threshold of entering the spaces of
experimentation became radically changed in the second half of the last century. A
186 Meaningful Articulation and Objectification of Reality in Scientific Inquiry
5
Ethnomethodologists also pay close attention to the specificity of purely conceptual practices of
inquiry. In this regard see Lynch and Jordan (1995).
1 Prelude 187
6
The increasing spatial heterogeneity of the production of scientific knowledge is intrinsic in the
evolvement of practices of experimentation. It is the growth in the range of instrumentation that
has contributed to the growing complexity of the spatiality of knowledge production. The experts
on scientific experimentation are unanimous in arguing that phenomena are released in and by
instrumental manipulation. But what is the destiny of the released phenomena? The theoretical
plots endowed with power of explanation and argumentation do not meet the released phenomena
within the experimental contextures-of-equipment (the workplace of experimenters). This is
already a sufficient argument for disavowing the view that by scrutinizing the local orders of
research activities, one is in a position to address the entirety of the production of scientific
knowledge.
1 Prelude 189
of the hermeneutic realist. Tentatively, I would like to point out that the quest for a
“methodical order” leading step by step from the particular environments and con-
textures of instrumental manipulation to contexts of producing theories with funda-
mental symmetries and unifying equations is a productive enterprise when at stake
is the issue of transportation of instrumental and discursive practices from the pre-
scientific life-world into the sites of scientific knowledge production. Yet it is a
futile enterprise when one should address the transitions from contextures of equip-
ment to the constitution of (what I call) “texts”. The local spatial-instrumental set-
tings of scientific activities and the contexts of inquiry enabling the saving of
phenomena are not subordinated in an ascending order, but are entangled with one
another. It is the kind of entanglement that is at stake in hermeneutic realism.7
I will conclude the section with a brief comment on an approach that is seem-
ingly pertinent to the problematics discussed so far. Peter Galison (1997, 46–63)
implements his model of “trading zones” to explain the “context of context” of the
cooperation of scientific subcultures committed to diverging forms of theorizing
and experimentation. He aims at discovering forms of cooperation among divergent
forms of inquiry under the conditions of an increasing heterogeneity of scientific
subcultures. The trading zones of exchange do not need global agreement. They are
intermediate zones in which practices could be coordinated locally even where the
articulated meanings clash. The local coordination of practices within trading zones
accounts for how local knowledge becomes widely accepted. Working the local
exchanges out – so Galison’s argument goes – would allow one to figure out the
possibility of locally convergent meanings between globally diverging subcultures.
The boundary work is conceived of as a production of local languages which grow
in the interstices between subcultures. The global divergences can be set aside,
while the local exchanges should be worked out. In so doing, one becomes entirely
preoccupied with the question of how science manages to create a homogeneous
order within its diverging subcultures. In my view, Galison’s approach provides an
excellent account of dynamic interlinks and interfaces within the unsurmountable
and growing heterogeneity of scientific subcultures. However, this approach seems
to be irrelevant to the issue of the relatedness between contingent contextures of
equipment in which scientific work is situated and the contexts whereby this work
discloses, articulates, and objectifies domains of reality.
7
To reiterate my argument, the methodical orders as envisioned by the Erlangen School’s construc-
tivists are always already within the hermeneutic circularity of the interplay of practices and pos-
sibilities. Surely, the “justificatory recourse” to the life-world makes no fundamentalist claims, but
invokes a normative directedness that is hardly to be found in scientific inquiry. The Erlangen
constructivists do not offer scenarios of the articulation of (methodical) norms, and this is due to
the hermeneutic deficiency of their program.
190 Meaningful Articulation and Objectification of Reality in Scientific Inquiry
8
An important factor was the discussion of what is a precise test of the electroweak theory.
According to participants in experiments at CERN aimed at establishing the W boson mass versus
the Z boson mass, the proton-antiproton collider ensured W and Z production in a range that was
very suitable for calculations in a theoretical framework. The experiments provided the opportu-
nity for a precise comparison of the theoretical predictions about the weak bosons versus the
experimental data.
2 Contextures-of-Equipment and Contexts of Inquiry 191
the synchrotron; (2) observe and control the variables of the produced antiproton
and the production angle; (3) single out pertinent quantities (like the number of
particles produced per interacting proton) that have to be measured experimentally;
(4) establish a maximum production of antiprotons around a given antiproton
momentum; (5) prepare diagrams for measured antiproton production for various
target materials; (6) try to obtain information about the extent to which the Coulomb
scattering (provoked by the electric charge of the nuclei) has a negligible effect on
the antiproton production; (7) choose a suitable lens (in the form of a magnetic
horn) for the antiproton accumulation by employing computer modeling; (8) cool
the target (e.g., tungsten) and try to avoid its oxidation and disintegration; (9) regis-
ter different types of oscillations for various beams in the synchrotron; (10) interpret
the obtained results both in real space and in six-dimensional phase space (position
coordinates and the momentum associated with each coordinate) characterizing the
density of the antiproton accumulation, and so on.
This practice of experimentation with the production of antiprotons as composed
of the aforementioned actions and activities does form a unit of ongoing inquiry, but
it is not capable by itself to bring the reality of a scientific domain into being. As a
single practice, it does not ensure necessary conditions for having the facticity of
meaningful articulation which discloses a domain. To reiterate, a practice isolated
from the contextually arranged (and contextualizing) practices projecting their
interrelatedness upon a horizon of possibilities is no longer a part of the domain’s
articulation and objectification. This is why the “minimal fragment” from the factic-
ity of inquiry which can bring a domain into being is the contexts of configured
practices. Furthermore, only a practice that is instrumental in the interplay of prac-
tices and possibilities may participate in facticity that reveals reality. The experi-
mental practice of antiproton production has contributed to disclosing a domain of
reality by being enmeshed and contextualized in a wide range of other practices
(including engineering practices of improving the accelerator’s work like adding a
superconducting low beta section), each of them distinguished by its own contexture-
of-equipment. Thus, for instance, once contextualized by practices of quantum
chromodynamics, the experimental practice of producing antiprotons in order to
study hadronic events participates in revealing the reality of strong interactions
between quarks and gluons characterized by “color charge”.
The reason for building the CERN proton-antiproton collider and carrying out
the practice in question was provoked by a configuration of scientific practices
aiming at studying W and Z weak bosons. The practice prepared experiments
designed for the study of vector bosons in the early 1980s. In this regard, the origi-
nal practice was improved through correction procedures of the detector that
enhanced the acceptance for charged tracks. The experimental production of anti-
protons also became contextualized by practices of studying jets in hadron-hadron
collisions. The historical initiation of this practice is not to be disentangled from
the belief that in exploring such collisions, one could learn about the properties and
interactions of (what Richard Feynman called) partons: point-like constituents of
hadrons that are identical with quarks and gluons. Looking for jets in hadron-had-
ron collisions was also motivated by new practices of perturbative quantum chro-
192 Meaningful Articulation and Objectification of Reality in Scientific Inquiry
modynamics which enabled new tests of Feynman’s parton model (Ellis and Scott
1989, 132). It was this gauge theory of strong interactions that most clearly pre-
dicted jets in such collisions. For a long period in the 1970s, the experimental
production of antiprotons was not a very successful practice for demonstrating the
existence of jets in hadron-hadron collisions. It is nowadays widely accepted that
the later discovery of the plot of “two-jet dominance at high transverse energy” is
among the most important discoveries achieved using the proton-antiproton
collider.
The experimentation with the production of antiprotons can be replicated arbi-
trarily many times by changing different components in the range of (1–10). The
interlinked activities composing the practice – each of them following its rules and
algorithms – and the material resources they utilize form a contexture-of-equipment
that involves a basic apparatus by means of which entities that are ready-to-hand
(accelerated protons and produced antiprotons for various target materials) become
manipulated. In this contexture/setting several experiments are carried out and vari-
ous experimental systems are formed, all of them preserving the same readiness-to-
hand, provided that the practice remains unchanged. (In this account, ready-to-hand
is what has the character of being manipulable and readable. Thus, the incoming
particle beam is manipulable by means of dipole magnets like “injection kicker
magnets”. Furthermore, the beam might be bunched by a radio frequency system
and decelerated.) The practice would not lose its identity if the variations in its com-
posing actions and activities preserve the interrelations which it has with other
experimental, instrumental, computational, and theoretical practices of inquiry
(Janich 1998, 101–110). (Not to mention that this identity is always preserved when
the experimental practices are carried out in the environments of other contextures-
of-equipment, given that the type of apparatus and the experimental design are the
same.)
Yet if one changes the configuration of practice’s interrelations with other prac-
tices of inquiry, then the replication would be a new practice of repeating an experi-
ment. In this case, what is at stake is not merely the assurance that the results can be
replicated, but a new contextual articulation of meaning. (It is an open and compli-
cated question as to whether the reproduction of an experiment by using different
apparatuses [characterized by different systematic errors] without changing the con-
text of inquiry should be counted as inaugurating a new experimental practice.
Galison (1997, 10) observes that “even where the cloud chamber and the bubble
chamber overlap, they do so more because they share practices associated with their
design, operation, and characteristic demonstration strategies than because they are
both used to resolve the same particular puzzle within physics.” However, more
often than not the aim of this repeating by using alternative instrument is to elimi-
nate – or at least to reduce – the possibility that the experimental result is an artifact.
In keeping in mind that the different apparatuses also have different backgrounds of
technological practices and procedures of calibration, one might assume that such a
replication may evoke a re-contextualization and a formation of new experimental
practice. [Think, for instance, on the re-contextualization implied by the introduc-
tion of the electron microscope in molecular biology.] The work of Allan Franklin
2 Contextures-of-Equipment and Contexts of Inquiry 193
9
Galison (1997, 20–22) pays heed to another important factor – the activation of different experi-
mental traditions – for a re-contextualization in repeating experiments. He differentiates between
the “image tradition” (distinguished by the production of homomorphic representations) and the
“logic tradition” (producing homologous representations). Instruments and apparatuses exist in
such traditions as part and parcel of the “material culture of the laboratory shifts”. What he explores
is the “life of instruments” with regard to the “fusion of traditions of experimentation”. Such a
fusion does not necessarily break the continuity in the reproduction of an experimental practice.
194 Meaningful Articulation and Objectification of Reality in Scientific Inquiry
10
Though I completely agree with the role Gooding assigns to construals, I am not inclined to
accept without reservation his way of differentiating between interpretations and construals. By
Gooding’s account, construals refer to actions as they are on a par with talk and thought. They
precede the Cartesian split of subject and object, and emphasize the articulation of meaning on a
pre-linguistic and pre-predicative level. Interpretations within linguistic media communicate the
meaning thus articulated. This way of differentiating between construals and interpretations,
which follows the tenets of social constructivism, is to be criticized from the viewpoint of herme-
neutic phenomenology. Gooding’s differentiation replaces the Cartesian dualism with a dichotomy
between extra-linguistic construals and linguistically designed interpretations. I agree that actions
are on a par with talk and thought. Yet, a genuinely non-Cartesian position supplying Gooding’s
distinction with proper arguments would rest on the following two assumptions: (1) Talk and
thought constitute meaning only in contexts of actions; (2) since language-thinking is entangled
with actions and activities, all actions and activities – including the non-verbal ones – always
already take place in linguistic media whereby the latter make them meaningful. These two
assumptions render impossible the way of differentiating based on opposing extra-linguistic to
linguistic actions and activities. Despite this disagreement with the way in which Gooding’s dis-
tinction is grounded, his concept of construals is of prime importance to any hermeneutic approach
to experimentation.
2 Contextures-of-Equipment and Contexts of Inquiry 195
11
Many of the entities I am speaking about have been “socialized” in non-scientific contexts as
well. Such a “socialization” and the concomitant exchange of scientific and non-scientific entities
is of prime importance to the studies of technoscience. In investigating the conjugated processes of
“scientification” of non-scientific social areas and growing “socialization” of technoscience, some
authors address the “changing geometries” of the social existence of the technoscience’s contex-
ture-of-equipment (Mol and Law 1994; Marres 2012). I partially dealt with this subject in the
Intermediate Reflections.
196 Meaningful Articulation and Objectification of Reality in Scientific Inquiry
in a certain contexture are at the very moment of their production dislocated and
placed in the circulation of systems of signs. Accordingly, the transitions from
contextures-of-equipment to contexts of configured practices are mediated by a kind
of semiosis. Yet it is not, as I will try to show, a semiosis that can be localized in
particular nexuses of contextures and contexts. The generation of semiotic systems
in the research process is rather stretched out over the whole facticity of inquiry.
Let me stress once more that the hermeneutic realist works with a broad concept
of manipulating-within-contextures-of-equipment. This concept also includes the
localized manipulations of idealized entities existing only through their symbolic
representations. Thus, for instance, the physicists working in quantum electrody-
namics make use of form factors that presumably describe the structure of particles.
They are symbolically represented by matrix elements of operators. These elements
are amenable to formal manipulations that may reduce them. The so-called Gordon
decomposition is a case in point. With the help of this formal manipulation, the
physicists are, in particular, able to represent the coupling of the electron to the
electromagnetic field by reducing matrix elements, which eventually allows them to
describe electrons as “point-like” particles. In the case of mathematical representa-
tion of the electromagnetic currents for hadrons, the formal manipulations that
reduce matrix elements are of prime importance since hadrons are not point-like
particles, and accordingly, a formalism that describes a point particle with unit
charge and a Dirac magnetic moment is not applicable. To sum up, when what mat-
ters is a manipulation of entities that are ready-to-hand as mathematical symbols,
then obviously the boundary between contexture and context becomes completely
effaced. Yet this effacement does not contradict the thesis of the entanglement of
contextures-of-equipment with contexts of inquiry.
A conclusion reached so far is that the multiplicity of loosely interconnected
contextures-of-equipment in a research process that meaningfully articulates a sci-
entific domain is still not capable (1) of warranting a sui generis facticity of inquiry,
i.e., the self-sufficiency and autonomy of inquiry as a mode of being, and (2) of
disclosing the reality of a domain. The self-sufficiency mentioned is due not to the
contextures (each of them composed of the activities of a single practice) but to the
contexts of the domain’s meaningful articulation. Each context as constituted by a
configuration of scientific practices is characterized by a synergy of readable tech-
nologies and interpenetrating spaces of representation. By this account, to the
domain’s interrelatedness of practices corresponds the domain’s totality of co-
referential contexts (or the domain’s intercontextuality). The term “intercontextual-
ity” also stands for the dissemination/dispersal of meaning over the domain’s actual
and potential contexts of inquiry due to the interrelatedness of practices. (This dis-
semination is facilitated and partially accomplished by the aforementioned semiosis
and the mutual translatability of semiotic systems operating in the research pro-
cess.) Vis-à-vis the distinction between contextures-of-equipment and contexts of
doing research, hermeneutic realism is to be defined as a realism about the meaning-
ful articulation of reality within co-referential contexts of scientific practices, pro-
viding that what becomes articulated is predicated on the way in which what is
ready-to-hand within the contextures-of-equipment is entangled with the
2 Contextures-of-Equipment and Contexts of Inquiry 197
12
Roughly, quantum contextuality is a corollary to Heisenberg’s uncertainty theorem: One and the
same observable might be co-measurable with different sets of observables. This is why the
observable (as identified by measurements) is unavoidably contextualized.
