This survey of major developments in North American philosophy of science begins with the mid-1960s consolidation of the disciplinary synthesis of internalist history and philosophy of science (HPS) as a response to criticisms of logical empiricism. These developments are grouped for discussion under the following headings: historical metamethodologies, scientific realisms, philosophies of the special sciences, revivals of empiricism, cognitivist naturalisms, social epistemologies, feminist theories of science, studies of experiment and the disunity of science, and studies of science as practice and (...) culture. A unifying theme of the survey is the relation between historical metamethodologists and scientific realists, which dominated philosophical work in the late 1970s. I argue that many of the alternative cognitive naturalisms, social epistemologies, and feminist theories that have been proposed can be understood as analogues to the differences between metamethodological theories of scientific rationality and realist accounts of successful reference to real causal processes. Recent work on experiment, scientific practice, and the culture of science may, however, challenge the underlying conception of the field according to which realism and historical rationalism (or their descendants) are the important alternatives available, and thus may take philosophy of science in new directions. (shrink)

This paper lays the groundwork for normative-yet-naturalistic social epistemology. I start by presenting two scenarios for the history of epistemology since Kant, one in which social epistemology is the natural outcome and the other in which it represents a not entirely satisfactory break with classical theories of knowledge. Next I argue that the current trend toward naturalizing epistemology threatens to destroy the distinctiveness of the sociological approach by presuming that it complements standard psychological and historical approaches. I then try to (...) reassert, in Comtean fashion, the epistemologist's credentials in regulating knowledge production. Finally, I consider how social epistemology may have something exciting and relevant to say about contemporary debates in the theory of knowledge. (shrink)

During the 1992–1993 academic year, Harold Garfinkel offered a graduate seminar on Ethnomethodology in the Sociology Department at the University of California, Los Angeles. One topic that was given extensive coverage in the seminar has not been discussed at much length in Garfinkel’s published works to date: Aron Gurwitsch’s treatment of Gestalt theory, and particularly the themes of “phenomenal field” and “praxeological description”. The edited transcript of Garfinkel’s seminar shows why he recommended that “for the serious initiatives of ethnomethodological investigations (...) […] Gurwitsch is a theorist we can’t do without”. Garfinkel’s ethnomethodological “misreading” is not a mistaken reading, but is more a matter of taking Gurwitsch’s phenomenological demonstrations of Gestalt contextures in phenomenal fields and transposing them for making detailed, concrete observations and descriptions of organizationally achieved social phenomena. Where Gurwitsch addresses the organization of perception as an autochthonous achievement, inherent to the stream and field of individual consciousness, Garfinkel extends and elaborates this field into the social world of enacted practices. The April 1993 seminar also is rich with brief asides and digressions in which Garfinkel comments about his use of Alfred Schutz, his attitude toward publishing, his relationship with Erving Goffman, and many other matters. (shrink)

The ArgumentIn this rejoinder to Gyorgy Markus, I argue that although there are nonphilosophical hermeneutical studies of communication among scientists from which much can be learned about scientific practices, there is also the philosophical genre of a hermeneutics of natural science, 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 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. (shrink)

(1999). Francis Bacon's “VERULAMIUM” the common‐law template of the modern in english science and culture. Angelaki: Vol. 4, Judging the law, pp. 7-26.

Many philosophers of science and technology who see themselves as coming “after” Husserl also claim that their phenomenology is hermeneutical. Yet they neither practice the same sort of phenomenology, nor do they all have the same understanding of hermeneutics. Moreover, their differences often seem to be more a function of different pre-selected substantive commitments—say, to take a “material” turn or to be resolutely “empirical”—than the product of any serious effort to clarify what it is be hermeneutical. In this essay, after (...) some discussion of Dilthey’s reception among post-Husserlians (especially Patrick Heelan and Don Ihde), I consider how aspiring hermeneuts might make their own pre-possession of substantive and methodological commitments a hermeneutical topic. This is, of course, is not just a scholarly question of how post-Husserlian phenomenologists might make themselves more phenomenological. Without thoughtful self-awareness of these commitments, one’s assumptions about the use of technology, design, the place of science in the larger culture and in relation to conceptions of human flourishing—all of these assumptions are likely to pass through into technoscientific practice with insufficient critical consideration. (shrink)

