Two Accounts of the Hermeneutic Fore-structure of Scientific Research

Abstract

In this article, I examine various aspects of the application of Heidegger's motif of interpretative articulation (the core phenomenological motif of existential analytic) to the constitutional analysis of meaningful objects in scientific research that are contextually ready-to-hand. It is my contention that not only the concepts of the ‘fore-structure of understanding’ and the ‘as-structure of interpretation’, but also the extended concepts of the ‘hermeneutic fore-structure of meaning constitution’ and ‘characteristic hermeneutic situation’ are the keys to understanding the interpretative nature of scientific research. The paper applies the constitutional analysis of hermeneutic phenomenology to several phenomena of scientific research—constitution of meaningful objects, situational fulfilment of a domain's general project, production of a domain's thematically given objects, implementation of readable technologies to what is contextually ready-to-hand, reading hypothetical theoretical objects, and exegetical textualizing within interrelated practices. The study is supplied with exemplary illustrations from enzymology and biochemistry. The correlation between a domain's interpretative articulation and the appropriation of research possibilities within the research everydayness is addressed. Special attention is paid to the belief in and reading of intracellular enzymes as hypothetical theoretical objects.

Acknowledgements

I would like to express my deep gratitude to the three anonymous referees of this journal for their valuable critical comments on the initial version of this article.

Notes

Of course, this formulation simplifies essentially Heidegger's discussion, in which the most important role is played not by the concept of mathematical projection but by the conception of ‘the mathematical’. In this regard, Heidegger's central claim is that modern natural science, modern mathematics, and modern metaphysics sprang from the same root of the mathematical (Heidegger 1984, 98). Mathêmata is conceived of as what is learnable, i.e. what can be grasped and appropriated. At the same time, the mathematical is the a priori knowledge about the thingness of things—the things as what we already know them to be in advance. Roughly speaking, the mathematical projection is that specification of the mathematical which takes into account the axiomatic structure of modern science's theorizing.

In my view, it is simply inconsistent to discuss Heidegger's position in terms such as ‘robust realism’, ‘naïve antirealism’, ‘background realism’, ‘deflationary realism’, ‘instrumentalist antirealism’, ‘minimal realism’, etc. All of these terms refer to positions that have nothing to do with the assumptions of Heidegger's philosophizing.

The assumption that enzymes change shape on interaction with their substrates is known as the ‘induced-fit hypothesis’ in biochemistry.

On the experimental and conceptual articulation of fields of research in biology, see in particular Bechtel (1984).

It is this predication that enables one to design experiments that may confirm or reject predictions made by means of the induced-fit hypothesis.

This is a too large subject that I cannot discuss ad hoc here. For an approach that provoked many debates on the subject see Callon and Latour (1992).

In this formulation, a particular situation in the research process is circumscribed by the understanding–interpretation circle set up by a configuration of scientific practices. This is why independent of the general hermeneutic fore-structure of domain's articulation, it is reasonable to say that each particular situation has its own horizon of articulation. Thus considered, a situation in the research process is at once an empirically identifiable configuration of scientific practices and a contingent hermeneutic situation defined by that triad of fore-sight, fore-having, and fore-conception which the configuration enacts.

This was Liebig's Utopia, but to a great extent it expressed dominant beliefs guiding the everyday work in physiological chemistry in the last three decades of the nineteenth century.

To be sure, belief in scientific objects might be treated as a collective-psychological event and relegated to the ‘context of discovery’. The account I am discussing, however, singles out the phenomenological aspects of this belief, i.e. those aspects that are indispensable for the constitution of scientific objects. It is an account in terms of the ‘context of constitution’. In one of the first studies in the hermeneutics of the natural sciences Theodore Kisiel (1971) suggests a substantial revision and extension of the very concept of the context of discovery. He provides a rationale for assigning Heideggerian and Gadamerian dimensions to this context by reading in hermeneutic terms ideas of post-empiricist philosophers (Polanyi, Hanson, and Kuhn). In my view, this way of developing a hermeneutics of the natural sciences (however promising and however broad the reach of its consequences) is still committed to the ‘science-as-knowledge’ approach. It does not break definitively with the cognitivist picture of science, and does not do sufficient justice to the plurality of practices of scientific research. This is why I insist, not on an extension and revision of the context of discovery, but on the delineation of a context of constitution that is completely independent of the traditional distinction in philosophy of science between discovery and justification. (On a similar estimation of Kisiel's programme, see Kockelmans 1986, 41–44.)

On the status of protoplasm theory in physiological chemistry see Kohler (1973).

The belief that protoplasm is endowed with a vital force that propels all intermediate steps between the initial materials and the final products of the biochemical reactions posed the ambitious (and eventually irresolvable) task of identifying/constructing highly complex thematically given objects in the research everydayness.

See in this development Fruton (1999, 117–141). It deserves mention that the belief in the living protoplasm was essentially shattered within the longstanding debates on the nature of fermentation in the second half of nineteenth century.

The opportunity to prove the assertion that basic metabolic reactions can also take place in ‘dead protein’ endangered the integrity of physiological chemistry's everydayness, on one hand, but opened a horizon of possibilities whose actualization promised to disclose a new domain of research, on the other. In the mid-1890s a significant step in the transition from physiological chemistry to biochemistry was undertaken when Eduard Buchner showed on the basis of in vitro experiments that the conversion of glucose to alcohol is due not to protoplasm and the cell structure, but to a soluble protein that he called ‘zymase’. See Kohler (1971, 1972) and Bechtel and Abrahamsen (2007).

Of course, long before the emergence of the aforementioned practice of in vitro experimentation, enzymes have been identified as completely ‘real objects’ (i.e. thematically given objects). Emulsin was discovered as early as in 1828 by identifying the role it plays in decomposing amygdalin in sugar, benzaldehyde, and hydrocyanic acid. In the subsequent years chemical and physiological discoveries of diastase and pepsin happened. Yet no biologists or chemists who studied in the mid-nineteenth century went on to suppose that the vital reactions of living cells were due to enzymes. The ‘discovery’ of the enzyme as a hypothetical theoretical object happened not until the protoplasm theory was called into question. At that time the existence of enzymes was associated with a wide range of entirely new structural and functional properties of these proteins that transformed them into a significantly new scientific object. The initial version of enzyme theory was entitled to circumscribe the semantic content of the theoretical concept of enzyme. However, the realization that the identification of the new structural and functional properties is a long-standing forthcoming task made enzymes a hypothetical theoretical object whose existence became projected on the research possibilities arising out of the configurations of scientific practices in the domain of biochemistry.

In fact, what was initiated might be described as a ‘continuous representation’ of that object within the deferring spaces of representation enacted by the configurations of scientific practices. See on this claim and its implementation in the historiography of biochemistry and molecular biology Rheinberger (1997, 102–113).

The way of studying a situational hermeneutic fore-structure by having recourse to the text it gives rise to amounts to entering into the problematic of scientific research's intertextuality—a step that I will not undertake in this paper. Theoretical meaning is constituted through the play of texts constituted in various situations of a domain's research process. The infinity of a domain's research process rests, in particular, on this intertextuality.