2 Contextures-of-Equipment and Contexts of Inquiry 199
In the main thesis of this section, the meaningful articulation of a scientific domain
consists in the generation of meaning within the circulation of co-translatable semi-
otic systems and overlapping spaces of representation. The domain’s objectification
that runs parallel to its meaningful articulation is due to a transformation of repre-
sentation that takes place within the same circulation. As already noted, the manipu-
lation of entities within a particular contexture-of-equipment and its environment
produces signs that from the very moment of their initiation are – in contrast to the
manipulable entities – beyond the contexture. (In the case of the previously dis-
cussed practice of collider physics, these are signs resulting from a statistical pro-
ceeding of experimental data. The semiotic system of the constructed data models
200 Meaningful Articulation and Objectification of Reality in Scientific Inquiry
becomes translatable into, say, the semiotic system of a quark model stemming from
the analysis of symmetry patterns. The symmetry of the currents is of prime impor-
tance to the electroweak theory. The patterns of symmetry are represented by the
so-called current algebra, which is a semiotic system about quarks’ quantum num-
bers. This semiotic system is on its part translatable into a system representing the
currents in terms of quark fields that satisfy certain equal-time canonical anti-
commutation relations (Paschos 2007, 21–28). I mention this to provide a tentative
illustration of how results obtained in a contexture-of-equipment begin to circulate
in semiotic systems and spaces of representation.)
In taking up the claim of the ubiquity of semiosis, I will argue that the production
of signs in scientific inquiry is always already within the circulation of semiotic
systems. Stating that the manipulable entities are tied to the particular contextures-
of-equipment whereas the signs produced by the manipulation of these entities are
constantly beyond the environmental arrangement of any particular practice of
inquiry is a statement that ought to be construed in connection with the following
claim: Because of the hermeneutic circularity between single contextures-of-
equipment and (the intercontextuality) of the contexts of configured practices, each
contexture is always already within the interplay of practices and possibilities of
inquiry. The production of signs by reading manipulable entities proceeds within
this interplay. Thus, reading entities in a particular contexture does not produce
signs de novo, but rather adopts and elaborates on a system of externally (with
regard to the contexture’s environment) transmitted signs.
In reading manipulable entities and elaborating on externally transmitted signs,
one makes the semiotic outcome of this reading compatible with signs obtained in
other contextures. The production of new signs is impossible without the translation
of signs already produced. This is why I argued that the semiosis in scientific inquiry
is stretched out over the whole facticity of inquiry. The readable technology and the
space of representation which distinguish a particular contexture transmit signs
from one to another practice of inquiry, thereby enabling the circulation of signs
within the interplay of practices and possibilities. Now, the observation that the
manipulability of entities within contextures assumes the continuous production of
signs within the process of inquiry is to be generalized to cover the contexts of con-
figured practices as assuming the same ubiquity of semiosis in the articulation and
objectification of a domain. In a certain context – due to the synergy of readable
technologies and the deferring spaces of representation – a relatively self-sufficient
system of signs comes into being. Yet this system always already takes place within
the intercontextuality of a scientific domain. The intercontextuality owes its exis-
tence to the circulation of systems of signs across the contexts of inquiry.
The circulation has its own hermeneutic device of preserving itself that consists
in the ongoing mutual translatability of the semiotic systems involved in the mean-
ingful articulation and objectification of a scientific domain. Since this translatabil-
ity is not secondary to the aforementioned semiosis but rather affords it, the
circulation generates signs and symbols by translating semiotic systems across
spaces of representation. In the sociology of scientific knowledge there is a tradition
of specifying a class of scientific practices as representational practices (Lynch and
2 Contextures-of-Equipment and Contexts of Inquiry 201
Woolgar 1988). Though this tradition has produced several interesting views, the
hermeneutic realist is not inclined to approve the separation of a special class of
representational practices of inquiry. She rather tries to show that each and every
scientific practice is distinguished by a characteristic space of representation. This
generalization of the representational dimension of scientific research might be vin-
dicated by tackling again the issue of how symbolically embodied representations-
as mediate between the facticity of inquiry and the objectified factuality. It is the
ongoing semiosis in scientific inquiry that tears the research process away from the
particular environment and contextures-of-equipment. This thesis might be inter-
preted in terms of empirical sociology as well as in ontological terms.13
The interpretation in ontological terms concerns the transformation of represen-
tations-as into contextualized representations-of distinguished by stable referents.
This is an ontological transformation that enables epistemic representations-of.
(Roughly, it corresponds to the way in which one accounts for the passage from
utensils that are ready-to-hand to entities that are present-at-hand in in terms of her-
meneutic phenomenology.) The circulation of representations-as and the co-
translatability of semiotic systems are part and parcel of that mode of being which
articulates a domain. The transformation mentioned takes place within this mode,
and is necessary for objectifying the domain. Each context of inquiry has resources
to accomplish this transformation and to single out the referents of semiotic systems
and spaces of representations. These referents become subsequently procedurally
stabilized. (The more intensive and effective the transformation, the closer the the
inquiry to the pole of de-contextualization. However, one has to keep in mind that
the de-contextualization is always contextualized by a configuration of practices.)
When physicists doing research in quantum electrodynamics work with the
gauge theory, they represent mathematically all gauge bosons and fermions as
massless particles. But they are aware that these representations-as are not trans-
formable into representations-of since the photon is the only massless vector parti-
cle that has an identifiable referent for representations-of. In order to carry out the
intended transformation, they elaborate on procedures (like the Higgs mechanism)
that give masses to gauge bosons and fermions. These procedures basically draw on
13
From a sociological viewpoint, the systems of signs transcending the local sites and settings of
knowledge production become means of communication that induce the special inter-subjectivity
of scientific communities. In this regard, the non-localizable semiosis that puts into operation the
circulation of semiotic representations-as is a “transcendental condition” for having scientific com-
munities. The institutionalized networks of communicating scientific results are entitled to inte-
grate these systems in the technical languages of scientific disciplines whereby the intrinsic
translatability of one system into another I discussed earlier becomes to a great extent effaced in
the texts of scientific papers (viewed as second-order representations of the spaces of representa-
tions circulating in the process of inquiry). This effacement takes place for the sake of making
scientific communication more effective. Of course, the different types of scientific papers – pub-
licizing experimental results, techniques of measurements, construction of data models measuring
parameters, descriptions of phenomena to be theoretically conceptualized, useful mathematical
formalisms, theoretical models, etc. – accentuate and scrutinize diverse translations of one semi-
otic system into another. Nonetheless, scientific communication tends to skip details of the intrin-
sic translatability within the circulation of semiotic representations.
202 Meaningful Articulation and Objectification of Reality in Scientific Inquiry
the connection between particle masses and symmetries. In several cases, it is the
breaking of the symmetry that generates a mass term. Spelling out this connection
allows the physicists to gain representations-of particles initially introduced by
means of the gauge theory. The differentiation between the two types of representa-
tion belongs to the semiosis of a scientific domain, and will be tackled below. The
transformation of representations-as into contextual representations-of and the sta-
bilization of referents hinges on the characteristic hermeneutic situation, and is a
part of the domain’s objectification.
Before proceeding further, let us recall that each configuration of scientific prac-
tices that puts into operation a relatively autonomous context of inquiry is at once
meaningfully articulating and objectifying a domain. Such a configuration creates
meaning by representing the outcome of a certain practice (say, the selection of
experimental data exhibiting patterns) in terms of the outcome of another practice
(say, data models measuring parameters related to a phenomenon). There is a trend
in the philosophy of science that – following the lead of Hacking – posits that sci-
entific representation is intrinsically tied to scientific intervention in the physical
world. Scientific instruments are at once knowledge-producing tools and interven-
ing technologies. Thus, computer technology used in the process of inquiry is a
paradigmatic example of technology that in dealing with computational complexity
interweaves representation and intervention (Lenhard 2015, 115). My reticence
regarding this interweavement is elicited by the uncritical receiving of the concept
of representation from Cartesian epistemology. Enriching this concept by assigning
to it an interventionist dimension does not change the situation. Representation –
conceived of as a procedure of displaying structures by means of technological
devices – assumes that there are structures out there waiting to be represented
through intervening in the world which is otherwise a mere presence. Authors
adhering to this trend cogently make the case that the avant-garde technologies in
scientific research manage to deconstruct the very boundary between representing
and intervening. Yet again this is done within the tacitly presupposed framework of
(what Nelson Goodman calls) “the copy theory of representation”. Furthermore, the
way in which the “interventionists” try to deconstruct the boundary mentioned
makes scientific inquiry a kind of engineering activity governed by instrumental
rationality. In this regard, their efforts bring to mind the intimate relation between
this kind of rationality and representational epistemology. It is my contention that
the intervening realist can hardly escape from the pitfall of becoming apologetic
about this relation.
The way in which the hermeneutic realist makes use of the expression of repre-
sentation-as – in contrasting it to the expression of representation-of – is rooted in
two traditions stemming respectively from Goodman’s nominalist (anti-essentialist)
philosophy and hermeneutic phenomenology. In his conception of symbolic repre-
sentation Goodman differentiates between dyadic denotative representation-of and
representation-as (in a sense close to that used here). He argues that the latter is
already at work in the mode in which the human eye functions interpretatively:
What the eye sees “is regulated by need and prejudices. It selects, rejects, organizes,
discriminates, associates, classifies, analyzes, constructs. It does not so much mirror
2 Contextures-of-Equipment and Contexts of Inquiry 203
14
At a certain stage the experimental practice of antiproton production has been related to practices
that the domain’s articulation has subsequently disclaimed. Cases in point are the construction of
models with hypothetical quarks, the elaboration on toy mathematical models, or the search for
further measurable parameters that can be presented by data models as a result of a rejection of the
existence of neutral currents.
15
For more on the ways in which experimental practices in weak interaction physics have been
contextualized at the time when the debate on the existence of neutral currents has been topical, see
Pickering (1984). Pickering’s case study is guided by the dictum that historians should not put the
phenomena studied by physicists first. Instead, they have to prioritize the practices of inquiry. His
case study – based on the assumption that the interpretive practices and the natural phenomena
stand or fall together – pioneers the efforts to demonstrate how the facticity of scientific practices
reveals phenomena and presents them in their objectified factuality. Unfortunately, Pickering – in
line with the constructivist paradigm of accentuating the negotiations – puts too much emphasis on
theorists’ and experimenters’ pragmatic motivations (including the symbiosis of such motiva-
tions), and largely neglects the role of the interpretative constitution of meaning. In hermeneutic
realism, the trans-subjective constitution of meaning is always prior to any motivation for experi-
mental or theoretical construction (and production of phenomena) in scientific inquiry. Had
Pickering taken into consideration the interpretive constitution, he probably would have had better
arguments for coupling practices and phenomena, and (like Barad) would have regarded them in
their inseparability within the facticity of inquiry.
206 Meaningful Articulation and Objectification of Reality in Scientific Inquiry
ways in which the interactions of gravity, the strong force, and electromagnetism
respect the three discrete symmetries (parity, charge conjugation, and time reversal)
in elementary particle physics. It was the resistance in the translatability of such
representations-as that forbade one to include the weak interactions in the list of
interactions respecting the discrete symmetries. As a result, the representations-of
the weak interactions came into being which took the form of theoretical models of
phenomena related to the violation of parity and charge conjugation. These repre-
sentations-of the weak interactions led to the formulation of a central theorem in the
articulation and objectification of quantum electrodynamics: Any local field theory
based on special relativity and quantum mechanics is invariant under the combined
action of parity, charge conjugation, and time reversal. Briefly, the formulation of
this theorem resulted from the resistance that arose in the circulation of semiotic
representations-as causing the models of (representations-of) the weak
interactions.16
Let me express the idea of circulating representations-as in an alternative man-
ner. Within a particular context the spaces of representation – as related to the spe-
cifically configured scientific practices – are interpenetrating each other: The
representation of measurements is already deferred in the space of designing new
experiments, the outcome of experimentation is deferred in the space of interpreting
theoretical models, the data models by means of which one interprets a theoretical
model penetrate the space in which new measurements are initiated, and so on. The
meaning of what is read by a certain technology in its space of representation is to
be seen in the next space corresponding to another readable technology. Stated oth-
erwise, the signs embodying the representation of what is obtained in a contexture-
of-equipment are always already read and bestowed upon meaning within the next
space of representation whereby a semiotic transformation takes place, and the
older system of signs boils down to a new one. This description is convenient for
addressing a process that reverses the transformation discussed so far: the re-
contextualization of representations-of which places them again in the circulation of
representations-as.
What I have in mind is a semiotic transformation that re-contextualizes represen-
tations-of. As a result, the representations-of (as presupposing a stable relation of
denotation) become more or less “swallowed up” by circulating representations-as
within the deferral of spaces of representation. This transformation occurs always
when there is a re-contextualization of the process of inquiry. Thus, to change the
example exploited so far, the equilibrium model of Michaelis and Menten formal-
izes enzyme kinetics in a manner that enables one to introduce stable representa-
tions-of the specificity of enzymatic reactions (as compared with the kinetics of the
non-metabolic chemical reactions). These are representations-of measurable phe-
nomena (constructed through patterned data concerning the change of the reaction
rate and the concentration of a substrate over time) described by a system of
16
The resistance itself can be identified as a historical event by analyzing Lee and Yang’s sugges-
tion that parity is possibly violated by the weak interactions and Wu’s subsequent experimental
proof that these interactions are to be represented as violating this symmetry.
2 Contextures-of-Equipment and Contexts of Inquiry 207
17
In connection with developing a program for a new reconstruction of de Saussure’s project for
semiology, I defend this point in Ginev (2013f).
3 Hermeneutic Circles of Articulation and Objectification in Scientific Research 209
within the facticity of scientific inquiry – a subject to which the Concluding Chapter
is devoted.
differ from other patterns. I would add that this specification proceeds in a charac-
teristic hermeneutic situation. Accordingly, the investigators stipulate within the
facticity of inquiry the patterns they should try to explain as corresponding to phe-
nomena. Explaining patterns in this way is not in the sense that investigators must
discover which patterns ought to be explained. It is the facticity of inquiry (and not
the world-out-there) that decides which patterns one should explain.
The articulation of data should not be restricted to experimentation and measure-
ment. Indeed, data refer to individual events recorded by particular detectors. Yet the
acquisition of data and their interpretation as meaningful units take place in the
hermeneutic circularity of contextual reading where a much larger class of scientific
practices are at work and act in concert. However contingent and indexical the
detected data may be, their recognition as (relevant) data depends on instrumental
technologies and statistical techniques that tacitly participate in the aforementioned
circularity. Allan Franklin (1990, 104) argues that the acceptance of data is based
upon various strategies that “distinguish between a valid observation or measure-
ment and an artifact created by the experimental apparatus.” What is important in
these strategies is that they appeal to scientists’ reflexive attitude toward the whole
interpretative context of constituting data. Accordingly, scientists become commit-
ted to practices of instrumentation that are closely related to several kinds of analyti-
cal practices, always opening more possibilities for data detection than the actually
recorded data in a given context.
The instrumental observations of measurable data are within the horizon of pos-
sibilities for a further calibration of instruments, new manipulations of experimental
entities, a change of the statistical technique for data analysis, a new dealing with
artifacts that are known in advance to be present in the experimental situation, a re-
designing that improves the sensitivity of apparatus, alternative implementations of
the experimental apparatus due to changes in background knowledge, and so on.18
These are as yet (within the current context) non-actualized possibilities for record-
ing data whose appropriation would exceed the bulk of recorded data. The practices
of calibration – called by Franklin (1997, 31–33) an “experimental strategy” for
legitimating the reliability of the achieved results – are perhaps the most important
device for reducing the diversity of data. In Franklin’s approach, calibration is to be
viewed as the use of a surrogate signal to standardize an instrument. What the exper-
iment aims to investigate is unknown phenomena. A substitute for these phenomena
is a signal of supposedly already-known properties. Calibration acquires a status of
experimental strategy when we assume that if “an apparatus reproduces known phe-
nomena (i.e., the known characteristics of the surrogate signal), then we legitimately
strengthen our belief that the apparatus is working properly and that the experimental
18
The Ninov affair (in 1999) shows how strongly the data collection and selection in experiments
in nuclear chemistry is dependent on the complex types of software. The affair concerns not the
accuracy of the experiments, but the correctness of the translation of the computer results into
reports on events taking place in the decay chain of unstable transuranium elements. The affair was
provoked by discovering a fabrication of results that is entirely rooted in the aforementioned trans-
lation. Famously, the re-examination of the data from the experiments confirmed the discoveries of
the two radioactive synthetic elements 111 and 112.