In this transdisciplinary article which stems from philosophical considerations (that depart from phenomenology—after Merleau-Ponty, Heidegger and Rosen—and Hegelian dialectics), we develop a conception based on topological (the Moebius surface and the Klein bottle) and geometrical considerations (based on torsion and non-orientability of manifolds), and multivalued logics which we develop into a unified world conception that surmounts the Cartesian cut and Aristotelian logic. The role of torsion appears in a self-referential construction of space and time, which will be further related to (...) the commutator of the True and False operators of matrix logic, still with a quantum superposed state related to a Moebius surface, and as the physical field at the basis of Spencer-Brown’s primitive distinction in the protologic of the calculus of distinction. In this setting, paradox, self-reference, depth, time and space, higher-order non-dual logic, perception, spin and a time operator, the Klein bottle, hypernumbers due to Musès which include non-trivial square roots of ±1 and in particular non-trivial nilpotents, quantum field operators, the transformation of cognition to spin for two-state quantum systems, are found to be keenly interwoven in a world conception compatible with the philosophical approach taken for basis of this article. The Klein bottle is found not only to be the topological in-formation for self-reference and paradox whose logical counterpart in the calculus of indications are the paradoxical imaginary time waves, but also a classical-quantum transformer (Hadamard’s gate in quantum computation) which is indispensable to be able to obtain a complete multivalued logical system, and still to generate the matrix extension of classical connective Boolean logic. We further find that the multivalued logic that stems from considering the paradoxical equation in the calculus of distinctions, and in particular, the imaginary solutions to this equation, generates the matrix logic which supersedes the classical logic of connectives and which has for particular subtheories fuzzy and quantum logics. Thus, from a primitive distinction in the vacuum plane and the axioms of the calculus of distinction, we can derive by incorporating paradox, the world conception succinctly described above. (shrink)

Science teaching always engages a philosophy of science. This article introduces a modern philosophy of science and indicates its implications for science education. The hermeneutic philosophy of science is the tradition of Kant, Heidegger, and Heelan. Essential to this tradition are two concepts of truth, truth as correspondence and truth as disclosure. It is these concepts that enable access to science in and of itself. Modern science forces aspects of reality to reveal themselves to human beings in events of disclosure. (...) The achievement of each event of disclosure requires the precise manipulation of equipment, which is an activity that depends on truth as correspondence. The implications of the hermeneutic philosophy of science for science education are profound. The article refers to Newton’s early work on optics to explore what the theory implies for teaching. Modern science—as the event of truth—is a relationship between an individual student, equipment, and reality. Science teachers provide for their students’ access to truth and they may show how their discipline holds a special relationship to reality. If the aim of science teaching is to enable students to disclose reality, the science curriculum will challenge some of the current practices of schooling. If teachers base science teaching upon the hermeneutic philosophy of science, science will assert itself as the intellectual discipline that derives from nature, and not from the inclinations of human beings. Science teachers teach nature’s own science. (shrink)

In this article I deal with the notion of observation, from a phenomenologically motivated point of view, and its representation mainly by means of the formal language of quantum mechanics. In doing so, I have taken the notion of observation in two diverse contexts. In one context as a notion related with objects of a logical-mathematical theory taken as registered facts of phenomenological perception ( Wahrnehmung ) inasmuch as this phenomenological idea can also be linked with a process of measurement (...) on the quantum-mechanical level. In another context I have taken it as connected with a notion of temporal constitution basically as it is described in E. Husserl’s texts on the phenomenology of temporal consciousness. Given that mathematical objects as formal-ontological objects can be thought of as abstractions of perceptual objects by means of categorial intuition, the question is whether and under what theoretical assumptions we can, in principle, include quantum objects in abstraction in the class of formal-ontological objects and thus inquire on the limits of their description within a formal-axiomatical theory. On the one hand, I derive an irreducibility on the level of individuals taken in formal representation as syntactical atoms-substrates without any further content and on the other hand a transcendental subjectivity of consciousness objectified as a self-constituted temporal unity upon which it is ultimately grounded the possibility of generation of an abstract predicative universe of discourse. (shrink)

Don Ihde is one of the world's foremost thinkers on the place of technologies in our lives. Over the course of a long career, he has built a unique and useful perspective by expanding on phenomenological and American pragmatist philosophy and has developed wide-ranging insights and conceptual tools for describing the details of our experience across the various areas of human activity, including scientific practice, anthropological history, computer interface, design, art history, and the technologies of everyday life. The Critical Ihde (...) brings together many of Ihde's most influential writings, as well as a number of under-recognized gems. Across these works are examples of his influential contributions to the phenomenology of human auditory and visual experience, his foundational work on the phenomenology of technology, and his thoughts on the technologies of scientific practice, including laboratory and medical imaging. Further, these chapters reveal the development of "postphenomenology," Ihde's original philosophical perspective, one that continues to flourish today across the work of a growing interdisciplinary and international collective of scholars. (shrink)

This article presents a brief argument for STS studies as grounded in fundamental historical transformations of the human condition, outlines seven distinct approaches to STS, and concludes with a brief for STS as the new form of a liberal education.

