Why Is There No Hermeneutics of Natural Sciences? Some Preliminary Theses

Abstract

The ArgumentContemporary natural sciences succeed remarkably well in ensuring a relatively continuous transmission of their cognitively relevant traditions and in creating a widely shared background consensus among their practitioners – hermeneutical ends seemingly achieved without hermeneutical awareness or explicitly acquired hermeneutical skills.It is a historically specific – emerging only in the nineteenth century – cultural organization of the Author-Text-Reader relation which endows them with such an ease of hermeneutical achievements: an institutionally fixed form of textual and intertextual practices, normatively posited ways of adequate reception and criticism, etc. The same organization also explains a number of their often-discussed epistemic and cultural characteristics: their depersonalized objectivity, the social closure of their discourse and their reduced cultural significance, the shallow historical depth of their activated traditions, etc.The cognitive structure and the social function of contemporary natural sciences are intimately interwoven with a set of sui generis cultural relations that are partially fixed in the textual characteristics of their literary objectivations. A comparative hermeneutical analysis of natural sciences as a specifically constituted and institutionalized cultural genre or discourse-type brings into relief those contingent cultural conditions and relations to which some of their fundamental epistemological characteristics are bound, or at least with which they are historically closely associated.

Psychedelic science as cosmic play, psychedelic humanities as perennial polemics? Or why we are still fighting over Max Weber’s Science as a Vocation

“…If we revisit Science as a Vocation as a classic, however, the question is how, if at all, it continues to be relevant today. The Hungarian philosopher of science Gyorgy Markus (1987: 34–35) noted that, unlike the natural sciences, the humanities and social sciences came to be articulated in a “polemic-dissensive manner.” Different schools and traditions have been organized around theoretical alternatives, which can be traced back to texts considered classical because they provide a paradigmatic formulation to one or another of these alternatives. These alternatives are posited as perennially or at least epochally valid.…”

“…In the natural sciences, the situation is very different. They do not have classics anymore, Markus (1987: 32) pointed out. The historian of science Derek de Solla Price (1970: 9) corroborated bibliometrically Weber’s (2004b: 11) estimate that the historical memory of scientists had shrunk to about five decades, showing that the number of citations per paper was halved every 20–30 years, as the knowledge got packed down and outmoded.…”

Contingency, Nature and Hermeneutics in History of Science

“…As such, it is a different business that does not contradict the possibility of 'playing the stranger' (that is, of artificially ignoring certain aspects of the tradition we have inherited), but provides a coherent alternative to it: an alternative that, however, cannot take place in complete independence of current scientific knowledge (and, relatedly, practice). 52 The crucial idea is that we understand past dealings with natural phenomena because we are ourselves familiar with similar phenomena.…”

The Meaning of “Inhibition” and the Discourse of Order

“…The scientific research paper, written for a narrowly defined audience and inaccessible to others, became the hallmark of scientific productivity. As Gyorgy Markus (1987) has argued, natural-scientific communities in the nineteenth century developed clear rules for expressing a "depersonalized objectivity" in texts and for satisfying specific, restricted expectations concerning relations between author, text, and reader. This undoubtedly reduced, sometimes to vanishing point, the meaning of scientific texts for the wider culture.…”