Expanding Hermeneutics
Don Ihde, Philosophy, SUNY Stony Brook
The late twentieth century seems marked by a deep intellectual
discomfort about the ways in which Western thought generally has
framed its ways of understanding the World. One symptom of this dis-
ease revolves around the current philosophical debates which see
either a dramatic end to, or a winding down from 'modernity.' Are we
'postmodern'? 'a-modern'? or, were we, as Bruno Latour claims, never
modern to begin with? {1} In this contribution to the closing of the first
"Hermeneutics and Science" meeting, I shall be using this context to re-
interpret both hermeneutics and science.
Here the more focused and immediate context is one which finds the
early and mid-twentieth century interpretations of science called into
question. Nor is this unique meeting alone--only a few weeks prior to
the Vesprey meeting I had attended a similar search for alternative
philosophies of science within a more Anglo-Australasian-American
context in Newcastle, Australia. Here, in Hungary, the context is one
which more fully draws from Euro-American philosophies relating more
closely to phenomenological-hermeneutic traditions. But in both cases
what is clear, negatively, is that earlier accounts of science now seem
unsatisfactory. Allow one final parallelism between the two conferences:
the Australian conference focused itself upon the "foundations of non-
formal reasoning" in science--the title still echos the earlier Anglo-
American analytic traditions, whereas we focused upon a "hermeneutics
of science." Yet, both conferences might also be seen as reactions
against the now dying prominence of intepretations of science which
prevailed in early and mid-twentieth century thinking, interpretations
which revolved around several variations upon Positivism and Logical
Empiricism.
Positivistic interpretations of science could be characterized as extreme
late forms of Modern rationalistic interpretations which, in certain
respects, saw the phenomenon of science as a kind of logical and
propositional enterprise focused upon theory and its subsequent
verifications--or falsifications--and clearly framed in terms of modernist
epistemologies. It is this modernist framework which now falls into
question in the dissatisfaction exemplified in both conferences.
I. Setting the Context
If the general dissatisfaction is situated within the broader doubts being
raised against modernist epistemologies, in this Euro-American context
the primary alternative is one which seeks to find the relevance of
hermeneutics for the sciences. But, interestingly, within the context of
this search, there has emerged a strong tension concerning how
hermeneutics itself is to be understood.
Most simply it might be thought that what is needed is (a) to understand
hermeneutics, and (b) to understand science, and then (c) to simply
relate the two. But, in fact, the situation is much more complex in that
neither term is clear, nor do they stand in isolation. Instead,
hermeneutics needs to be understood, not only in relation to science,
but in relation to the philosophies of science which, for philosophers,
are often taken implicitly for science itself, or for how science is to be
understood. Moreover, the parallel histories which relate to
hermeneutics, science and philosophies of science have sometimes
strange subterranean interconnections.
This complexity is revealed in precisely the tension which has erupted
in the debates and discussions here. One way of phrasing this is to say
that there are two strongly held, but opposing, views of hermeneutics
and its relations to science. The one view, supported most strongly by
Karl Otto Apel, but also seconded by Dagfinn Follesdal and others,
holds that there can be a hermeneutics of science as a cultural and
historical phenomenon, but there cannot be a hermeneutics of the
objects or products of science. This view, I shall argue, remains bound
to the concept of hermeneutics which I shall call 'modernist' and which
maintains some degree of strong difference between the human or
social sciences and the natural sciences.
The other view holds that there is emerging what I shall call in a very
special sense, a 'postmodernist' hermeneutics which practices both a
"hermeneutics of the thingly" and a hermeneutic philosophy of science
which calls into question the older accepted strong distinctions between
the human and natural sciences. This view argues for an 'expanded
hermeneutics.' And although in the polemics of the debate Professor
Apel has called this the view of "some Americans" (Crease, Eger and
Ihde), it is obviously also held by some Europeans (Kampis and Ropolyi
among them).
I shall argue, albeit indirectly, that one key variable within this debate
relates to, not so much how a hermeneutics operates, as to the regard
with which philosophy of science operates. In particular, one difference
between the 'traditionalists' and the 'expansionists' relates to the
vestigial effects of Positivistic or 'modernist' forms of the philosophy of
science still held to be more or less correct with respect to interpreting
science by the traditionalists, whereas the expansionists hold that this
tradition of philosophy of science has now been surpassed. To open the
exploration, I shall turn to two brief histories.