New accents in the philosophy of technology and philosophy of science amounting, e.g., to the so-called schools of the “New Experimentalism”, “New Instrumentalism” and, recently, “New Mechanism” emphasize the impact of instruments, experiments, and “mechanisms” of the respective technologies opened up by the progress of ever-improving measuring instruments, procedures etc. In addition, it would be necessary to accentuate the process- and action-orientation including practical responsibility problems and dynamic systems models from an epistemological perspective of the methodological scheme-interpretationist approach developed by (...) the author since the seventies of last century. The necessity of multi-disciplinary mutual influences was already time and again stressed regarding philosophy of science. But relatively new is not only the methodological turn involved but also the necessity to go to higher levels of abstraction, metatheories, action- and value-orientation. Therefore, we have to go more interdisciplinary, systems-oriented, and higher-level. That implies notable consequences for an ethics, or rather, meta-ethics for philosophy of science. Practice-oriented philosophers of science will have to go more methodological, multidisciplinary and even responsible. (shrink)

This essay is dominated by three themes that recur contrapuntally in Heisenberg’s writings: observation, description, and ontology—prompted always by a concern about the role played by the subjective inquirer in scientific meaning-making, and by the ontology of scientific claims. Among the related themes are; the tension between paradigmatic concerns with structure and philosophical concerns with reality, the possibility of scientific revolutions, such as relativity and quantum mechanics, that can overthrow the classical traditions of natural science and the inadequacy of a (...) psychophysical parallelism for an epistemology of reason. The influence of Husserl and Heidegger is in his neokantian concern about the role of subjectivity. Heisenberg was a long-time friend of Heidegger and familiar with Heidegger’s hermeneutical phenomenology and its critique of Greek philosophy; he also contributed an essay to a Festschrift in Heidegger’s honor in 1959. (shrink)

We come prepared to track events and objects, building our knowledge base while foraging for coherence. Classical pragmatism recognizes that the acquisition of knowledge is in part a contact sport (e.g. Peirce, Dewey). One of the aims of neuroscience is to capture human experience. One route to perhaps achieve this may be through the study of the visual system and its expansion in our evolutionary history. Embodied cephalic systems, as Dewey knew well, are tied to self-corrective inquiry. A philosophy of (...) neuroscience needs to capture how such events are tracked, tested through experience, and subsequently modified in the brain to comprise a knowledge base. (shrink)

The controversy over imageless thought versus picture thinking , with the recent reconsideration of model-based reasoning in the physical sciences is briefly examined. The main focus of the article is on the role of instrumentally elicited images in the sciences, especially in the physical sciences, with special reference to optics, experimental particle physics and observational astronomy, against the background of the civilization of digital images, though to some degree every scientific discipline is implicated. Imaging, today chiefly in the mode of (...) electronic digital visual imaging, reaches into every phase of scientific inquiry, observational, experimental, simulational, even in mathematical research. The combination of algorithms and image-intensive science with the plethora of big data results in an epistemic pattern of "mathematical imagism". The epistemological issues regarding the image-intensiveness as of data-intensiveness of scientific research deserve further probing, in pursuance of the discussions of the ideal of mechanical objectivity in machine vision versus trained judgment in the selection and assessment of scientific images: as for now tacitly we depend on conventions regarding what we called "warranted imageability". (shrink)

Thinkers from a variety of fields analyze the roles of imaging technologies in science and consider their implications for many issues, from our conception of selfhood to the authority of science. In what follows, I encourage scholars to develop an applied philosophy of imaging, that is, to collect these analyses of scientific imaging and to reflect on how they can be made useful for ongoing scientific work. As an example of this effort, I review concepts developed in Don Ihde’s phenomenology (...) of technology and refigure them for use in the analysis of scientific practice. These concepts are useful for drawing out the details of the interpretive frameworks scientists bring to laboratory images. Next, I apply these ideas to a contemporary debate in neurobiology over the interpretation of images of neurons which have been frozen at the moment of transmitter release. This reveals directions for further thought for the study of neurotransmission. (shrink)