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Comments and Critique

Yes! There Is a Hermeneutics of Natural Science: A Rejoinder to Markus

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 September 2008

Patrick Heelan
Patrick Heelan
Affiliation:
Department of PhilosophyState University of New York
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Abstract

In this rejoinder to Gyorgy Markus (Science in Context 1:5–51), I argue that although there are nonphilosophical hermeneutical studies of communication among scientists (a “weak” hermeneutics) from which much can be learned about scientific practices, there is also the philosophical genre of a hermeneutics of natural science (a “strong” hermeneutics), with which this paper is concerned. The former is the nonphilosophical use of hermeneutics in the study of texts and historical sources; the latter is a philosophy pursued within a working canon of philosophical works defined principally by the writings of Heidegger and Husserl. There is also a hermeneutically sensitive analytic philosophy of science, such as in the work of Kuhn, Toulmin, and Elkana. These genres are distinguished by their literary canons and their basic phenomenologies or critical experiential givens; each genre comprises an exemplary phenomenology as understood with the help of a characteristic fundamental literary canon.

I argue that analytic philosophy is pursued within a canon that makes it difficult to raise hermeneutical questions about natural science, and that it assumes a generally positivistic phenomenology. I argue that hermeneutical phenomenology currently defines itself in dialectical opposition to “science” as understood (positivistically) by analytic philosophy, and has failed to exploit the opportunity of making its own positive contribution to the philosophy of science by examining for itself the phenomenology of laboratory work, especially data production, and the transformation of the language of theory into a descriptive language of scientific phenomena. A “strong” hermeneutical philosophy of natural science, then, challenges both analytic philosophy and the existing tradition of hermeneutical phenomenology.

Type
Research Article
Information
Science in Context , Volume 3 , Issue 2 , Autumn 1989 , pp. 477 - 488
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1989

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