II. A Brief History of Hermeneutics
Paul Ricoeur, one of the primary twentieth century hermeneuts, claims
that hermeneutics can be traced back to Aristotle's Peri hermeneias
and that in this classical work hermeneutics is a general theory of
human comprehension. {2} If that is the case, historically, then the
argument which follows is an attempt to return an expanded
hermeneutics to this general theory of understanding. However,
Aristotle's 'hermeneutics' is one which preceeds the Modern division of
knowledge into the cultural and the natural sciences. This means that
we cannot simply either return to or recover the ancient sense without
risking anachronistic error.
In post-classical Europe, after the disruptions which separated
European thought from classical thought, pre-modern hermeneutics
became a much narrower discipline. It was an exegetical, expository,
interpretive process applied to written texts and in particular, to sacred
texts. And although such a textually oriented hermeneutics was far from
naive--it included theories of symbols, analogies, and significations--it
remained bound to exegetical praxis and remained so until the rise of
modernity.
Indeed, hermeneutic modernity could be said to have arrived somewhat
late because it was primarily in the work of the late nineteenth and early
twentieth century thinkers such as Friedrich Schleiermacher (l768-l834)
and Wilhelm Dilthey (l833-l9ll) that hermeneutics becomes both
philosophical and expands beyond exegesis.
Schleiermacher, a theologian, begins this second development by
adapting hermeneutics as a distinctive humanistic and historical
discipline which, in effect, becomes a philosophical anthropology and a
distinctive 'psychology.' But it is Dilthey who gives hermeneutics its
'canonical' modernist direction. Hermeneutics is generalized as the
"human science" which applies to the various disciplines which deal
with Geisteswissenschaft, the sciences of "understanding." And, it is
Dilthey who contrasts such sciences from the natural sciences,
Naturwissenshaften, which are distinguished as sciences of
"explanation." It is this distinction which becomes canonical and which
remains operational within the still modernist hermeneutic
traditionalists. Modern hermeneutics thus becomes a 'humanities'
methodology, broader than exegesis, but not a truly 'general' method,
and it remains distinct from the natural sciences.
The twentieth century, particularly the mid-twentieth century, sees
philosophical hermeneutics enriched by yet another development:
phenomenology. Here we arrive at the three European giants of the
hermeneutic tradition: Martin Heidegger, Hans Georg Gadamer, and
Paul Ricoeur. Enriched by Husserlian phenomenology, hermeneutics in
these three thinkers becomes ontological. And, insofar as there can be
a hermeneutic ontology there can be a methodological generalization
which reaches beyond any merely historical or humanistic trajectory.
Ontology precedes epistemology and this, itself, is already to overturn
the claims of modernist epistemology.
There remain, however, epistemological implications of a hermeneutic
ontology. Not only can one note the muting or virtual disappearance of
a strong understanding/explanation distinction in the operative theory of
these three hermeneuts, but the phenomenologically enriched
epistemologies of late modern hermeneutics shows how, in principle,
scientific knowledge as well as cultural knowledge must be derived from
(human) ontology. In Husserl this was already argued for insofar as the
constitution of any special science must refer back to the Lifeworld. In
Heidegger this becomes the derivation of the objects of science
(Zuhanden) from the praxical knowledge of pragmata or tools
(Vorhanden). In effect this was to argue that scientific knowledge was
derivative from practical knowledge. In Gadamer and Ricoeur, both
somewhat more indirect in ontological claims than the former
philosophers, it remains the blurring of the understanding/explanation
distinction. I shall temporarily leave this brief history and now turn to a
parallel brief history of science and the philosophy of science.
III. A Brief History of Science and Philosophy of Science
If one accepts as the standard view that science is itself a Modern
phenomenon, for purposes here one need not look at any pre-modern
stage of the development of science. Nor need one look at all the
stages by which early modern science attained the particular later
modern perspective with which I wish to confront the modern stage of
hermeneutics. Indeed, one could even claim that there is something of
an early modern to late modern 'lag' between the development of
modern science and modern hermeneutics not dissimilar to what I am
arguing is a lag between traditional and expansionist hermeneutics in
the late twentieth century.