3 Hermeneutic Circles of Articulation and Objectification in Scientific Research 211
results produced with that apparatus are reliable” (Franklin 1997, 31). (Franklin
develops this conception in the aftermath of his debate with Harry Collins about the
capability of calibration to stop the “experimenters’ regress”. Calibration is experi-
mental strategy – so Franklin’s argument goes – because it provides an epistemo-
logical justification [for eschewing the regress] that is independent of social
factors.)
It goes without saying that the statement about the practices of calibration as
strategies for reducing the diversity of data is true under the condition that there is
no plurality of incompatible numerical scales for the measurements. The practices
of calibration prepare and ensure the stability of data which is necessary for con-
structing data models. Thus, these practices play a role in representing phenomena
by measurable data. They manage to do this by means of their own interpretative
resources – in particular, the interpretations they advance of how to convert per-
formed operations with instruments into a definite value of what is measured (Soler
et al. 2013, 282–285).
In adhering to the view that the detection and selection of data is within an open
horizon of interpretation, the hermeneutic realist challenges the validity of the post-
empiricist thesis of theory-ladenness. True, scientific theories interfere on very low
levels of objectification and cognitive structuration of factuality, including the level
of selecting relevant data and constructing an appropriate empirical basis for theo-
rizing. Nevertheless, the thesis is dubious in two respects. First, it can only be for-
mulated by assuming the scheme-content distinction – an assumption that, as
already indicated, the hermeneutic realist denies. Second, and more importantly, the
thesis presupposes an intra-theoretical enclosure of the production of data (cum a
kind of theoretical holism). The observation that something (represented by data)
exists in accordance with a model does not imply that the detected and selected data
are determined by the intrinsic logic of theorizing. Anticipating my further consid-
erations, acquisition and proceeding of data, on the one hand, and construction of
theoretical models, on the other, are involved in an integral hermeneutic circle, but
they are independently fore-structured, and remain open (not determined) within
this circle. Like theorizing itself, the production of data patterned by a model mea-
suring a phenomenon is situated in the horizon of interplaying scientific practices
and possibilities for doing research. Moreover, the hermeneutic realist holds – with-
out disputing the significance of the logical and semantic reconstructions of theo-
retical structures – that the concept of scientific theory has to be reconsidered by
putting the “practices of theorizing” first. There is nothing in the structure of scien-
tific theories that is not constituted by practices like elaborating on equations to
serve as theoretical models, harmonizing semantic interpretations of concepts with
basic equations, adjusting general theoretical formulations to be invariant under
certain transformations, extending a formalism to cover new phenomena by avoid-
ing ad hoc hypotheses, or devising scenarios for testing experimentally theoretical
predictions.
The objections against the thesis of theory-ladenness raised from the viewpoint
of hermeneutic realism are not to be confused with the criticism of this thesis sug-
gested by Bogen and Woodward. According to these authors, the thesis is invalid
212 Meaningful Articulation and Objectification of Reality in Scientific Inquiry
19
Crease makes the case that the emergence of a phenomenon in an experimental situation is
unavoidably involved in a back and forth motion between experimentalists and equipment. The
motion calls into play the fore-having, the fore-seeing, and the fore-conception of the emerging
phenomenon. This triad is informed by both the instrumental equipment and the theoretical prac-
tices surrounding the experimental situation. (On the hermeneutic approaches to experimentation,
see also Heelan (1992), Crease (1992), and Crease (1995).)
3 Hermeneutic Circles of Articulation and Objectification in Scientific Research 213
objectified in this process, I have to note that I am not quite satisfied with the effec-
tiveness of Heelan’s way of distinguishing between what is practically laden and
what is theoretically laden. In my view, he reverses Hanson’s thesis of theory-
ladenness without noting that the interpretive praxis-ladenness is a phenomenon
that is not amenable to a conceptualization in formal-semantic terms.
In Heelan’s argument, scientific data are practically laden since they from the
very outset enter socio-cultural fora. They first enter the public forum of scientific
research, and then “other fora within which individual ‘theoretical entities’ and the
data about them can become cultural entities” (Heelan 1998, 285). But is not the
same argument usable for advocating the cultural-public character of the theoreti-
cally laden scientific instruments and experimental apparatuses? Furthermore, he
argues that the hardware of experimentation is a theory-laden technology because it
is unavoidably overseen by a theory. But if so, then again why not expand the same
argument to the production of data, regardless of how strongly these data would be
subsequently culturally reshaped? It is my contention that these ambiguities in
Heelan’s conception are due to the lack of distinction between meaningful articula-
tion and objectification within inquiry. From the viewpoint of hermeneutic realism,
this is the phenomenological distinction which grounds any – more or less conven-
tional – way of differentiating between theory-ladenness and praxis-ladenness in
the research process.
The hermeneutic circle in which data are collected, selected, and patterned char-
acterizes the initial step in having a meaningful reality amenable to being procedur-
ally objectified. However, this circle – albeit being a primary stage with regard to
the “didactic order” of treating the research process in a scientific domain – takes
place already within the horizon of presenting phenomena through possible data
models. The didactic order of scientific inquiry suggests a transition from data
acquisition to construction of data models.20 The chronological unfolding of the
research process corresponds to this order. Yet it would be a non sequitur, from a
hermeneutic viewpoint, to say that the interpretative circularity of creating data
models is a (subsequent) extension of the primary hermeneutic circle in scientific
research. The detection and selection of data are “always already” within the hori-
zon of possibilities for constructing data models (graphical representations in par-
ticular). A data model – being itself in a horizon of possibilities of conceptualizing
and theorizing – does not determine the selection of data. However, such a model
instructs the experimentalists in the choices of relevant data. Technically speaking,
the possible ways of presenting phenomena by data models inform one about how
to cut the random and systematic errors in data collection. The data models alert one
to possibilities that uncontrolled variables may exercise systematic effects on the
production of data. The construction of data models is entitled also, however, to
serve more sophisticated hermeneutic functions in data collection. Thus, this
20
The research process in several domains (especially in physical chemistry) is characterized by a
sequence of different types of data models (e.g., a numerical representation of data is replaced by
a graphical representation).
3 Hermeneutic Circles of Articulation and Objectification in Scientific Research 215
construction may alert one to wrong expectations stemming from biased preconcep-
tions (Garland et al. 2009, 6).
Bas van Fraassen (2008, 172), following Patrick Suppes’s suggestions, cogently
argues that “through construction of data models the experimentalist is in general
bringing the theoretician small rational structures, constructed carefully from
selected data.” It is the data model as such a small structure (“empirical algebra”)
that can be integrated into a theoretical model’s larger structure. This is why in con-
structing data models, the experimentalist employs practices of idealization as well.
(Thus, the numerical calculations of measured values may involve the practice of
smoothing these values. The practices of noise reduction are perhaps the most com-
plex practices of formal analysis involved in the construction of data models.
Grinnell (2009, 43–45) attractively describes cases in which the experimental prac-
tice manages to transform noise into unexpected data.) The practices of noise reduc-
tion are hidden in the detection of data, but their interplay with the possibilities they
engender affords both this detection and (to a greater extent) the subsequent selec-
tion of data. Furthermore, the idealizing practices in the construction of a small
structure of data open possibilities for representing phenomena by repeatedly mea-
sured parameters. Data models can represent phenomena by means of reading items
that are immediately ready-to-hand under laboratory conditions within contextures-
of-equipment. Following a line of reasoning of the preceding section, data models
are the most typical representational device mediating between contextures of sin-
gle practices and contexts of configured practices. Creating data models by reading
measurable parameters and quantitatively representing phenomena broadens the
horizon of the interplay of practices and possibilities, thereby opening new contexts
of inquiry.
The hermeneutic circularity of constructing data models transcends not only
each of its particular outcomes, but also goes beyond itself as a whole by indicating
a further articulation of meaning related to the theoretical interpretation of the phe-
nomena which these models represent. Here again I would like to stress McAllister’s
view that since all the infinitely many patterns that are exhibited in a data collection
have equal claim to correspond to phenomena, the inquirers are those who stipulate
what to count as a relevant phenomenon to be saved by choosing which pattern is
corresponding to the phenomenon. This is why the phenomena are those patterned
data or data models that the inquirers “intend to study or hope to explain” (McAllister
1997, 224). Let me sum up the point of the preceding considerations: Prima facie
the construction of data models seems to be a (chronological) next step of extending
the hermeneutic circularity of reading/representing by taking into account practices
and possibilities specifically involved in the processing of data. Then again, the
“didactic order” of scientific inquiry is not in agreement with the “hermeneutic
logic” of the reading process since the data collection and selection (by applying, in
particular, filters for reducing noise stemming from various sources) takes place
within the horizon of constructing possible data models that might quantitatively
represent the investigated phenomenon.
A data model is constructed (at least in mathematical physics) from a statistical
analysis of data – an analysis that allows one to summarize relative frequencies of
216 Meaningful Articulation and Objectification of Reality in Scientific Inquiry
21
The identity of object measured is complicated when the measuring apparatus is interacting with
the system to which the object belongs. The issue of entangled measurement is of prime impor-
tance in this regard. The paradigmatic illustration for tackling this issue is the so-called von
Neumann measurement in quantum mechanics: In deviating from the Copenhagen interpretation,
one describes the quantum measurement in quantum-mechanical terms as an interaction between
the measured system and the measuring apparatus. Both ingredients are formally construed as
basic vectors in a Hilbert space. Accordingly, one may arrange entanglement dynamically in a way
in which the final superposition would involve both the system and the apparatus. In so doing, one
would no longer be able to attribute an individual state vector to the system or to the apparatus.
Since the traditional interpretation of measurement is no longer relevant to this case, one has to
take a reflexive stance in order to determine the observables that are measured. The observables are
not uniquely defined by the final state of von Neumann measurement. (For the formal difficulties
in this connection – in particular, the difficulties in coping with simultaneous measurement of non-
commuting observables – see Schlosshauer 2007, 53–58.) Textualizing that involves, in the mean-
ingful articulation of a domain, constitutive interaction between what is measuring and what is
measured leads to (a particular kind of) what I will address under the heading of “reflexive texts”.
3 Hermeneutic Circles of Articulation and Objectification in Scientific Research 217
particular set of measurements and the whole of possible models that might save
this phenomenon. The envisioning of a theoretical object may also take place in
contexts of inquiry that cross two or more domains of inquiry. A case in point is the
construction of data models representing a measurable phenomenon that by being
saved through theoretical resources of a given domain indicates the existence of an
unexpected phenomenon that is beyond the domain’s phenomenal scope, but is
quite relevant to another domain. Interestingly enough, the indicated phenomenon
has been ruled out by data models of the other domain. It is the task of saving it that
leads to envisioning a theoretical object within contexts and spaces of representa-
tion crossing different domains.
Here is an example of the case just mentioned. Within the domain of paleomag-
netism – the studies of the historical changes of the Earth’s magnetic field – the
phenomenon of reverse polarity of this field has been known since as early as the
mid-1950s. Data models for representing and measuring this phenomenon were
constructed from collecting data of lava samples and self-reversing minerals in
rocks pertinent to magnetic measurements. These data models showed that changes
in polarity were not random in time, but “that groups of normal and reverse lavas
followed each other in stratigraphic order and appeared to be time-dependent”
(Opdyke 2003, 97). The phenomenon of reversing polarity of the geomagnetic field
became – after a decade of intensive work on data collection carried out by six
research teams, and in spite of the geophysical community’s skepticism to the phe-
nomenon’s existence – represented by proper data models. Constructing data mod-
els of reverse polarity indicated the possibility of another – strongly rejected by
several scientific communities in the preceding three decades – phenomenon, that of
continental drift. This possibility was nurtured in the early 1960s by paleomagnetic
data models of polar wandering. At that time, one began to relate data of paleomag-
netism and other numerical data – like those collected in surveying the magnetic
anomaly pattern through a marine magnetometer – to data of paleoclimate. Matching
both types of data created data models for representing the phenomenon of conti-
nental drift. Yet this phenomenon could not become saved through the theoretical
models of existing domains.
It was the formation of the domain of plate tectonics which began to provide the
proper theoretical models. The theoretical object they introduced (with reference to
isostasy) was that of the “convection currents in the Earth’s mantle” as the cause of
the horizontal movements of continents. The theoretical models advanced by plate
tectonics were successful in saving phenomena like the sea floor magnetic stripes,
the similarities of magnetic events in terrestrial and sea floor basalts, and the pres-
ervation of a symmetrical pattern of the periodic reversal of the geomagnetic field
by rocks across the ocean floor’s medial rift. The theoretically saved phenomena
envisioned the ways in which the “convection currents in the Earth’s mantle” oper-
ate in such a way as to provide a causal mechanism for continental drift. Plate tec-
tonics succeeded in diversifying the general phenomenon of continental drift in a
series of phenomena, each of them savable by the domain’s particular theoretical
model, and able to envision further the theoretical object in question.
218 Meaningful Articulation and Objectification of Reality in Scientific Inquiry
22
The most serious objection – raised by Albert Lehninger – which the champions of the chemios-
motic theory had to meet was related to the membranes’ impermeability: The occurrence of oxida-
tive phosphorylation is not to be expected if the membranes are badly damaged. The repeating of
the experiments presumably supporting the objection show that submitochondrial particles con-
tained intact membranes.
3 Hermeneutic Circles of Articulation and Objectification in Scientific Research 219
scientific inquiry is fore-structured by the other two stages which – in line with the
integral circularity of inquiry – the practices and possibilities of saving phenomena
and envisioning theoretical objects are fore-structuring.
Here again I have to invoke the image of the integral hermeneutic circle of the
process of inquiry in a scientific domain. The interpretative fore-structuring of the
domain’s reality disclosed in scientific inquiry consists in an integral hermeneutic
circle of meaningful articulation that – by enabling the domain’s objectification –
involves cycles of detecting and selecting data, constructing data models, and sav-
ing phenomena through theoretical models that prompt the acquisition of further
data within the contexts of inquiry. Thanks to this circle the stages of inquiry that are
fore-structured serve the function of fore-structuring as well. The medium wherein
the ongoing and continuous interpretive fore-structuring of a domain’s structuration
takes place is the circulation of representations-as embodied in semiotic systems. In
accordance with the conclusions of the preceding section, this is also the medium of
the non-localizable semiosis of various signs and symbols serving as mediators
between contextures-of-equipment and contexts of inquiry, and operating via their
co-translatability in the transitions from one space of representation into another.
The medium of circulating representations, semiosis, and translatability of semiotic
systems embraces all of the three stages of a domain’s meaningful articulation and
objectification. By implication, the integral hermeneutic circle of the process of
inquiry in a scientific domain takes effect within this medium.
