Theodore Kisiel

New philosophies of science in the USA

SummaryThe following overview of the present situation and recent trends in the philosophy of science in the USA brings together bibliographical and institutional evidence to document the last stages of the supersession (Aufhebung) of logical positivism, the emergence of the historical school (Toulmin, Hanson, Kuhn, Feyerabend), its widespread influence upon other fields as well as within philosophy of science, and finally some of the reactions to it, many of which envision their endeavors as mediations between the historical school and the older logical approaches As well as recording pertinent institutional trends, the report provides a series of capsule summaries of representative work from the extant literature primarily from 1966 to the present.

Zu einer Hermeneutik naturwissenschaftlicher Entdeckung

SummaryA revisionist movement in Anglo-Saxon philosophy of science seeking to modulate the positivistic stress on formalized systems and to consider science as ongoing research in finite historical context strikes resonances with hermeneutical phenomenology (Heidegger and Gadamer), whose ontology likewise shifts the locus of truth from verification to discovery. Fusion of the two traditions is utilized to illuminate hitherto relatively unexplored facets of the logic and psychology of scientific discovery, as well as its ontology, here developed from the intentional intertwining of man and nature and finding its locus in the linguistic historicity of fundamental scientific concepts.

The Mathematical and the Hermeneutical: On Heidegger’s Notion of the Apriori

Heidegger’s most penetrating reflections on the essence of mathematical physics inevitably turn on the sense in which it is mathematical. And in a fashion which has come to be known as “Heideggerian,” he bases his reflections on the original Greek sense of mathesis and mathemata, so that the notion of the “mathematical” is thereby broadened from its current reference to the “apriori” discipline that deals with number, quantity and the like, to the comprehensive sense of a process of learning in which we come to know what we already know, where the mathemata, what is thereby known, refers to any apriori knowledge whatsoever.

Scientific discovery: The larger problem situation

Abstract Present discussion of scientific discovery is in transition from a psychological idiom which reduced it from an irrational quasi-magical process to a more methodological idiom regarding it as a rational heuristic, if not a logic. The greatest obstacle to the latter endeavor is found to be a Romantic genre of introspective and anecdotal psychology. A more fruitful conceptual source is to be found in the classic tradition of ars inveniendi and its development into modern versions such as Deweys pragmatic logic of inquiry and Gadamers hermeneutic dialectic of question and answer. On this basis, a research program is sketched out for understanding scientific discovery as a rational heuristic in its ontological, psychological and methodological dimensions and for coming to terms with this phenomenon in the present cultural situation.

A hermeneutics of the natural sciences? The debate updated

The initial obstacle to the development of a hermeneutics of the natural sciences has been the inadequate translation, and thus misunderstanding, of the basic terms of Heideggers ontological analysis ofthe protopractical human situation and its progressive technicization. Pragmatisms parallel analyses of the problem situation of scientists has promoted a more idiomatically English vocabulary. But 1) Gadamers exclusion of domains and disciplines working with technical methods from his “universal” hermeneutics continues to be influential, this in spite of the genesis of his project in Helmholtzs insights into the process of scientific discovery. 2) Markus thus depicts a distinctly different style of production, transmission, and reception of the technological “texts” of natural science. 3) Rouses 1987 extension of pragmatic hermeneutics into the incipient politics of knowledge/power relations in laboratory science presents the usual frightening prospects connected with laboratory experimentation impacting on disciplinary social institutions. 4) Rouses 1996 analysis of scientific practices in local narrative situations eschews the banner of hermeneutics and instead proposes to examine scientific-technological work by way of interdisciplinary ’“cultural studies,” once the traditional loci of hermeneutic methodology. 5) A hermeneutic phenomenology of the natural sciences thus finds itself fundamentally challenged with respect to its rightful topics and roles in the analysis of increasingly technicized disciplines and domains.