In this context, however, the relevant history is one which takes note of
the late modern, established natural science perspective at the moment
of the modernization (Schleiermacher/Dilthey) of hermeneutics. That
perspective was distinctly pre-relativistic and distinctly early modern in
form. In short, the 'science' which was being distinguished from the
Geisteswissenshaften was the science of early modernity which held
that (a) there could be a fully 'objective', contextless, ideal observer,
perspectiveless knowledge. (b) This science took there to be an
absolute space and absolute time as in the Newtonian conception, and
(c) that such 'nature' could be arrived at through the variations upon
'geometric theory' which used inferences of the hypothetical-deductive
type.
That such a perspective and method could not apply to the human
sciences was obvious enough. And it was the implicit acceptance by
modernist hermeneutics of this self-interpretation of science which
entered into the human versus natural sciences distinctions which
characterized early twentieth century hermeneutics. And, ironically,
elements of this same self-interpretation of modern science also
became canonized within the early twentieth century positivist
developments in the philosophy of science as well.
What first was to change science, and with it its perspective, but which
was not to be socialized until later, was the "paradigm shift" introduced
first through Einstein's theory of relativity and then through quantum
mechanical probabilistic theory. Both these developments displaced the
perspectiveless perspective of earlier modern science and introduced a
perspective which tied relativistic sciences precisely back into the
necessity of accounting for an embodied human perspective. This
should have been seen from the beginning to pose a challenge to the
nature/culture, human/natural science, and understanding/explanation
distinctions of early twentieth century hermeneutics--but this was not
the case until later.
The need for re-introducing a hermeneutic ontology into science itself
was already latent in the relativistic sciences which realized that the
position of the observer must be taken into account in all
measurements--measurements are relativistic in precisely the way
phenomenological correlations of noema/noesis occur on a broader
schema. Quantum explanations are even more radical in that in one
sense one can say that in such explanations nothing becomes 'real'
until it is looked at.
What I am suggesting here is that the 'science' which is correspondent
to modernist hermeneutics is not the science which now obtains.
The same type of shift from modern to late modern or contemporary
views occurs in the philosophies of science. Positivistic versions of the
philosophy of science are primarily pre-Kuhnian. (I use this term in a
somewhat generic sense since it was not Kuhn alone who changed
philosophers' perspectives on science.) From the late l950's on the view
that science was, in effect, a complex 'theory generating (through
hypothetical-deductive and propositional processes) machine' began to
fall into disrepute.
Kuhn's introduction of historical cases and recognition of radically
disruptive shifts of "paradigms" in revolutions was to be adumbrated in
later decades by the rise of a whole series of refractive intepretations of
science. One new front was opened by the sociology of science in the
seventies and eighties. This re-interpretation of science often included
social scientists trained in phenomenologically oriented "social
constructionist" theories (such as Andrew Pickering of
CONSTRUCTING QUARKS) or the "strong program" traditions which
saw that not only are scientific products historically, but socially
"constituted." I shall not rehearse the full history of this set of
arguments, some of which have been rather highly contested by more
traditional modernist philosophers of science, but merely point out that
the current generation of science interpreters seems no longer to deny
that the products of science are socially constructed, rather they argue
over whether these products are only social constructions implying at
least that they are both/and rather than either/or. Such a stance, I would
point out, is a distinctively postmodern stance. And it is a stance which
holds to a multidimensioned analysis, also in keeping with
contemporary multifactoral analysis.
As the final step in this brief history, I wish to turn at a group of
contemporary philosophers of science, some of whom are specifically
self-identified with a 'hermeneutics' of science approach, and who take
an expansionist direction into the analysis of scientific products
themselves. These include the thinkers which I have included in my
INSTRUMENTAL REALISM book (Indiana, l99l) {3}, all of whom argue
that much contemporary science produces not only socially constructed
products, but what could be called 'technologically constructed'
products. Later, and on a much broader scale, Bruno Latour has
recognized this same trajectory in his notion of "hybrids" in WE HAVE
NEVER BEEN MODERN (Harvard, l993).