The medium I am discussing is what becomes textualized in the process of
inquiry. Since the integral hermeneutic circle unites the facticity of inquiry (the
interplaying practices and possibilities of the three stages) and the objectified factu-
ality, the “texts” created in scientific inquiry-as-textualizing are the places of
facticity-factuality unity. My efforts now will be directed to clarifying this unity by
having recourse to reading and representing the theoretical objects. As already
pointed out, the interplay of practices and possibilities through which theoretical
objects become partially/contextually envisioned via saving phenomena provides
the broadest horizon of articulation in scientific inquiry. It is this horizon in which
the stage of a domain’s articulation through saving phenomena becomes fore-
structured by the practices and possibilities of the other two stages. Saving a phe-
nomenon by means of a theoretical model remains situated in and transcended by
the interplay of experimental, instrumental, and measuring practices and the possi-
bilities for data selecting, patterning, and arranging in proper order. An articulated
unit of a scientific domain in which a saved phenomenon shows how a theoretical
object is read and represented-as is a textualized expression of the domain’s
reality.
The kind of contextual reading and representing of science’s theoretical objects
as entities (or structures) that might reveal their being through what is ready-to-hand
within contextures-of-equipment is much more complicated than the other kinds of
representation-as in the research process. Yet, to reiterate, it is the reading/representing
of theoretical objects that constitutes relatively autonomous “text” that is amenable
to a further re-contextualization in the articulation of a domain. My point is that
reading and representing theoretical objects contextually is tantamount to the whole
3 Hermeneutic Circles of Articulation and Objectification in Scientific Research 221
23
There is a special class of theoretical objects which are neither introduced by means of hypoth-
esis nor through mathematical idealization. Their existence is rather initially allowed by solutions
of equations. A classic example is the positron as it has been allowed by the Dirac equation. The
debut of such objects in scientific inquiry shows that the dual existence might follow an initial
period of virtual unitary existence. The dual existence of the positron became reality when the
negative-energy electron solution to the Dirac equation was rejected. At this time, possibilities for
other negative-energy solutions to this equations emerged, and they fit the experimental results.
222 Meaningful Articulation and Objectification of Reality in Scientific Inquiry
theoretical objects cease to exist. The answer must be sought again in the theoretical
objects’ special mode of being. As Lorraine Daston argues on various occasions,
theoretical objects’ ways of coming into being and passing away are ingredients of
their biographies. A “biography” of a scientific object in the perspective of historical
epistemology is more a story about a certain mode of being – a claim defended also
by Latour – than a historiographic overview of the strategies of producing knowl-
edge about this object. In developing further Daston and Galison’s (and Latour’s)
approach to historical epistemology, Theodore Arabatzis manages to consider a cer-
tain class of scientific objects – in his words, the class of “non-historical natural
kinds” – as “historical entities”. (These are objects that after being once represented
by conceptualized factuality are no longer distinguished by evolvement in historical
time, e.g., electrons. Any of them emerges “when various phenomena coalesce as
manifestations of a single hidden entity” (Arabatzis 2011, 385). Nevertheless, they
have historicity when at stake are their cultural-historical biographies.) From the
viewpoint of hermeneutic realism, Arabatzis addresses the historicity of scientific
objects as existing in the facticity of inquiry. He deals with the way in which these
objects come into being, and exist under culturally stipulated conditions. The her-
meneutic realist handles the biographies of science’s theoretical objects by follow-
ing the view of interpretative internalism in the first place.
The preceding considerations touch upon an issue that concerns the argument
against equating theoretical objects with theoretical concepts/terms (Ginev 2015a,
107–122). Starting with Carnap’s intention to approach theoretical terms in a man-
ner that would dissolve rather than solve the ontic dispute between realism and
instrumentalism, the tendency to transforming the whole discussion about these
terms into an entirely methodological discussion has become a winning trend in the
analytical philosophy of science (Friedman 2011). The hermeneutic realist supports
this Carnapian trend since the alternative trends which relate the discussion to ontic
issues are reifying science’s theoretical terms. Yet she is convinced that the method-
ological discussion of these terms has nothing to do with the “biographies” of sci-
ence’s theoretical objects. Theoretical terms are elements of theory’s conceptual
organization, and their intra-theoretical role is defined by this organization, whereas
theoretical objects are meaningfully constituted within particular modes of being-
in-the-world. It is the strong insistence on theoretical objects’ non-identification
with theoretical concepts that distinguishes hermeneutic realism’s approach to these
objects from the approaches to the non-observational entities designated by theo-
retical terms as these approaches are suggested in the realism debate. Within this
debate the issue of how to identify science’s non-observational entities is an episte-
mological and/or a semantic issue. For the hermeneutic realist, the existence of
science’s theoretical objects is an ontological subject. In handling this subject, she
is not interested in – or at least does not privilege the theme of – how a scientific
theory contributes to the interpretation of its primitive (theoretical) terms.
Differentiating between theoretical terms and theoretical objects makes sense only
in connection with the ontological difference between factuality and facticity.
Furthermore, the hermeneutic realist is not preoccupied with how to make sense
of the distinction between observational and theoretical terms. (She is also not
3 Hermeneutic Circles of Articulation and Objectification in Scientific Research 223
engaged with the views which discard this distinction by means of epistemological/
semantic arguments.) The basic difference between the ontological approach to
theoretical objects advanced by hermeneutic realism and the approaches to the theo-
retical terms is most drastic with respect to the issue of contextualization. The deter-
mination of the meaning of a theoretical term invokes the so-called contextual
theory of meaning. According to the latter, the extension (Frege’s meaning) of a
theoretical term is defined by the theory’s axioms, but its intension (Frege’s sense)
depends on a theoretical model that contextualizes the semantic interpretation of
these axioms. This view of contextualization was already rejected as ignoring the
very contextualization of the theory’s construction.
In assuming the primacy of the theory’s conceptual organization (and supporting
scientific realism), one is doomed to look for an observable referent for each theo-
retical term, granted that this referent somehow represents the unobservable entities
and properties which the term expresses. From the viewpoint of hermeneutic real-
ism, a theoretical object does not amount to a theoretical term with a possible
observable referent. From this viewpoint, the birthplace of science’s theoretical
objects – whether they are introduced by a hypothesis, or determined through theo-
ry’s axioms, or through mathematical idealizations, or by a convention (in Poincaré’s
sense)24 – is the facticity of inquiry. By contrast, the theoretical terms exist only
within conceptual frameworks whereby they get factual content. Consequently,
these terms have a debut after the formation of an epistemic relationship within the
facticity of inquiry. Scientific theories (as conceptual frameworks) fix the (seman-
tic) meanings of the theoretical terms by assigning to each of them an observable
referent and factual content.25 This fixation results from a conceptualization (within
theory) of certain contextual interpretations of a theoretical object.
By the same token, the factual content of a theoretical term becomes intra-
theoretically fixed by disentangling a limited number of a theoretical object’s con-
textual interpretations from the ongoing interplay of practices and possibilities. By
contrast, the theoretical object is never “fixed” by a theory since its meaning (and
mode of being) is projected upon possibilities that always already transcend each
and every conceptualization of factuality. This is why I am holding that a theoretical
object has first and foremost a being in the facticity of meaningful articulation,
regardless of whether it is designated by a proper term. Once emerged from this
facticity, the theoretical object becomes constantly exposed to a pertinent conceptu-
alization and an intra-theoretical stylization that make it expressible via theoretical
terms with fixed factual content. Yet again, framing theoretical objects in conceptual
24
More precisely, the conventional stipulation refers to the mathematical structure with which the
theoretical object is associated.
25
Anjan Chakrvartty (2007, 14–15) points out that in the heyday of the post-empiricist philosophy
of science (from the early 1960s to the early 1980s) the expression of “theoretical term” was stan-
dardly used to denote terms for unobservables, but nowadays it is used to refer to any scientific
term. With regard to the expression’s older meaning, Chakrvartty differentiates between theoretical
terms denoting detectable unobservables and terms referring to undetectable unobservables (enti-
ties and processes that are neither observable nor detectable, but whose existence one posits for
theoretical and explanatory reasons).
224 Meaningful Articulation and Objectification of Reality in Scientific Inquiry
frameworks is only one among many possible ways of contextualizing these objects
in the course of a domain’s articulation and objectification. Bluntly, any configura-
tion of scientific practices directly or indirectly aims at conceptualizing a theoretical
object.
One might argue (in a Kuhn-like manner) that a theoretical object vanishes when
the believers in its existence – like members of scientific communities – pass away.
Yet this conclusion is at odds with hermeneutic realism. The existence of a theoreti-
cal object does not depend on the collective subjectivity of the believers’ community
since this existence is “inscribed” on a trans-subjective horizon of possibilities for
the object’s contextual interpretations and ways of its envisioning through saving
phenomena. These possibilities keep being projected even when all believers have
passed away. (Hypothetically, an “officially dead” theoretical object might become
revived if a new trend of inquiry appropriates possibilities that will make the object
contextually envisioned.) A theoretical object ceases to exist when the whole factic-
ity of scientific inquiry – qua a particular mode of being-in-the-world – becomes
superseded by completely different interplay of scientific practices and possibilities
for doing research.
This case is clearly epitomized by the destiny of phlogiston. Analytical philoso-
phers of science often use the construct of phlogiston as an example for a theoretical
term defined within a theory that – despite its explanatory (and even predictive)
power – is unable to specify the term’s observable referent. Because of this special
status, the story of phlogiston seems to provide a convenient historical episode for
vindicating structural realism. In structuralist reconstructions, the phlogiston theory
establishes – in terms either of the dephlogistification of the fuel or metal, or the
phlogistification of the air – empirical regularities concerning various chemical pro-
cesses. Standard realists fail to explain this success in their usual manner – through
appealing to the theory’s approximate truth. By contrast, structural realism explains
this success by analyzing the unobservable structural process posited by phlogiston
theory. In the suggested explanation, the posited structure/process succeeded in uni-
fying various kinds of observable process, thereby enabling the chemists to make
successful theoretical predictions.26
26
See, in particular, Ladyman (2011). In this article the case study of the phlogiston theory is
entitled to show not only the priority of scientific structuralism over standard realism but also the
primacy of ontic structural realism over the epistemic version of this realist position. Structural
realists have designed several ingenious case studies of the replacement of phlogiston theory by
oxygen theory with the aim of forging proper arguments against standard scientific realism.
Though phlogiston is without factual content, it seems to have been a useful fictional construct
enabling unifying explanations of a wide range of processes from respiration to combustion. For
ontic and epistemic structural realists, this conclusion is important, for it shows that the regularities
unveiled by the superseded theory remain valid in oxygen theory; i.e., something like a structure –
an unobservable network of relations underlying the observable processes – has been preserved
after the theory replacement. Structural realists dismiss phlogiston, but do justice to the structure
(as related to empirical regularities) which emerged through the explanatory application of phlo-
giston to processes as diverse as the calcination of metals, ordinary combustion, and respiration. I
agree with Gerald Doppelt’s argument against the structural realists’ account of the successes of
phlogiston theory. For Doppelt (2011, 296), this account “assumes the truth of current chemistry’s
3 Hermeneutic Circles of Articulation and Objectification in Scientific Research 225
How does the death of phlogiston look from the viewpoint of hermeneutic real-
ism? Seen from a historiographic perspective, it was not the oxygen theory that
annihilated the horizon of making sense of phlogiston. In other words, even after the
rise of this theory there was a wide range of possible phenomena that were amena-
ble to being saved by evoking the envisioning of phlogiston. François Rouelle’s
revising reading of Stahl’s theory led to a differentiation between phlogiston as
principle (in the sense of the Aristotelian triad of principles, qualities, and virtues)
and as the matter of fire, and opened a new horizon of possibilities for making sense
of this theoretical object. Interestingly enough, for those who followed Rouelle’s
version of phlogiston theory, the treatment of phlogiston as principle and the non-
quantitative experimental study of its role in chemical processes prevent them from
becoming committed to the quest of reducing chemistry to physics. This position is
documented by the article on chemistry in the Encyclopedia written by a pupil of
Rouelle. Phlogiston as a theoretical object “died” after the horizon mentioned began
drastically to diminish, thereby ceasing to be a horizon of anti-reductionist expecta-
tions for affirming chemistry as an autonomous science. It was the development of
imageries and conceptual figures for chemical affinities as being based on causal
laws of physics whereby Newtonian dynamics made an inroad into chemistry – and
not the oxygen theory – that made phlogiston as principle meaningless.
Although no more than a fictional object, phlogiston has been existing not only
in the imaginative minds of its creators but in all research contexts in which it has
been envisioned (read and represented). Being envisioned in the facticity of a cer-
tain kind of scientific inquiry, phlogiston has had a meaningful existence within the
mode of existence corresponding to that facticity. Phlogiston “died” when the fac-
ticity of its meaningful existence was “worn out”. The shrinking horizon of possi-
bilities for its envisioning was the forerunner of the coming death of this theoretical
object. The theoretical term of phlogiston could have transmitted its structural-
explanatory potential in post-Lavoisier chemistry. But this does not change the
“biography” (in Daston’s sense) of the theoretical object of phlogiston. The end of
this biography occurs when there are no longer possibilities for doing research
whose appropriation would make sense of phlogiston as a meaningful entity. A
theoretical object cease to exist when there is no open horizon upon which the
object’s potentiality-for-being can be projected. (This conclusion is confirmed by
Douglas Allchin’s (1997) study of the destiny of the “high-energy intermediates of
ox-phos” that was already discussed in another chapter. The identification of and the
way of envisioning this theoretical object have been vigorously pursued by promi-
nent biochemists in the period from the early 1950s to the mid-1970s. Allchin makes
the case that objectified factuality about the existence of the high-energy intermedi-
ates has been actively constructed. This factuality consists not in artifacts but in
“erroneous facts”, given that the latter acquire this status when evidence leads the
researchers to see them as facts belonging to another domain. [By his account,
ontological claims concerning oxygenation and reduction. This assumption violates structuralists’
key claim that the truth of such theoretical posits cannot be known or used to explain the success
of scientific theories.”
226 Meaningful Articulation and Objectification of Reality in Scientific Inquiry
artifacts in experimental research work are those that lost their epistemic value as
causal relationships became better known.] The believers in the high-energy inter-
mediates “did view nature” (Allchin), and in following their belief, they produced
important facts that “expressed nature”. However, these facts gained their meanings
not through envisioning the theoretical object in question, but by being tied (in each
particular case) to another domain [such as the domain of NAD coupling]. Making
facts meaningful in this way is an indication that there is no longer an open horizon
of possibilities for envisioning certain theoretical object within the original domain
of inquiry.)
An extant theoretical object is, as it were, scattered over its possible contextual
readings and representations (and, by implication, over a greater diversity of
contextures-of-equipment). The object’s being is distinguished by a growing “dis-
persal” of its contextual identifications (Ginev 2008b). The ways in which one
ascribes contextualized empirical identities to a theoretical object are dictated by
the scenarios of how to save particular phenomena. Theoretical objects are existing
in both factuality and facticity – and accordingly, in the ontic-ontological difference
and unity of reality (as being objectified and being projected upon a horizon of pos-
sibilities). Their being is (a) contextually scattered, (b) characterized by absent
presence with regard to the attempts of their comprehensive factual identification,
and (c) distinguished with a potential “inexhaustibility” with respect to their pos-
sible interpretations. This claim opposes at once the view that theoretical objects
are predicated on actual presence in the hypostatized factual reality, and the view
that they are but convenient instruments for conceptualization and conceptual orga-
nization of data. As already mentioned in the Introductory Chapter, the claim con-
fronts the empiricist doctrine of observability which presumes that there is actually
present meaning – contained in the terms referring to theoretical objects – waiting
to be made explicit by unfolding an observational (experiential) language. In this
doctrine, the meaning of a theoretical term is fixed and can be “exhausted” without
remainder by explicating the empirical basis that makes this meaning observable.
