In this bold and original study, Jeff Kochan constructively combines the sociology of scientific knowledge (SSK) with Martin Heidegger’s early existential conception of science. Kochan shows convincingly that these apparently quite different approaches to science are, in fact, largely compatible, even mutually reinforcing. By combining Heidegger with SSK, Kochan argues, we can explicate, elaborate, and empirically ground Heidegger’s philosophy of science in a way that makes it more accessible and useful for social scientists and historians of science. Likewise, incorporating Heideggerian phenomenology into SSK renders SKK a more robust and attractive methodology for use by scholars in the interdisciplinary field of Science and Technology Studies (STS). Kochan’s ground-breaking reinterpretation of Heidegger also enables STS scholars to sustain a principled analytical focus on scientific subjectivity, without running afoul of the orthodox subject-object distinction they often reject. Science as Social Existence is the first book of its kind, unfurling its argument through a range of topics relevant to contemporary STS research. These include the epistemology and metaphysics of scientific practice, as well as the methods of explanation appropriate to social scientific and historical studies of science. Science as Social Existence puts concentrated emphasis on the compatibility of Heidegger’s existential conception of science with the historical sociology of scientific knowledge, pursuing this combination at both macro- and micro-historical levels. Beautifully written and accessible, Science as Social Existence puts new and powerful tools into the hands of sociologists and historians of science, cultural theorists of science, Heidegger scholars, and pluralist philosophers of science.

https://www.openbookpublishers.com/10.11647/OBP.0129.pdf

Science as Social Existence: Heidegger and the Sociology of Scientific Knowledge

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 formulation, the potentiality-for-being of the interrelatedness of scientific practices (disclosing a domain of reality) is always involved in a hermeneutic circularity. Thus considered, the interrelatedness is not only a dimension of the trans-subjective facticity 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.

Meaningful Articulation and Objectification of Reality in Scientific Inquiry

Is it possible to have a philosophical position of realism without essentialist assumptions and residual metaphysics of presence? In this book I develop the position of hermeneutic realism as an affirmative answer to that question. In breaking in a radical manner with the “myth of the given”, the hermeneutic realist holds that there is but a meaningful reality. The articulation of meaning within practices is not imposed upon a pre-meaningful (amorphous) reality. This articulation is inextricable from reality. (Hereafter I will also use the expression “meaningful articulation”.) In the remainder the profile of hermeneutic realism will often be specified via formulating disclaimers. Here is the first disclaimer: The intrinsic meaningfulness of reality does not need an epistemic subject who intentionally produces meanings embodied in her beliefs, actions, and activities. The meaningfulness of reality preexists and conditions the formation of any kind of epistemic subject. This meaningfulness is neither subjective nor intersubjective. It is trans-subjective. The next disclaimer is that advocating the meaningfulness of reality by stressing the primacy of practices does not imply a form of constructivism. Reality is not constructed by (scientific) practices. Any form of constructivism presupposes the dualism of constructor and constructed qua a version of Cartesian dualism. (Approaches such as actor-network theory and the “empirical ontologies” in SSK are controversial attempts at deconstructing the dualist assumptions of classical social constructivism.)

Introductory Chapter: On the Very Idea of Hermeneutic Realism

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

A hermeneutics of scientific practices and the concept of “text”

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 meaningful 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).

Dimitri Ginev

Papers

The Unfinished Project of Cognitive Existentialism