Instrumental realists recognize that today's science technologically
constructs products (of 'Nature'?) such as the newly constructed
elements in the expanded table of elements which now includes entries
which may or may not exist in nature (those of the heavy, nanosecond
lives predicted as possible by atomic stability factors but the actual
examples of which occur in laboratory productions.) Similarly, the
creation of 'artificial' molecules (in polymers and plastics) which do not
again, exist in nature. Or, in the latest biotechnological sciences, the
applications of inter-species DNA manipulations which place human
DNA into rats in a distinctly 'unnatural' construction. Latour, in
specifically challenging the nature/culture distinction which
characterizes so much of modern thought, argues further that even
such a phenomenon as the ozone hole is precisely a "hybrid" which is
simultaneously both cultural and natural. I am suggesting that
hermeneutically a 'postmodern' hermeneutics can be a hermeneutics of
the 'thingly' which does not presuppose the culture/nature modern
distinction, and instead focuses upon the 'construction' of things.
IV. Expanded Hermeneutics: A 'Thingly' and 'Postmodern'
Hermeneutics
We are now at the end of the twentieth century and I have been arguing
that at this historical point much has changed, including at the least our
perspectives upon modernity. And, while I admit to some discomfort
with the term, 'postmodern,' especially since it often has come to stand
for a lot of sillyness, I cannot now think of a better term to denote
passing out of the distinction sets of late modernity.
In the context of a hermeneutics of science, I have been arguing that
this expansion of hermeneutics is one which extends to the 'thingly',
including the things of science and not merely to its history, its cultural
context, or its sociology (all of which terms retain the modernist
distinctions between social and natural sciences). Implicitly I am also
suggesting that if there is to be a hermeneutics of (natural) science, it
must be a hermeneutics which reverberates with the actual state of
those sciences and not to what they have been at some earlier time.
In what I have termed the 'postmodernity' of this hermeneutics, I am
mostly reacting to the vestigial uses of nature/culture distinctions and
the progeny from such which becloud the possibility of an emergent
'thingly' hermeneutics. The mid- to late twentieth century applications of
the social or human sciences to the practices of the natural sciences is
a beginning. But this set of disciplines, too, is not yet fully
hermeneutical. So, in conclusion I want to point to some interesting
symptoms of what I take to be areas where a hermeneutics in a
'postmodern' mode might look:
A history of dominant metaphors which operate in so many of the
sciences has long been of philosophic interest. And if the rise of
mechanical metaphors in very early modernity was telling, it is of no
small interest to see the late twentieth century turning to broadly
linguistic or language metaphors. The scientific tribal languages of the
genetic and biotechnological sciences, for example, are full of such
metaphors. DNA is a 'code' which has 'communicative' aspects between
gene strands. Genes 'express' themselves in various ways. At the full
animal stage, one today even speaks of 'animal cultures' and
increasingly of 'sociobiological' factors.
Reductionistic simplicity has often been replaced with 'systems' and
'complexity' factors which our new tools, particularly computers, make
possible. Laplacean determinism is long dead with 'chaos' and 'fractals'
contexted within very complex probablistic calculations their
replacements. Here computers and computer modelling allows
investigators to have a tool which can deal with complexity and
multifactoral aspects of a phenomenon.
And in the contemporary philosophies of science, the inclusion, rather
than reduction of, history: sociology: culture: amd gender factors all
must be included. These factors may not be simply rhetorical, but be
inbuilt perspectives which can only be expanded by a multiperspectival
inclusiveness.
V. Epilogue
An expanded hermeneutics can and will play a role as a theory of
meaning and interpretation, beyond the distinctions of modernity and
towards the multifactoral and multistable analysis which is in keeping
with 'postmodern' thinking. To undertake this role, however,
hermeneutics must--like its sister disciplines are beginning to do--free
itself of modernist epistemology. I suspect that will become the concrete
task of our future meetings which delve into the interface of
hermeneutics and science.
Notes:
l. Bruno Latour, WE HAVE NEVER BEEN MODERN (Harvard
University Press, l993)
2. Paul Ricoeur, THE CONFLICT OF INTERPRETATIONS
(Northwestern University Press, l974), p. 4
3. Don Ihde, INSTRUMENTAL REALISM (Indiana University Press,
l99l) Discusses Robert Ackermann, Robert Crease, Hubert Dreyfus,
Peter Galison, Ian Hacking, Patrick Heelan, Don Ihde, and Bruno
Latour.
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