Yet if theoretical objects are never totally envisioned and interpreted, then it seems
plausible to assume that they are Platonic entities whose existence per se is not to be
achieved (and in this sense, not to be exhausted). With this assumption, a theoretical
object should be interpreted as an essence that remains invariant within potentially
infinite variations. The hermeneutic realist strongly denies this essentialist interpre-
tation of theoretical objects’ mode of existence. More specifically, she holds that
theoretical objects’ being is not determined by a mathematical, mental, or physical
essence that is beyond contextualization and meaningful articulation.
The thesis that all entities taking place in scientific inquiry are meaningfully
constituted in the research process sounds very much like the neo-Kantian dictum
that scientific entities are not prior to scientific theorizing. The spread of Kantian
attitudes toward the mode of being of theoretical objects was recently promoted in
the analytical philosophy of science by the reception of Ernst Cassirer’s form of
structuralism about the theories in physics.27 According to Cassirer, objects like
27
See in particular French and Ladyman (2003a), Massimi (2005, 28–31), and Massimi (2011).
4 The Absent Presence of Science’s Theoretical Objects 227
atoms or electrons can only be defined implicitly by having recourse to the struc-
tures through which they have been introduced. Epistemic structural realists follow
this tenet when denying the existence of autonomous objects beyond or behind
structures. But their commitment to neo-Kantianism is by no means limited to that
point only. They believe in the existence of a whole “architectonic of scientific
knowledge” that – as a regulative and not a constitutive a priori – regulates scientific
inquiry. More specifically, it regulates the quest for good epistemic conditions under
which assertions about unobservable theoretical objects (as embedded in structures)
would be justifiable. Since the architectonic of scientific knowledge fulfills its regu-
lative function in inquiry via the process of theory construction, there are no scien-
tific entities (including theoretical objects) prior to theorizing. Scientific theorizing
is fixing (by means of mathematical structures) the aforementioned epistemic con-
ditions which are envisioned in a regulative-aprioristic manner by the architecton-
ic.28 Against this view, hermeneutic realism states that there is no architectonic of
scientific knowledge prior to the facticity of scientific inquiry.
From a slightly different perspective, the conclusion reached in the preceding sec-
tion can be expressed as follows. Science’s theoretical objects are neither entities in
themselves nor entities postulated by theories to serve the function of useful fictions
in saving phenomena. The total interpretation of a theoretical object is beyond the
“reading potential” of any particular context of inquiry: There is no context in which
one might accomplish an exhaustive interpretation of a theoretical object. Each
theoretical object has a potentiality of being in intercontextuality. (By “exhaustive
interpretation” I mean one that would eliminate the need of a further interpretative
re-contextualization of the object.) More importantly, a theoretical object is not only
interpretatively inexhaustible within the particular configurations of practices, but
each new contextualization of such an object extends the possibilities of its further
reading, provided that the horizon of the domain’s meaningful articulation is not
shrinking. I will briefly track the “destiny” or the “biography” of the theoretical
object “enzymes” in order to put flesh on my discussion. In what follows, first a
quasi-historiographic description of symptomatic conceptual and empirical
28
Cassirer describes the architectonic as involving results of measurement, laws, and principles.
The principles prescribe the form of laws. But neither the principles nor the laws operate outside
the space of measurements. In the internalist perspective of this architectonic, one determines the
criteria for identifying entities and the conditions under which scientific knowledge defines the
references of the unobservable objects. The way in which scientific structuralists of different sorts
receive Cassirer’s views might be criticized from a broader perspective that specifies the place of
this “architectonic view” in the whole of his philosophy. Cassirer is by no means a Kantian struc-
turalist. The architectonic of scientific knowledge is part of his dynamic-processual theory of sym-
bolism in which the anti-structuralist thesis of the priority of the constitution of symbols over the
linguistic structures occupies a central place (Krois 2011, 11–14).
228 Meaningful Articulation and Objectification of Reality in Scientific Inquiry
29
Theoretical biology’s dominant paradigm of the late nineteenth century prohibited the existence
of Kühne’s enzymes. In this paradigm, the synthesis and transportation of materials in living
organisms are accomplished by biochemical reactions within cells, but without any catalytic par-
ticipation of extracellular ferments in these reactions.
4 The Absent Presence of Science’s Theoretical Objects 229
a further envisioning of the object was achieved by identifying enzymes that hydro-
lyze a substrate to oxidizable forms. Yet the progress in extracting enzymes catalyz-
ing other reactions than hydrolysis was for a long period not impressive. This failure
created the belief that the enzymes are only able to catalyze relatively simple bio-
chemical reactions.
In the year 1894, three years before Buchner’s epochal discovery that sugar is
fermented by yeast extracts, Emil Fischer speculatively figured out a context of
conceptualizing enzymes that several decades later – after the introduction of repre-
sentational devices of protein structure by means of X-ray diffraction analysis, and
the development of models of the tertiary structure of macromolecules – would
become a basic research trend in enzymes’ structural envisioning. What Fischer
began to constitute was the context of modeling the work of enzymes in terms of
stereochemistry. Fischer’s experimental investigation of the role of “albuminoid
substances” in the living cells led him to the conclusion that the molecular asym-
metry – and more generally, the “geometrical structure” of the molecules – is cru-
cial in the enzymatic catalysis. This conclusion was the hour of birth of the “lock
and key” model entitled to explain the enzymes’ activity through complementary
geometric shapes of the enzyme and the substrate.30 The research work in this con-
text of identifying enzymes would reach its apex in Daniel Koshland’s model of the
continuous reshaping during enzyme-substrate interactions suggested in 1958.
Envisioning the theoretical object enzymes by predominantly paying attention to
the geometrical structure of molecules hinted at possibilities for doing research
whose appropriation gradually eliminated the difference between the chemical
activity of living cells and the activity of chemical reagents (in particular, reagents
distinguished by molecular asymmetry) (Fruton 2006, 70). This development
opened an avenue to the initial version of the enzyme theory of metabolism in which
the distinction between vital and enzyme action definitely vanished.
Immediately upon Buchner’s discovery, a reaction against dethroning living pro-
toplasm in favor of zymase began to take shape. It was not easy to annul the domi-
nant view that all metabolic processes are carried out by the whole living protoplasm.
The reaction against extracellular enzymes was inspired by motifs coming from
physiological chemistry and the Liebig-Pasteur dispute. Richard Neumeister, who –
though accepting cell-free fermentation – insisted that fermentation is too complex
a process to be reduced to the catalytic role of zymase, called into question that
enzymes even exist. He argued that enzymes could not play a role in glycolysis or
in the cleavage of sugar to alcohol and carbon dioxide. For an externalist historian
of science like Robert Kohler (1972), the acceptance of zymase was a social
phenomenon. Yet the clash between the “emerging enzymologists” and the adepts
30
Very soon, however, enzyme identification by means of stereochemistry was cast into doubt by
the discovery of enzymatic reactions for which the lock and key model is invalid. Nonetheless, the
theoretical model of how appropriately shaped substrate molecules fit into the lock (enzyme) was
the first case of saving the phenomenon of extracellular fermentation by means of a theoretical
model. Starting from this case, the search for envisioning (reading and representing) the enzymes
would be carried out by broadening the practices of constructing models that might formalize the
kinetics of enzyme catalyzed reactions.
230 Meaningful Articulation and Objectification of Reality in Scientific Inquiry
theoretical object “enzymes” as that factor that mediates between the process stud-
ied by physiological genetics and the processes studied by biochemistry. The exper-
imental practice launched by Beadle and Tatum is nowadays considered to be the
birthplace of “biochemical genetics” and a forerunner of molecular biology. Yet the
hypothesis “one gene-one enzyme” was strongly modified (if not refuted) soon after
the introduction of the new experimental practice. Research work in the period from
the late 1940s to the late 1950s shows that it is impossible to envision enzymes as
localized units determined by genes. What can be envisioned is the strong depen-
dence of the production of polypeptide chains by genes – a result that promoted the
research work in molecular genetics.
The constitution of contexts envisioning enzymes in the period immediately
upon the emergence of biochemical genetics and molecular biology was marked by
a kind of “division of labor” regarding the fourfold (material, structural, functional,
and formal) problematic of identification. One constructed graph and diagram data
models describing enzymes’ functional properties by acquiring and proceeding data
about molecular structures, and looking for formalized theoretical models (includ-
ing mathematical plots about the kinetics of the catalyzed reactions) pertinent to the
constructed data models. However, this cooperation led to new forms of divergence
among the lines of identification. The research history of DNA polymerase provides
an illustration in this regard. (The research concentrating on the so-called Klenow
fragment, which lacks a certain activity of DNA polymerase I, was contextualized
by configurations of molecular-biological practices like those investigating the syn-
thesis of DNA molecules from single-stranded templates, while the studies of the
activities of the whole enzyme were contextualized via practices dominated by
in vivo experimentation on mutants deficient in this enzyme. Thus, the Klenow frag-
ment was envisioned more as a structural entity, while the whole enzyme was identi-
fied more by the functions it serves.)
It should be emphasized, however, that the theoretical object “enzymes” is much
more homogeneously envisioned in contexts of inquiry than another famous bio-
logical object with a hypothetical status: the theoretical object “genes”. In charac-
terizing the gene as a “hypothetical construct”, Raphael Falk shows that the quest
for envisioning the discrete elementary material units of heredity has proceeded
within contexts of inquiry that are hardly to be aligned.
Once having been identified as a Mendelian unit serving the function of a means
to differentiate the phenotypic variability from the genotypic variability, and later
(in the period of “Drosophila genetics”) as a “material unit located in the chromo-
somes” (Thomas H. Morgan) that (again in connection with Beadle and Tatum’s
hypothesis) determines properties while not being determined by protein’s proper-
ties, the gene became in the 1960s a clearly identifiable object: a spatial elementary
unity of heredity, localized as a sequence of nucleotides of DNA. As is well known,
nowadays the conviction prevails that the reference to the gene as a discrete and
concrete entity of DNA could not be maintained (Falk 1986, 135). It was Jacob and
Monod’s model of genetic regulation and especially the models of the “develop-
mental gene” that definitely broke with the atomistic-reductionist view of this
object. At first glance, there are (in the history of the biological approaches to
234 Meaningful Articulation and Objectification of Reality in Scientific Inquiry
but the discrepancies among these contexts are not to be overcome in a definitive
manner.
In drawing attention to the discrepancies among the contexts of envisioning
“enzymes”, I am far from asserting that today the theoretical object “enzymes”
exists pluralistically in the growing divergence of its four lines of identification and
contextual envisioning. To be sure, every working biochemist recognizes enzymes –
in her routine laboratory everydayness – as something monolithic and distinguished
by a clear empirical identity. Yet, again, if one looks at the possibilities for new
contextual identifications, one would see tendencies to growing dissonances – I
even dare to say discrepancies – among the four ways of reading and representing
enzymes even within the routine of “normal science”. Moreover, each of the lines of
investigating enzymes discloses and articulates the reality of enzymatic catalysis in
a characteristic hermeneutic situation. Even in the period 1920–1950 there were
complicated processes of convergence and divergence among the lines of formal,
material, structural, and functional envisioning of this theoretical object. In the post-
war period the “dispersal” of the object’s existence in contexts of its envisioning
became intensified. What I would like to stress by making this observation is the
impossibility to depict an idealized image of enzymes – supposedly revealing the
object’s “intrinsic identity” – that might serve as a “regulative essence” to be
approximated in all contexts of inquiry. (In stating this, I am countering those her-
meneutic philosophers of science who believe that bringing Heidegger’s concept of
formal indication to bear on the analysis of tendencies of doing research might
reveal hidden regulators in the articulation of scientific domains.)
As a matter of fact, the story about the pluralist being of this theoretical object is
much more complicated. At the beginning of the 1980s an “event” took place in
enzymology that had much more far-reaching implications than any re-
contextualization that has had happened before. I am referring to implications not
only for the domain, but for the role which biochemistry might play in understand-
ing the genesis and nature of life on Earth. (By “event” I mean not the appearance
of a new context, but a radical change of the horizon of possibilities for doing
research whereby the whole domain becomes disclosed anew.) Phrased alterna-
tively, the “event” was not on the same level at which the new readings and repre-
sentations of the domain’s central theoretical object had happened in the preceding
70 years. The changes which it provoked were on a much bigger scale than those on
which the emergence of any of the four lines of enzymes’ envisioning – and the cor-
responding forms of the domain’s textualizing – had been created. What took place
was the introduction of a new theoretical object – “ribozymes (RNA catalysts) and
ribonucleoprotein enzymes” – in studying the catalysis of biochemical reactions.
Though engendered by the experimental search for new structural and biochemical
data models that might represent new facets of protein enzymes, the way of intro-
ducing ribozymes as a theoretical object was not to be subsumed under the heading
of re-contextualization within the historically established interplay of practices and
possibilities. It was rather a “revolutionary twist” in the meaningful articulation of
enzymology. As a result, it became clear that the central dogma of this domain – all
236 Meaningful Articulation and Objectification of Reality in Scientific Inquiry
metabolic reactions are catalyzed by proteins (folded chains of amino acids) and
cofactors (non-protein molecules) – is no longer valid.
In 1982 a team of researchers published in the journal Cell a paper devoted to the
phenomenon of “self-splicing RNA”. The paper describes data obtained by means
of experimentation with the production of a kind of RNA that underwent splicing (a
modification of the pre-messenger RNA molecule that is necessary for the produc-
tion of protein through translation). The authors dared to conclude that splicing
activity is intrinsic to the structure of the RNA, and that enzymes are unnecessary
for this reaction.31 According to this conclusion, a certain portion of the RNA has
enzyme-like properties that enable it to break and reform phosphodiester bonds.
Twenty-five years after these experiments (when meanwhile the studies on the cata-
lytic functions of RNA had become a well-established subdomain of enzymology),
Thomas Cech – the leading figure of the 1982 research team, who shared the 1989
Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his research in the catalytic properties of RNA – wrote
that when the team announced the initial experimental data about the self-splicing
RNA with enzyme-like properties, “it required a bit of daring to speak of catalytic
RNA” (Cech 2008, vii). It was discovered (before the end of the 1980s) that the
molecule of the catalytic RNA – just like the molecule of any protein enzyme – must
be correctly folded into the conformation required for catalytic activity. The careful
selection of data in this period brought into play a significant molecular-genetic
result: ribozymes are (at least some of them) introns (nucleotide sequences within
genes) that must be regarded as being able to encode proteins required for the pro-
cessing of DNA and RNA. Thus, ribozymes as introns are “multitalented mole-
cules”, and not “junk”.
In 1994 the first three-dimensional structure of a catalytic RNA was published,
thereby providing the initial structural data for representing the phenomenality of
the new catalytic mechanisms. This step in the “legalization” of ribozymes as an
autonomous theoretical object had the same importance which the chemical identi-
fication of protein catalysts had shown for the legalization of enzymes. (At the end
of the 1990s, the belief gained currency that the data collected by cooperation of
structural and functional studies of ribozymes could be organized to represent cata-
lytic phenomena that on their part would be saved by means of mechanistic theoreti-
cal models. However, growing disagreement between biochemical and structural
data compromised to some extent this belief.)