Commentary on patrick Heelan's “hermeneutics of experimental science in the context of the life-world”

embodiment in instrumental artifacts, a hermeneutical shift in the subjectobject cut, and the assimilation of instrumental signals to a text. (6) Technological artifacts make possible modes of observational givenness which, unlike experimental science, are constituted by human technical interests; within this context scientific terms are used with analogical meanings. (7) Quantum mechanics as a physical science gives a logical model, the Q-lattice, for the relation between context-dependent and dialectically related languages, that is, languages supposing relatively non-compossible modes of subjectitiy. (8) Quantum mechanics cannot be understood without recourse to a transcendental language that is the dialectical synthesis, in a Q-lattice, of physics and psychology. (9) The hermeneutic aspects of natural scince and technology have momentous consequences for the evolution of human subjectivity and the lifeworld.

The new translation of Sein und Zeit: A grammatological lexicographer's commentary

After years of complaining about Macquarrie and Robinson’s (= M&R) English translation of Heidegger’s opus magnum, Sein und Zeit (1927), which we teachers of Heidegger have endeavored to explicate to our unteutonized students both graduate and undergraduate for over three decades, we now have a new English rendition of the German text from Joan Stambaugh, “one of Heidegger’s students and leading interpreters, [who] takes account of English-language Heidegger research since the first translation of Being and Time in 1962.” The publisher’s flyer (from the book’s back cover) continues and concludes:

Heidegger and Our Twenty-first Century Experience of Ge-Stell

I propose an etymological translation of Ge-Stell, Heidegger’s word for the essence of modern technology, from its Greek and Latin roots as “syn-thetic com-posit[ion]ing,” which presciently portends our twenty-first century experience of the internetted WorldWideWeb with its virtual infinity of websites in cyberspace, Global Positioning Systems, interlocking air traffic control grids, world-embracing weather maps, the 24-7 world news coverage of cable TV-networks like CNN, etc., etc.—all of which are structured by the complex programming based on the computerized and ultimately simple Leibnizian binary-digital logic generating an infinite number of combinations of the posit (1) and non-posit (0). The sharp contrast between the global time-space technologically foreshortened into instantaneity and simultaneity and the radically local time-space of our situated historical existence—in short, the temporal-spatial tension between Ge-Stell and Da-Sein—is examined for ways and means of bringing them together in contemporaneous compatibility.

Was Heißt das — Die Bewandtnis?

Recent accounts of the historical genesis of logical positivism tie it to the genesis of the analytical-continental split in American philosophy in ways that begin to appreciate why and identify where the “hermeneutic supplement” of continental philosophy is “naturally” evoked in the more recent attempts in philosophy of science to “overcome” positivism. One such account concedes the “interpretative and hermeneutic shallowness of analytic philosophers” due to their “antihistorical approach.”1 Another account, which traces the differing approaches toward “overcoming metaphysics” in Carnap and Heidegger back to their different neo-Kantian roots, couches its philosophical conclusions in a final political contrast, reminding us that neo-Kantianism as such was ultimately a philosophy of culture complete with a Kulturpolitik. Carnap’s objectivist and universalist concept of philosophy via mathematical logic “best serves the socialist, internationalist, and anti-individualistic aims” of his espoused political philosophy, whereas Heidegger’s “particularist, existential-historical conception of philosophy ... based on an explicit rejection of the centrality of logic . . . best serves the neo-conservative and avowedly German-nationalist cultural and political stance” of his would-be Nazism.2

Hegel and Hermeneutics

Some of the most recent developments under the banner of “her-meneutics” have made explicit appeal to various facets of Hegel’s thought, suggesting that its current Wirkungsgeschichte goes beyond Marxism and existentialism pure and simple, while still including these in sublated forms. Such direct appeals are to be found in both the hermeneutical phenomenology of Hans-Georg Gadamer and its incorporation in the most recent efforts of the Frankfurt school of ideology critique, particularly in the work of Jurgen Habermas and Karl-Otto Apel, who together constitute the hard core of what has been called the “hermeneutical-dialectical approach to metascience” (Radnitzky). Moreover, inasmuch as the aim of the latter approach is a “philosophical anthropology of knowledge” and hermeneutics as such remains centered on the problem of Verstehen, one might expect that a rereading of Hegel in the light of these recent developments should reveal something of what is still alive and operative in his thought with regard to the so-called “problem of knowledge.”