Ebook: The Context of Constitution: Beyond the Edge of Epistemological Justification

This study brings together ideas developed over many years in various lectures in an endeavour to clarify the concept of hermeneutic fore-structure of scientific research. The starting point of my investigations was the outline of an interp- tative approach to the constitution of science’s cognitive content. In the late 1970s I was preoccupied with a question that nowadays should be formulated as follows: Is it possible to claim a validity of the hermeneutic view of the “situatedness in a tradition” also for the natural sciences? I was convinced that the negative answer implies a self-defeating position. It states that in order to champion the (cultural) universality of hermeneutics, one has to profess the non-hermeneutic nature of the natural sciences. Paradoxically enough, this a- wer presupposes a sharp dividing line (between dialogical experience and monological research) in culture in order to stress the universality of hermeneutics. Long before the period of perestroika in my corner, I learned from Joseph Kockelmans, Patrick Heelan, and Theodore Kisiel how the universalization of hermeneutics can include the natural sciences without ignoring their cognitive specificity. Somewhat later, in the aftermath of the discussions over the “finalization of science”, I began to confront the view that it would be a kind of trivializing the struggle for a philosophical hermeneutics if the theory-observation nexus is treated as a specific hermeneutic circle. No doubt, the view is correct. I was, however, dissatisfied with the way of arguing for it.

Whether philosophy of science is crucially tied to epistemological justification is a significant topic of current debates. This book sets out an extensive argument against the foundationalist theories of justification, and advocates new life for philosophy of science. At the present, there seems to be no middle ground between analytic approaches to scientific knowledge and hermeneutic conceptions of scientific research. The author brings together aspects of an ontology of the interpretative constitution of research objects and a holistic picture of science’s cognitive structures.

Yet the book is by no means an attempt to reconcile holistic epistemology and hermeneutic phenomenology. The Context of Constitution goes beyond both enterprises. Delineating this context leads to the view of "cognitive existentialism" by means of which the author offers a fresh look at key issues in the theory of scientific practices, hermeneutics of research traditions, taxonomy of the types of scientific inquiry, and phenomenology of proto-normativity.

The book is a contribution to a wide range of discussion concerning the post-Gadamerian extension of philo