A crucial point in the emancipation of the subdomain was the experimental con-
struction of data models for an important observable phenomenon: the ribosome is
characterized by a catalytic activity whose active site (for a certain reaction) is com-
posed entirely of RNA. Saving this phenomenon by means of a theoretical model
would have meant the non-derivability of the theoretical object “ribozymes” from
the “behavior” of other theoretical objects. The question as to whether such a
model – through which the ribosome as a whole can be interpreted as a ribozyme –
31
Shortly afterwards, another research team working at Yale University discovered a similarly
independent catalytic RNA when experimenting with a certain enzyme in the bacteria Escherichia
coli.
4 The Absent Presence of Science’s Theoretical Objects 237
32
A typical motif is the “hammerhead RNA catalysis”. In this motif, two RNA strands work in
concert, one of which becomes cleaved, thereby enabling a trans-acting catalytic regime. The
multiple turnover (i.e., the number of the substrate’s molecules that a ribozyme can convert, via its
catalytic site, to product) obeys the same rate equations which characterize the enzyme kinetics.
33
The possibility of saving this phenomenon through a theoretical model precisely opened a win-
dow into the way of studying ribozymes as playing a key role in the evolution of life on Earth. All
traditional theories of the macromolecular genesis of life face a “chicken and egg” dilemma since
both proteins and translation systems seem to require for their own origin the prior existence of the
other. (In the 1960s and 1970s several biologists asked how did DNA make the proteins and repli-
cate itself, before it had made some enzymes for which it needed some enzymes.) Ribozymes
provide a way out of this dilemma: If there is a kind of RNA that is simultaneously an informa-
tional and a catalytic macromolecule, then this kind might be considered as a remnant of the “RNA
world” that might have existed around 3.5 billion years ago. The proponents of this hypothesis
admit that the “RNA world” would have been short lived, being swiftly replaced by polypeptides
that it would have produced (see Tarasow et al. 1997; Unrau and Bartel 1998; Lilley and Eckstein
2008; Joyce 2002). This is why some of the ribozymes that currently exist are regarded as possible
“molecular fossils” or “relics”. It is an open question as to whether structural and functional data
obtained from the study of these fossils might be used as data models for representing theoretically
savable unobservable phenomena that are capable of confirming the “RNA world” hypothesis. (In
another formulation of this hypothesis, DNA- and protein-based life was preceded by a kind of
RNA that acted as both a genetic material and cellular enzymes.)
238 Meaningful Articulation and Objectification of Reality in Scientific Inquiry
experimental data in data models is the first step in saving unobservable phenom-
ena. Yet the relationship between data models and theoretical moments is not the
same in both kinds of scientific inquiry.
Michela Massimi nicely pinpoints the specificity of the unobservable phenom-
ena – each of them initially registered as an unexpected value of a function or a
parameter – in high-energy physics.34 (The range of possible expectation values is
determined by the models of a pertinent background theory.) According to her, an
unobservable phenomenon “is not idiosyncratic to the context in which it originally
appears, but it emerges from different contexts, namely, from other functions involv-
ing completely different parameters and data” (Massimi 2007, 248). It is a long way
from working out experimental outputs (through statistical selection and computer
simulation) to representing an unobservable phenomenon via data models (that are
capable of measuring parameters), and finally envisioning a theoretical object by
means of saving the represented phenomenon within a theoretical model. (A satis-
factory or reliable data model must “guarantee” that the unexpected value is not due
to experimental errors or side factors.) This long way involves a proof of a genuine
validity (i.e., a validity in multiple contexts of experimentation) of the unobservable
phenomenon which indicate the theoretical object’s existence. An additional diffi-
culty stems from the justified assumption that the theoretical model might envis-
age – in saving the unobservable phenomenon – not the intended theoretical object,
but “hidden parameters” and/or the behavior of other theoretical entities. Obviously,
there is a need for an effective procedure for identifying (envisioning) the intended
object within the experimentally represented unobserved phenomenon.
In most of the biological domains of inquiry (including the domains of biochem-
istry and molecular genetics) the data models cannot be represented as substructures
of theoretical models’ formal structures. (Even when the formalism consists in
dynamic equations, it is hard to organize the data models as “empirical algebras”.)
Van Fraassen’s requirement of “embeddedness” – the theoretical models’ empirical
interpretations must fit data models whereby the latter becomes embedded as sub-
structures in the theoretical models – as providing a sufficient condition for saving
phenomena is only met in a small number of phenomena conceptualized in theoreti-
cal biology. (Phenomena of enzyme-substrate reactions that obey the Michaelis-
Menten equations are a germane case in point.) A weaker and more tolerant criterion/
requirement is in need when one discusses the appropriateness of the data outputs’
theoretical interpretations in the biological domains. At the same time, weakening
this criterion shortens the way from experimental outputs to envisioning a theoreti-
cal object. The experimental output which supposedly represents an unobservable
phenomenon is directly related to the theoretical object. (The whole development of
enzymology until the birth of molecular biology was characterized by envisioning
34
A case in point of unexpected values – carefully analyzed by Massimi – was the number of
hadronic events in the October Revolution from the fall of 1974 as related to the envisioning of the
psi particle.
4 The Absent Presence of Science’s Theoretical Objects 239
35
Here is a typical statement of leading researchers: “Rather than being divided into ribozymes and
protein enzymes, biological catalysts occupy a true continuum, from RNA machines without or
with protein cofactors, to RNP with RNA active site, to RNP machines with protein active site, to
many protein enzymes with nucleotide-base cofactors, to pure polypeptide catalysts” (Hoogstraten
and Sumita 2007, 319).
240 Meaningful Articulation and Objectification of Reality in Scientific Inquiry
some. I would not say that the new ideas triggered a kind of hypothesis about the
evolution of macromolecules. A much more correct approach to this “event” would
be a description in terms of a re-contextualization that integrates practices of evolu-
tionary biochemistry in the articulation and objectification of enzymology.
Envisioning ribozymes in this context requires answering questions of (1) how
RNA-only catalysts may have been expanded by adding proteins; (2) whether the
modulation of the activity of the ribosome by the protein factors does indicate spe-
cific phenomena of the co-evolution of genetic information and catalytic function;
and (3) whether the diversification of the ribozymes’ active center by including
protein groups is representing a step in evolution from the RNA to the protein world
(Rodnina 2008, 287–288).
36
The criticism of the structuralist renouncement of objects’ independence of structures comprises
not only ontic, but methodological arguments as well. Among the latter is the argument that in
focusing only on the structural component, one is not able to provide an adequate explanation of
theories’ explanatory and predictive success (Doppelt 2011).
37
In meeting this objection, French and Ladyman (2003a, 35–36) point out that Psillos’s way of
describing the nature of objects is supporting an alternative form of structural realism rather than
undermining it altogether. For them, “Psillos’s argument may undermine the epistemic form of
structural realism, which holds that all we can know is structure with real objects hidden forever
242 Meaningful Articulation and Objectification of Reality in Scientific Inquiry
Formally seen, the hermeneutic realist shares some views with both standard and
structural realists. (I am saying “formally” since a comparative analysis in this
regard can only be carried out at the expense of ignoring the unsurmountable differ-
ence between the positions admitting the primacy of the epistemic relation and the
positions that assume the primacy of the being-in-the-world.) Like the standard
realists, the hermeneutic realist champions the ontological autonomy of theoretical
objects. Yet the arguments for this autonomy she employs differ essentially from
those of scientific realism. Roughly, the standard realists equate the objects’ ontic
autonomy with objects’ presence in a static-discrete factuality that precedes mean-
ingful articulation, while the hermeneutic realist insists on the objects’ autonomous
being in the facticity of scientific inquiry. To reiterate, the insistence on objects’
alleged intrinsic identities rehabilitates a kind of metaphysical essentialism that
contradicts the existentialist tenets of hermeneutic realism. It is the argument of the
theoretical objects’ “inexhaustibility” – as a specification of the argument of “situ-
ated transcendence” – that provides a vindication of their ontological autonomy.
In combating essentialism about (and reification of) theoretical objects, the her-
meneutic realist approximates an aspect of the position of structural realism. To be
sure, the latter can be developed as a position that is entirely independent of any
form of Platonism. It is not necessary to represent physical objects as mathematical
entities in order to claim that only objects thus represented can turn out to be struc-
tures (Saunders 2003, 129). The point made by structural realists is that all objects
are structures. (Some structural realists admit that objects are like nodes in a graph.
Thus considered, the entities embedded in structures still retain a status of “thin
objects” (Ladyman 2007).) The structuralist claim about the inseparability of objects
from structures is nourished on developments in science in the first place. Thus, the
indistinguishability of particles is typically illustrated in both classical statistical
mechanics and quantum mechanics. However, this illustration is not to be used as a
general argument: It would be absurd to claim that permutation symmetry is appli-
cable to all formally described scientific objects. On a more plausible argument for
the inseparability of objects from structures, the metaphysical claim that all (scien-
tific) objects are structures is to be defended in connection with the Quinean claim
that metaphysics is continuous with physics. If, metaphysically considered, all sci-
entific objects are physical objects, and, methodologically considered, there are in
physics only structural objects, then all scientific objects are inseparable from struc-
tures. Accordingly, the metaphysical conception about the ontic status of objects is
continuous with a methodological state of affairs in science.
There are also respectable voices suggesting that the logical (Fregean) notion of
object is inadequate to the ontic treatment of objects inseparable from structures.
Structural realists are divided when addressing the question as to whether they
should seek a non-logical notion of objecthood (Saunders 2003, 132). They are also
not unanimous when at stake is the issue of whether there is a place for “thin objects”
in a structuralist ontology (Wolff 2012). But they are united in arguing that their
from our scientific gaze, but supports an ontic form which reconceptualises the objects themselves
in structural terms.”
5 The Object-Structure Distinction in a Hermeneutic Key 243
replaced theory (as a once-accepted theory) is in most cases carried over to the new
theory, but its basic theoretical claims are not. Worrall’s impetus to outline the posi-
tion of structural realism as an alternative to both antirealism and standard realism
was the quest for reconciling the pessimistic meta-induction with the no-miracles
argument. His formula for having “the best of both worlds” consists in accounting
for the “empirical success of theoretical science without running afoul of the his-
torical facts about theory change” (Worrall 1989, 111). The observation that the
mathematical equations of the replaced theory reemerge as limiting cases of the
mathematical equations of the new theory adduces evidence that there is approxi-
mate continuity of structure, which is what the structural realist aims at. Continuity
or accumulation is one of structure (form), not of content. But why should the whole
debate agonize between the no-miracle argument and the pessimistic meta-
induction? My answer is that one is doomed to be captured by this situation, if one
is not able to find a way out of “squeezing” reality within normative codification of
theory-factuality relations.
Those who claim that the picture of historical theory change implied by the pes-
simistic meta-induction is inaccurate are right. The multitude of aspects of this
claim looms large, and I am not going to discuss it here. What I only want to stress
is that radical theory change ought to be addressed in connection with the cascade
of re-contextualizations that build the “fine structure” of each historical theory
change. In demonstrating that structures of classical physics can explain quantum
phenomena, Alisa Bokulich defends a position that is, in a sense, contrary to that of
structural realism: There is no continuity of structure since the classical structures
(like periodic orbits and their stability exponents) do not exist in quantum systems,
but nevertheless these structures can genuinely explain quantum phenomena (like
wave function scarring), thereby ensuring a kind of continuity on the level of empir-
ical content. Bokulich (2008, 224–231) bestows the possibility of combining struc-
tural discontinuity with content-continuity on (what she calls) “model explanations”
(i.e., explanations by means of dynamical structures that provide models for phe-
nomena, stressing at the same time some counterfactual dependence between the
explanatory model and explanandum). There is an interesting – although underde-
veloped – hermeneutic dimension in Bokulich’s argument. She appeals to the
“deeper understanding” of the role of the classical structures. This understanding
should empower one to forge model explanations. What her study shows is a re-
contextualization involved in a radical theory change that is not subjugated to the
structural realist formula.
The hermeneutic realist also disputes the structural-realist continuity of struc-
ture. She counters the structural realist combination of radical discontinuities at the
level of conceptualizing empirical content and continuity at the level of mathemati-
cal structure. Her counterargument rests on the insistence that scientific develop-
ment is at all levels amenable to discontinuities due to cases of significant
re-contextualization, and – because of the hermeneutic fore-structuring – there is
always interpretive continuity no matter how radical theory change is. Accordingly,
the hermeneutic realist denies that re-contextualization necessarily preserves struc-
ture’s symmetry. There are no symmetries that can resist radical changes effected by
5 The Object-Structure Distinction in a Hermeneutic Key 245
38
There are in the tradition of scientific structuralism some interesting attempts at making room for
autonomous objects in structural ontology. Thus, Brading and Landry (2006) suggest an innovative
interpretation of the relationship between presentation (of structure) and representation (of
objects), which makes possible the move from a “semantic is” to an “ontological is” in scientific
246 Meaningful Articulation and Objectification of Reality in Scientific Inquiry
structural realist is compelled not only to dissolve the fundamental objects’ ontic
autonomy, but to hypostatize the formally described basic structures. Van Fraassen
(2006, 297) argues that in order to have knowledge of structure by being committed
to a structuralist position, one has to take into account the context dependence of all
operations involved in the formal identification of the structure under investigation.
This would prevent one from hypostatizing the structure. Of course, an accent upon
the context dependence only does not provide a rationale for rehabilitating the ontic
autonomy of theoretical objects. Van Fraassen vigorously rejects such an autonomy.
For him, there are only two sorts of entities which science deals with: observable
things, events, and processes, on the one hand, and abstract structures studied in
mathematics, on the other.
In opposing the reification of formal relations and/or the hypostatization of basic
theoretical structures, the hermeneutic realist agrees with the critical arguments of
constructive empiricism. Van Fraassen (1980, 56–59) appeals to the hermeneutic
circle when trying to foreclose such a reification. Yet the intra-theoretical hermeneu-
tic circle he puts forward is wrongly set up, since it is restricted to the aim of dem-
onstrating theory’s empirical adequacy in saving phenomena. To repeat an argument
I have already brought forward, what is ignored in constructive empiricism (or
empiricist structuralism) is the “situated transcendence” of all interpretative intra-
theoretical relations. I agree with the criticism which makes the case that van
Fraassen’s scenario of saving phenomena overlooks the possible manifestation of
unobservable phenomena in data models. By concentrating on the practice of saving
unobservable phenomena, Michela Massimi (2007) manages to call into question
the view that the only aim of science is to provide semantically complete mathemat-
ical interpretation of observable phenomena. The analysis of this practice demon-
strates that theoretical entities and experimental data evolve together, and this
evolvement – so her argument goes – shows that there is more to saving phenomena
than constructive empiricism may imply. In particular, consider Massimi’s analysis
of how the introduction of the unobservable phenomenon of a new resonance in a
certain data model enables one to see that the way of making sense of quarks as
theoretical objects is not to be separated from the way of constructing models from
experimental data. This analysis reveals “unobservable reality” whose theorizing
requires something more than empirical adequacy of theoretical models.
Massimi’s argument against constructive empiricism is in line with the criticism
raised from the viewpoint of hermeneutic realism that van Fraassen does not do
justice to the whole range of practices of saving phenomena that are irreducible to
practices of theory construction. Transforming van Fraassen’s intra-theoretical her-
meneutic circle of saving phenomena into a trans-theoretical circle that takes place
theorizing. Brading (2011) argues that by identifying the phenomena with data models, one trivial-
izes the step from presentation to representation. In this regard, she suggests a strategy for a relax-
ation of the isomorphism requirements. Yet these attempts – however interesting they might
be – are restricted to modifications and innovations in the formal ontology of structuralism and the
semantic view of scientific theories. Like the views they criticize, they do not touch upon the prob-
lematic of how science’s theoretical objects exist in scientific practices.
