Implications for Scientific Understanding

Heidegger’s account of science in Being and Time, while very suggestive, is underdeveloped and involves a number of difficulties.¹⁸ Moreover, there is little to suggest the extent to which Heidegger engaged with the philosophy of science of his day, with the exception of a few polemical remarks.¹⁹ Nevertheless, there are three features of Heidegger’s account of scientific understanding that I wish to highlight in this section: (i) its practical character; (ii) its prospective nature; and (iii) its normative dimension.

The central claim of Heidegger’s existential conception of science is that science should be understood as something Dasein does, as a specific way in which it comports itself to the world (BT: 408). Heidegger explicitly contrasts this existential conception of science to more

18 As an area of research, Heidegger’s philosophy of science has received less attention than other aspects of his philosophy and their relation to other branches of philosophy. Nevertheless, recent work by Patricia Glazebrook has done much to rectify this, in particular Glazebrook (2000, 2012).

For a brief overview of some of the elements and problems with Heidegger’s philosophy of science, see Rouse (2005).

19 As Rouse notes, Heidegger’s development of an existential conception of science would have primarily been critically directed towards the neo-Kantians and Husserl’s transcendental phenomenological approach. For an excellent discussion of Heidegger’s relation to both neo-Kantian philosophy and the Vienna Circle, see Friedman (2000).

traditionally epistemological conceptions that identify science as ‘the totality established through an interconnection of true propositions’ (BT: 32), and do so through ‘the kind of

“logic” which limps along after the sciences in order to discover its “method”’ (BT: 30). In effect, Heidegger is criticising traditional approaches within the philosophy of science which are primarily concerned with the retrospective evaluation and justification of scientific results and its methodological norms. For Heidegger this approach to science rests of the assumption that, on the one hand, the relevant scientific research has been completed, and on the other hand, that what is to be evaluated can be made fully explicit. As Rouse (1981, 2005) emphasises, Heidegger is not concerned with this reconstructive project, but rather, insofar as science is understood as something Dasein does, the sciences must be considered prospectively:

Research demands that we project possible directions in outline, in advance of their actually having being carried out. To make such understanding fully explicit would be to have already carried out the research activities which the understanding is projecting. A fully explicit preconception would not tell us what would count as a solution to a problem; it would be the solution. (Rouse 1981: 274)

For Heidegger, it is the retrospective conception of scientific knowledge that is precisely what science actively seeks to surpass. For Heidegger, the aim of an existential conception of science is to thematise this prospective, futural-orientation of science, in which science, as a way in which Dasein directs itself to the world, always ‘presses ahead’ into unexplored possibilities.²⁰ Existentially conceived, Heidegger argues that the sciences must be approached as ‘a way of existence and thus as a mode of being-in-the-world, which discovers or discloses either entities or being’ (BT: 408). That is to say, the sciences manifest specific ways in which Dasein can exist in the world, a particular body of practices through which entities are intelligibly discovered as entities, which in turn presupposes an understanding of their being.

On a Heideggerian reading, the contexts in which scientific research is undertaken, the laboratory, clinic or field site, are not a collection of extant objects with various properties and relations, but instead constitute ‘worlds’: normatively structured contexts of significance. The practical understanding provides the background of possibilities against which the relevant skills, techniques and abilities of scientists enable them to successfully interact with, discover and manipulate the equipment with which they are concerned. On this Heideggerian reading, scientific instruments are not simply theory-driven ‘tools’ to which we put ‘definite

20 This prospective character of scientific research has been more recently discussed in Hans-Jörg Rheinberger’s account of experimental systems (Rheinberger 1997).

questions’.²¹ Instead, they are determined by our practical understanding of the kinds of possibilities that are available to them as equipment and a sensitivity to the normative conditions which determine their accuracy, reliability, repeatability and relevance for inquiry.

Such understanding, as Heidegger emphasised, need not involve an explicit representation of the ‘work to be produced’, but a non-thematic grasp of the possibilities available to equipmental entities, and a sense of how to act within these equipmental contexts (BT: 185).

Heidegger emphasises the practical dimension of scientific understanding by arguing against conceptions of scientific or theoretical inquiry which see it as involving detachment from our instrumental and equipmental concerns. If we characterise scientific inquiry as a shift from everyday circumspective concern to theoretical exploration, then theoretical understanding would consist primarily in the ‘disappearance of praxis’ or a ‘privation’ and

‘absence of praxis’ (BT: 409). But, according to Heidegger, scientific research is underpinned by bodies of research practices:

Reading off the measurements which result from an experiment often requires a complicated

‘technical’ set-up for the experimental design. Observation with a microscope is dependent upon the production of ‘preparations’. Archaeological excavation, which precedes any interpretation of the ‘findings’, demands manipulations of the grossest kind […] even in the

‘most abstract’ way of working out problems and establishing what has been obtained, one manipulates equipment for writing, for example. (BT: 409)

Heidegger’s point here is not to reduce all scientific activity to a kind of practical know-how in opposition to theoretical inquiry. His concern is rather to emphasise that our practical orientation to the world is not a mere ‘add-on’ to scientific inquiry but a constitutive element of the manner in which the sciences understand and make sense of entities within their disciplinary fields. The idea that science consists simply in pure theoretical inquiry has of course long been challenged by philosophers of science in the Anglo-American tradition, which is illustrated in the work on scientific experimentation, instrumentation and the material dimension of scientific practice.

However, although Heidegger does suggestively point to the dimension of practical understanding in science, his remarks on this matter are quite limited. In one respect, it is arguable that Heidegger did not want to characterise scientific research as simply a technical or pragmatic instrumentalism. Science, as a way in which Dasein comports itself to the world, does not simply discover entities through experimental and technological expertise. Instead, for Heidegger, scientific research involves disclosing the being of entities; that is, scientific

21 In the classical formulation of Karl Popper, ‘the theoretician puts certain definite questions to the experimenter, and the latter, by his experiments, tries to elicit a decisive answer to these questions, and to no others’ (Popper 2002: 89).

inquiry takes place with its own understanding of the being of entities. Thus, although it is possible to make sense of scientific understanding along a practical dimension, it is by no means exhaustive for the ways in which scientific understanding makes sense of entities.

Instead, any scientific domain embodies a regional ontology, which is a particular understanding of the being of entities within that domain. As a regional ontology, a science’s understanding of being determines what counts as an entity in its domain; it provides the conditions under which an entity can be intelligibly disclosed within a given domain of inquiry. Scientific understanding thus involves a projection of the being of the entities encountered in scientific research. As Rouse argues, Heidegger’s ontological pluralism, in which there are many different ways in which entities can be, stressed this point:

What a regional ontology thus projects is what is possible for any entity within that domain, and hence also what is impossible for it. Empiricists since Hume have been suspicious of modal attributions within the sciences, because empirical experience seems only to show what is actually the case, and not what must be so or can be so. That suspicion reflects what Heidegger thought to be a characteristic limitation of any retrospective, non-existential conception of scientific understanding. Scientific understanding does not provide an encyclopaedic summary of past experience, but instead projects how to encounter and deal with entities in a domain. (Rouse 2015b: 95)

Heidegger’s account of science thus emphasises the centrality of understanding in guiding scientific research, in determining what it means to count as an entity within a particular domain, and articulates the conditions for what is possible or not possible for entities in that domain. For Heidegger, the sciences are practices of research rather than bodies of knowledge extracted from those practices. His account of the ontological nature of understanding implies that such practices depend upon a prior understanding of the being of entities within the research domain, in the form of a regional ontology, which governs scientific methodology and conceptualisation.