6 A Preliminary Concept of “Text” 247
within the whole interplay of practices and possibilities for articulating a scientific
domain specifies the contextual configurations of practices as loci of revealing theo-
retical objects’ individuality and ontological autonomy.
Let me conclude this section by reiterating the main point of hermeneutic realism
about theoretical objects’ dual existence as it is informed by the interplay of prac-
tices and possibilities in scientific inquiry. Such an object is scattered over poten-
tially infinite contexts in which it can be read and represented. In each of them
theoretical object(s) is/are partially revealed and envisioned by the respective read-
able technologies and representations. At the same time, in each context certain
possibilities on which the object’s existence is “inscribed” become actualized.
However, the possibilities can never be exhausted. The more of them that are appro-
priated, the wider becomes the horizon of new possibilities for the object’s contex-
tual identification. Seen from the practitioners’ perspective, in each context of
inquiry the theoretical object – in its constant “absent presence” – displays possible
facets that could be revealed in a coming context. From this perspective, the theo-
retical objects’ meaning constantly goes beyond the current state of affairs in the
research process.
The considerations about the embeddedness of objects in structures, and the contex-
tual autonomy of theoretical objects are intimately tied in with hermeneutic real-
ism’s central concept of “text” (as it was adumbrated in the Introductory Chapter).
The preliminary form of this concept should refer to two things: first, to a concept
of “text” that is maximally close to established semantic approaches to texts of
diverse sorts; and second, to the salient kind of “texts” in science, i.e., “texts” con-
stituted under the conditions of maximally de-contextualized objectification. With
regard to the established semantic images of texts, the hermeneutic-realist concept
of “text” basically differs from these images by assuming that the semantic meaning
(represented most clearly by the Fregean triangle) is subjected to the hermeneutic
meaning (or that meaning which is presented through the operation of the “herme-
neutic-as” in reality’s articulation). From the viewpoint of this subjection, the struc-
turally enclosed (self-sufficient) and semantically complete texts are an extreme
(and idealized) case that borders the spectrum of contextualized “texts”. This is the
idealized case of heavily formalized texts in which the interpretive fore-structuring
is fully “extinguished”. By contrast, all “texts” are characterized by different degrees
of dominance of the hermeneutic meaning over the semantic (structured by models)
meaning, and in that sense they deviate more or less from the idealized case men-
tioned. This brings me to the next point.
The salient kind of “texts” in science are those constituted in mathematical phys-
ics. At the same time, these “texts” are distinguished by the highest degree of
semantic autonomy that makes the interpretive fore-structuring in the process of
textualizing as well as the articulation of hermeneutic meaning almost invisible. The
248 Meaningful Articulation and Objectification of Reality in Scientific Inquiry
meaning already produced before (or independent of) their implementation. In other
words, reading by means of scientific readable technologies is an ongoing textual-
izing that constantly transcends the formation of a stable textual structure. In
accordance with the paradigm of constitutional analysis advanced in this study, tex-
tualizing constitutes meaning by appropriating the possibilities projected by the
configuration of practices. Textualizing is not a codification – in the sense of lin-
guistics – that determines how to create “texts”, but a constitution of textual-
contextual wholes through which a domain of reality is disclosed and articulated.
The aforementioned formal criterion for semantic autonomy is mutatis mutandis
applicable to all “texts”. On a corollary to it, each “text” has to incorporate a mini-
mal structure of formal relations interpretable in properly structured data. In raising
a claim on the dependence of the interpretability of the “texts” on their formal struc-
turation, I approach the much broader issue of how mathematics operates within the
“texts” constituted in scientific inquiry. There is in the realism debate an array of
positions regarding the role of mathematics. The array is located between two
extreme poles: (a) the mathematics does not track physical reality; and (b) the math-
ematics unveils the essential aspects of physical reality. Christopher Pincock’s
(2007) views are close to (a), while some radical versions of ontic structural realism
approximate (b). With regard to the claim about relative semantic autonomy, certain
non-radical versions of (both epistemic and ontic) structural realism are of special
importance. These versions insist on the need of embedding data models into theo-
retical models’ mathematical structures, but leave at the same time enough leeway
for weaker theoretical scenarios that avoid a formal description of the inter-models'
relations up to isomorphism. Thus, Otávio Bueno and Steven French (2012, 86)
make the case that all roles mathematics plays in empirical science depend on “the
ability to establish inferential relations between empirical phenomena and mathe-
matical structures.” These relations include partial isomorphism and partial homo-
morphism, but also weaker kinds of relations that cannot be represented as functions,
group morphisms, linear transformations, or any other kind of morphisms.
From a semantic point of view, the preliminary concept of “text” is equally toler-
ant to the ontic existence of objects and structures. Yet the “text” might involve
procedural specifications of data models’ theoretical interpretation that accentuate
either on the structure (involved in the interpretive theoretical scenario) or on the
relata of the structure’s relations, treating them as “minimal objects”. Introducing
such conventional specifications does not imply any claim that objects are meta-
physically primary (and structures are secondary), or vice versa. (As already pointed
out, attaching more importance to structures or to objects is in the first place not a
question of speculative metaphysics, but an intrinsic issue of scientific inquiry that
hinges on the characteristic hermeneutic situation.) Obviously, if there is no room
for a non-formal interpretation, and the latter is reduced to a description of abstract
structures up to isomorphism, then any specification of objects would be impossi-
ble. Hence, the way of representing the relata as having properties that make them
objects independent of the relations involved in a structure is only admissible for the
interpretation of sets of data and phenomena via theoretical scenarios that are
loosely formalized and have some leeway for conceptual innovations. Envisioning
250 Meaningful Articulation and Objectification of Reality in Scientific Inquiry
39
Greaves and Wallace cogently demonstrate that local transformations correspond to empirical
effects in just the same way in which the global transformations in classical physics have empirical
consequences. From the viewpoint of hermeneutic realism, proving that there are no groups of
transformations without empirical counterparts means that these groups do not “control” and con-
strain the production of objectified factuality “from without”, but are intrinsic to the integral circu-
larity of a domain’s meaningful articulation.
40
Symmetry considerations always play a considerable role in textualizing. Yet the quest for sym-
metries in the research process is not to be absolutized. Inquirers are satisfied in some cases with
theoretical models (and mathematical plots) that lack symmetry. See in this regard Franklin (1989,
22–25).
6 A Preliminary Concept of “Text” 251
1
This is why Eric Donald Hirsch’s distinction between “meaning” and “significance” has no place
in hermeneutic realism. In fact,—leaning on Gadamer’s arguments—the distinction is to be
rejected also within the scope of the textual exegesis.
Concluding Chapter: “Texts”, Relevant Contexts, and Textualizing 255
also “written down” in “texts”. (Among these processes are the entanglement of
contextures with contexts, the interpretive fore-structuring of what is objectified by
an open horizon of possibilities, the formation and maintenance of a characteristic
hermeneutic situation through the correlation of practices’ endogenous reflexivity
and practitioners’ reflexivity, and the processual inseparability of a domain’s mean-
ingful articulation and procedural objectification.) Therefore, “texts” document the
integrity of domains of reality as a processual-empirical unity of
factuality-within-facticity.
As the discussion of the preliminary concept made clear, the contextual constitu-
tion of a “text” inevitably contains a kind of objectification that creates objectified
factuality related, for instance, to such quantifiable variables as mass values, charge
asymmetries, decay modes, production cross sections, and distributions. Within a
“text”, characterized by a high degree of semantic autonomy, the factual existence
of objects and structures amounts to manifolds of values of quantifiable variables
that might be represented, for instance, by phase diagrams. In the process of inquiry,
the kind of objectification (involved in the “text”) is still situated within (and fore-
structured by) the domain’s meaningful articulation.2
2
There is something highly instructive in Sokal’s hoax published in Social Text. The very title
illuminates what the hermeneutics of science should look like from the viewpoint of naturalist
objectivism. The “transformative hermeneutics of quantum gravity”—an expression contained in
the title—implies that hermeneutics is part and parcel of the phenomenon of “quantum gravity” as
existing in its objective factuality. In the hoax’s plot, hermeneutics is factually unveiled in the
phenomena as conceptualized by the synthesis of “non-linearity, relativistic space-time, and dif-
ferential topology”. Naturalizing hermeneutics in the sense of incorporating it in the natural
world’s phenomena is, for Sokal, the only way in which the hermeneutics of science might work.
Phrased differently, the interpretative subjectivity is a constitutive dimension of the natural world.
(As a matter of fact, if the hermeneutic philosophy of science would naturalize hermeneutics in this
way, it would become a part of what it severely criticizes: the “New Age” interpretation of sci-
ence.) Sokal’s “transformative hermeneutics” operates within the space of epistemological rela-
tions between natural phenomena and interpretive subjectivity. He ridicules a particular kind of
interpretive cultural studies by starting from a caricature of hermeneutics. Sokal starts from this
caricature because he absolutizes the epistemological framework of relating interpretative subjec-
tivity to natural phenomena. Placed in this framework, hermeneutics is doomed to be naturalized
in a grotesque way. By contrast, hermeneutic realism starts from a trans-subjective hermeneutics
that—in a way similar to Rouse’s non-objectivist naturalism and Barad’s agential realism—tran-
scends any hypostatized opposition between (interpretive) subjectivity and (metaphysically pres-
ent) objectivity. This hermeneutics is to be assigned neither to the interpretative activities of
epistemic subjects nor to the natural phenomena, but to the constitution of “texts” within the inter-
play of practice and possibilities in scientific research. Sokal’s criticism (of whatever) does not
have the resources to address this kind of hermeneutics. It is no accident that in Impostures intel-
lectuelles Sokal and Bricmont do not pay attention to the tradition of the hermeneutic philosophy
of science. Leading figures of that tradition like Patrick Heelan or Martin Eger, who are respected
mathematical physicists, or important scientists who support (and even contribute to) the tradition
like James Cushing, Abner Shimony, and Gunther Stent are not mentioned at all. Instead, there are
boring comments (with unnecessarily long quotations) on authors who do not have any signifi-
cance to the hermeneutic philosophy of science. It is another question that the criticism of the
postmodernist misuses of scientific ideas (and the political attacks on science from positions of
“radical democracy”) is always a welcome initiative, regardless of whether there is a peace treaty
after the science wars.
Concluding Chapter: “Texts”, Relevant Contexts, and Textualizing 259
3
The prediction of an unknown phenomenon through such a scenario also requires the experimen-
tal construction of an appropriate data model. The theoretical prediction of an unknown phenom-
enon must clearly be differentiated from the (already discussed) experimental discovery of an
unobservable phenomenon waiting to be saved via a theoretical model. Though predicted by a veri-
fied theoretical model, the unknown phenomenon might have not received an acceptable represen-
tation through a data model. Thus, the difference is to be summarized thusly: When expressed
through data models, the unobservable phenomena are waiting for appropriate theoretical models,
whereas the theoretically predicted unknown phenomena wait for the construction of acceptable
data models that are capable of expressing them.
Concluding Chapter: “Texts”, Relevant Contexts, and Textualizing 265
4
Roughly, the semantic notion of truth as well as the epistemological concepts of correspondent,
coherentist, consensualist, operationalist, pragmatic, and other types of truth refer to the truth-
characteristics of linguistically expressed units of factual knowledge, whereas aletheia—the
revealing (and concealing) of reality in a characteristic hermeneutic situation—is the truth-charac-
teristic of facticity. The concept of hermeneutic truth is an ontological concept which takes into
account the finite-contextual revealing/concealing of a “text” within the potentially infinite pro-
cesses of textualizing and re-contextualization.
266 Concluding Chapter: “Texts”, Relevant Contexts, and Textualizing
about the no-thing, it would not try to integrate a sort of existential analytic in its
strategies of conceptualization. Instead, it would have to start an incremental trans-
lation of the no-thing into the thing-languages with which it operates. But what
would have been amenable to translation? The obvious answer is what makes some
things reveal themselves contextually. The hermeneutic situations of inquiry are
the no-thing that enable the contextual revealing/concealing of things. Even if
these situations become conceptualized, their conceptualization would not alter
their status of being no-thing. (The conceptualization would only make intelligible
the way in which the no-thing conditions the possibilities of revealing the things in
the contexts of inquiry.) My claim is that the characteristic hermeneutic situations
of inquiry are nothing else but the more important special case of Heidegger’s no-
thing: the “creative no-thing” within the scope of science’s objectified “things”.
(They instantiate the work of no-thing whereby the domains of reality are
disclosed-to-be-objectified.)
Each “text” documents a way in which the facticity of inquiry fore-structures the
production of objectified factuality in a characteristic hermeneutic situation. This is
a way in which being becomes disclosed in the interpretive circularity of a meaning-
ful being-in-the-world—a way in which the no-thing becomes “textually” mani-
fested. Thus, each “text” constituted in scientific inquiry’s facticity speaks—documents,
records “something”—about the no-thing.5 Finally, it follows from the foregoing
considerations that the ontic-ontological difference operates in a non-dichotomous
manner in each “text” of scientific inquiry—a claim that basically revives motifs of
Misch’s criticism of “fundamental ontology”, although it is also directed against
Misch’s attempt at a radical dissolution of the ontic-ontological difference.
The thesis that the whole process of inquiry—in which a scientific domain
becomes both meaningfully articulated and objectified—is a process of textualizing
should not be equated with the (poststructuralist) thesis that there is nothing outside
of the text. In a premise of this thesis, there is no demarcation between text and
context that might resist a deconstruction. The rationale for adopting this premise
consists in the observation that there are no contexts pre-given to the text’s construc-
tion. Since the text creates its context, the possibility of drawing a theoretically
significant line of demarcation seems to be foreclosed. Moreover, insisting on such
a line would be a gesture of endorsing a kind of metaphysics of presence—the
5
Let me draw attention to the fact that this argument against Heidegger’s thesis does not necessar-
ily appeal to the “active conceptualization” of hermeneutic situations in scientific inquiry. The
claim that Heidegger ignores the potential of reflexivity of scientific inquiry—a form of reflexivity
that takes into consideration the characteristic hermeneutic situations—does not imply that scien-
tists actively elaborate on devices for conceptualizing these situations. As already pointed out,
having recourse to the hermeneutic situations of inquiry does not make scientists hermeneutic
philosophers of science. But the ways in which these situations are reflexively taken into consider-
ation show that scientific research is capable of “thinking” what—for Heidegger—should be
unthinkable for science. “Taking into consideration” is not tantamount to “actively conceptualiz-
ing” because it is the relatedness of inquirers’ reflexivity to practices’ endogenous reflexivity that
brings the characteristic hermeneutic situation to light. This enlightening essentially differs from
conceptualization.
Concluding Chapter: “Texts”, Relevant Contexts, and Textualizing 269
contexts are metaphysically present before the construction of texts takes place. A
radicalization of this view leads to the idea of intertextuality: Since the contexts are
always already involved in the texts, there is no diversity of contextualized texts, but
a continuum of interpenetrating texts. The view that the text does not border on
something extratextual also becomes radicalized: The text does not border on other
texts as well; rather it keeps a record of (and becomes recorded in) a potentially
infinite number of other texts whose traces are to be discovered in the text’s decon-
structive reading. Accordingly, to deconstruct the allegedly codified structure of a
text amounts to reading the latter intertextually. Interpreting a particular text
amounts to engaging in a “tracing game” within the intertextual continuum.
To reiterate, leading in the hermeneutic-realist discourse is not the thesis that the
text creates its context, but the claim that textualizing within the facticity of inquiry
constitutes both the “texts” and their relevant contexts. (However open a “text”, and
however minimalized its basic structure, it cannot dispense with the contextualizing
synergy of readable technologies and cycles of semiotic representations. Even in the
special case of the constitution of reflexive “texts” that actively participate in the
ways of carving their contexts out—and make use of complementarity in framing
the objectified factuality—the “texts” and contexts do not become conflated in the
course of inquiry.) It is the way of adding a “hermeneutic dimension” to the post-
structuralist deconstruction—a dimension on which Gadamer insisted in his unfin-
ished dialogue with Derrida—that helps one to restore the legitimacy of the division
between text and context without making concessions to the metaphysics of pres-
ence. The motifs of the interplay of practices and possibilities as fore-structuring
textual structures along with motifs of reading-and-representing as entangling
contextures-of-equipment with contexts of inquiry provide a demarcation without
reifying (a) the text, (b) the context, or (c) any kind of dividing line drawn between
them. What becomes fore-structured is a body of knowledge constituted by contex-
tual actualizations of possibilities for doing research. What at once contextually
situates and transcends this body is the open horizon of “exceeding possibilities” for
reading and representing within the particular (contextualizing) configuration of
readable technologies and spaces of representation. It is the openness of this horizon
that creates the co-referentiality of any particular context with all possible contexts
taking place in a domain’s meaningful articulation. “Supplementing” the decon-
structionist story about the dissipation of text’s meaning with motifs related to the
interpretative fore-structuring also adduces evidence for the irreducibility of the
hermeneutic-realist concept of intercontextuality to the poststructuralist concept of
intertextuality.
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Name Index
H
E Habermas, Jürgen, 152, 153
Eaton, Bruce, 237 Hacking, Ian, 68–70, 114, 167, 197, 202, 213
Eckstein, Fritz, 237 Hackmann, Willem D., 183
Eger, Martin, 126, 151–154, 193, 258 Haldane, John Burdon Sanderson, 207, 232
Ellis, R.K., 192 Hanson, Norwood R., 108, 214
Engelhardt, Vladimir, 82, 83 Haraway, Donna, 8
Harding, Sandra, 117
Harold, Franklin M., 86–88, 91
F Heelan, Patrick, 8, 37, 107, 213, 214, 257, 258
Falk, Raphael, 233, 234 Heidegger, Martin, 10, 14, 66, 100, 105, 133,
Feenberg, Andrew, 8 138–147, 162, 163, 184, 235,
Fehér, Mártha, 3 267, 268
Feyerabend, Paul, 94, 100, 108 Held, Klaus, 24
Feynman, Richard, 191, 205 Hesse, Mary, 95, 96, 148
Fine, Arthur, 131–134 Hirsch, Donald Eric, 254
Fischer, Emil, 229, 230 Hofmeister, Franz, 228
Fleck, Ludwik, 13, 104–124, 205 Hohlfeld, Rainer, 31
Foucault, Michel, 103, 104, 188 Holmes, Eric, 232
Fox Keller, Evelyn, 29, 30 Holton, Gerald, 12, 123
Franklin, Allan, 193, 210, 211, 250 Honneth, Axel, 5
Frege, Gottlob, 223 Hoogstraten, Charles, 239
French, Steven, 226, 241, 243, 249 Hook, Robert, 185
Friedman, Michael, 66, 222 Hopkins, Sir Frederick Gowland, 81, 232
Fruton, Joseph, 229 Hoy, David, 148
Fuller, Steve, 71, 105 Hoyningen-Huene, Paul, 102
Husserl, Edmund, 11, 24, 104, 133, 139, 142
Hyder, David, 104
G
Gadamer, Hans-Georg, 9–11, 29, 98, 100, 101,
108, 269 I
Galison, Peter, 28, 34, 184, 185, 187, 189, Ihde, Don, 8
192, 193, 222
Garfinkel, Harold, 164, 165
Garland, Carl, 215 J
Geertz, Clifford, 74, 163 Janich, Peter, 36, 192
Gethmann, Carl Friedrich, 128 Jasanoff, Sheila, 30
Giddens, Anthony, 26, 148, 153 Jerusalem, Wilhelm, 109
Giere, Ronald, 68 Jordan, Kathleen, 186
Gilbert, Nigel, 86 Joyce, Gerald, 237
Name Index 285
K M
Kay, Lily E., 204 Mannheim, Karl, 119
Kisiel, Theodore, 8, 26 Marangoni, Alejandro, 207
Kiss, Olga, 122 Marchart, Oliver, 168
Klein, Martin, 102 Markus, György, 100, 126, 154, 262
Knorr Cetina, Karin, 32, 35 Marres, Noortje, 160, 168–170, 195
Koch, Robert, 48 Massimi, Michela, 226, 238, 246
Kockelmans, Joseph, 23 McAllister, James, 59, 209, 215
Kohler, Robert, 228, 229, 231, 232 Menten, Maud, 206
Kollek, Regina, 31 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 8, 74, 75, 103
Koshland, Daniel, 86, 229 Michaelis, Leonor, 206
Kosso, Peter, 256, 257 Misch, Georg, 18, 19, 267, 268
Koyré, Alexandre, 103 Mitchell, Peter, 81–86, 90, 218
Krohn, Roger, 48 Mol, Annemarie, 160, 163, 164, 169, 195
Krohn, Wolfgang, 28 Morgan, Thomas H., 233
Krois, John Michael, 227 Moyle, Jennifer, 84, 90
Kuhn, Thomas, 98–104, 106, 107, 122, 123 Mulkay, Michael, 86
Kühne, Willy, 228 Muller, Herman J., 234
Kühne-Bertram, Gudrun, 144 Musgrave, Alan, 94, 132, 135
Kukla, André, 129
Küppers, Günter, 28
N
Næss, Arne, x
L Nagel, Thomas, 72, 73
Ladrière, Jean, 103 Naylor, Ronald, 88
Ladyman, James, 224, 226, 241–243 Needham, Joseph, 81, 232
Lakatos, Imre, 65, 72, 77, 95, 99 Neumeister, Richard, 229
Landry, Elaine, 245 Nuccitelli, Richard, 91
Latour, Bruno, 25, 65, 66, 110, 127, 129, 130,
162–164, 182, 187, 222
Law, John, 158 O
Lefebvre, Henri, 184 Opdyke, Neil, 217
Lehninger, Albert, 218 Orgel, Leslie, 89
Lembeck, Karl-Heinz, 24
Lenhard, Johannes, 202
Lettvin, Jerome, 231 P
Lévy-Bruhl, Lucien, 109 Paschos, Emmanuel, 200
Lezaun, Javier, 160, 168, 169, 173 Pasteur, Louis, 229
Lien, M.E., 158, 159, 161, 162 Peirce, Charles Sanders, 80, 208
Lilley, David, 237 Perutz, Max, 86
Lipmann, Fritz, 81–83 Piaget, Jean, 95
Lipps, Hans, xi Pickering, Andrew, 36, 205
Livingston, Eric, 65, 164 Pielke, Roger, 177
Lorenz, Kuno, 22 Pinch, Trevor, 39, 102
Lorenzen, Paul, 23, 127 Pincock, Christopher, 249
Löwy, Ilana, 121 Plessner, Helmuth, 135, 142
Luckmann, Thomas, 128 Poincaré, Henri, 223
Lund, Elmer, 81 Polanyi, Michael, 12, 13, 79, 80, 99, 101,
Lundegårdh, Henrik, 81 108, 152
Lynch, Michael, 7, 185, 186, 188, 201 Polikarov, Azarya, xi
286 Name Index
V
S van Dijk, Teun, 248
Sankey, Howard, 4, 125 van Fraassen, Bas, 35, 36, 42, 53, 129,
Sarasin, Philipp, 48, 204 238, 246
Sartre, Jean-Paul, 103 Varela, Francisco, 2
Saunders, Simon, 242 Vaysse, Jean-Marie, 24
Schatzki, Theodore, 20, 26, 182 Vetter, Helmuth, 142
Scheler, Max, 142 Virchow, Rudolf, 48
Schlosshauer, Maximilian, 40, 216 von Neumann, John, 216
Schrödinger, Erwin, 198 von Weizsäcker, Carl Friedrich, 61
Schütz, Alfred, 14, 159
Scott, W.G., 192
Seidel, Markus, 119 W
Shapere, Dudley, 41 Waddington, Conrad Hall, 81
Shapin, Steven, 185, 186, 188 Wallace, David, 250
Shimony, Abner, 102, 258 Warburg, Otto, 230
Shoemaker, David, 215 Weber, Bruce, 81, 86
Sinclair, John, 254 Weber, Marcel, 86
Skulachev, Vladimir, 86 Weber, Max, 103
Slater, Bill (E.C.), 83, 86 Weil, Hermann, 127
Sokal, Alan, 258 Welter, Rüdiger, 24
Sokolowski, Robert, 22 White, Hayden, 97
Soler, Léna, 63, 211 Whitehead, Alfred North, 65
Spinosa, Charles, 10 Widdowson, Henry G., 254
Steinle, Friedrich, 24 Wilson, Charles T.R., 34
Stent, Gunther, 258 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 74, 128
Stephenson, Marjory, 81, 232 Wolff, Johanna, 242
Ströker, Elisabeth, 24 Wölfflin, Heinrich, 115
Sumita, Minako, 239 Wolpert, Lewis, 91
Name Index 287
A D
Actor-network theory (ANT), 1, 66, 129, 158, Dasein, 10, 65, 78, 138, 141–144, 146
163, 168, 182 Deconstruction, 129, 130, 154, 182, 255,
Agential realism, 38–40, 68, 70, 182, 258 268, 269
Aletheia, 74, 118, 136–138, 265 De-contextualization, 79, 201, 266
Analytical philosophy of science, 49, 78, 222, Deflationary realism, 2
226, 240, 256 Diremption of reality, 21–23, 28, 43, 44
Anti-epistemology, 73–75 Dissemination, 55, 196, 259, 260
Antirealism, 68, 125, 131, 243, 244 Double hermeneutics, 3, 26, 95, 138–156, 158,
Apophantic-as, 44–46, 141 171–173, 193
Artificialization, 159, 162, 174–179
E
C Empirical ontologies, 1, 157–179, 182
Cartesian dualism, 1, 7, 13, 18, 39, 51, 69, 70, Empiricism, 67, 68, 107, 120, 131
73, 80, 110, 194 Entanglement, 8, 38–41, 44–46, 55, 156,
Characteristic hermeneutic situation, 3, 19, 41, 183–185, 189, 196–199, 258, 261, 263
78–81, 87, 88, 91–92, 132, 134–138, Entity realism, 4
149, 150, 154–156, 193, 202, 203, 210, Essentialism, 7, 8, 10, 37, 40, 74, 109, 131,
235, 240, 241, 249, 258, 259, 265, 134, 145, 153, 164, 242
266, 268 Ethnomethodology, 7, 27, 56, 128, 134, 158,
Cognitive existentialism, 9, 28 164–166, 187
Cognitive hermeneutics, 12, 13, 95, 96, 108 Existential analytic, 10, 20, 76, 135, 141, 143,
Cognitive sociology (SSK), 56, 109, 110, 128, 147, 184, 268
131, 187
Complementarity, 38, 39, 43–46, 54, 69, 70,
90, 94, 183, 213, 260, 266, 269 F
Conceptual framework, 4, 17, 49, 64, 67, 69, Finalization, 28, 31, 119
102, 108, 213, 223–224
Constructive empiricism, 53, 129, 246
Context of constitution, 64, 78, 97 G
Contexuality, 150 Grammar of scientific practices, 71
Conventionalism, 68, 95, 99, 102
Cultural hermeneutics, 153, 262
Cultural life forms, 3, 57, 106, 139, 140, 143, H
147, 151 Hermeneutic-as, 37, 44–46, 141, 143, 203
P
I Perspectivalism, 159
Incommensurability, 67, 94, 98, 101, 102, 105, Philosophical anthropology, 37, 142
107, 117, 121–124 Philosophical hermeneutics, 9, 29, 96,
Intercontextuality, 20, 52, 54, 60, 66, 130, 113, 116
196, 199, 200, 227, 252, 254, Phronēsis, 9, 11, 99, 113, 134
259, 269 Post-empiricism, 77, 94, 95, 103, 104,
Interpretive indeterminacy, 150 107, 110
Interpretive internalism, 13, 21–37, 132, Practice turn, 19, 63–76, 212
154, 259 Pre-narrativity, 97, 147, 154, 156, 266, 267
Inter-subjectivity, 5, 19, 57, 96, 110, 114, 137, Pre-normativity, 19, 20, 136, 137, 156
159, 201
Intertextuality, 51, 52, 269
R
Reading-and-representing, 55, 203, 204, 220,
L 252, 269
Lifeworld, 11, 21–25, 30, 43, 126, 147, 153, Realism debate, 49, 63, 72, 124–138, 222,
161, 164, 165, 173, 189 241, 249
Logic of practice, 6, 27, 42, 138, 139, 170, Re-contextualization, 5, 17, 29, 51, 53, 60, 61,
182, 256 78–80, 91, 92, 106, 107, 120, 121, 150,
155, 156, 175, 176, 178, 204, 206, 207,
220, 227, 230, 231, 235, 240, 243–245,
M 250, 255, 256, 259, 261, 265, 266
Metaphysical realism, 1, 2, 68, 69 Reflexivity, 4–7, 12, 39–43, 46, 57, 64, 79, 99,
Methodical constructivism, 23, 126 100, 114, 115, 117, 118, 134, 135, 138,
Methodology of double hermeneutics, 14, 27, 157–179, 183, 193, 197, 203, 256,
145, 148, 158, 171, 173, 188 258, 266
Subject Index 291
Reification, 4–6, 241, 242, 246 Spatializing, 16, 27, 76, 140, 141, 143, 173,
Relevant context, 52, 53, 174, 175, 178, 182–184
251–269 Standard realism, 40, 65, 66, 74, 125, 127,
Representational device, 47–49, 88, 215, 229 221, 224, 243, 244
Representationalism, 7, 40, 49, 50, 70, 133 Standpoint epistemology, 9, 70, 107,
Representationalist epistemology, 53, 69, 72 117–119
Robust realism, 10, 74–76, 149, 152 Strong Program, 40, 110, 117, 130, 144
Structural realism, 224, 241–245, 249
Supervenience, 43, 44
S Synergy of readable technologies, 53, 196,
Science and technology studies (STS), 8, 32, 200, 256, 261, 263, 269
108, 158, 160, 161, 168, 172, 173, 181
Scientific realism, 1, 96, 103, 124, 125, 132,
136, 223, 224, 241, 242 T
Scientism, 6, 12, 13, 30, 51, 69, 73 Technoscience, 28, 161, 173, 181, 182,
Semantic interpretation, 42, 52, 77, 102, 104, 195, 259
106, 107, 207, 208, 211, 213, 223, Temporalizing of temporality, 3, 4, 44, 143,
251, 264 184, 266
Semantic meaning, 247, 264 Transcendental pragmatics, 6
Semiosis, 41, 46–48, 52, 54, 55, 195, 196, Trans-subjectivity, 13, 65, 107, 109, 118, 137,
199–209, 220, 263 138, 168
Situated transcendence, 2, 9, 17, 26, 41, 57,
66, 67, 75, 77, 118–120, 142, 153, 158,
171, 172, 181, 242, 246, 267 W
Social constructivism, 1, 77, 106–107, 110, Work-world, 1, 4, 162, 163, 171, 172, 184
126, 129, 131, 160, 163, 194 Worldness of the world, 76, 183, 184