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SCIENCE STUDIES EVENTS
NANCY CARTWRIGHT'S HERMENEUTICS OF SCIENCE AND NATURE
Alfred Nordmann
Institute for Philosophy, Technical University of Darmstadt, Germany
Philosophy Department, University of South Carolina
April 8, 2003
Tuesday, 12:30pm
Preston Seminar Room
This talk is also part of the Philosophy Research Seminar series.
Science aims for literalness, it does not engage nature hermeneutically
as a text and deflects a hermeneutic treatment of its own articles,
textbooks, and diagrams. Theories and hypotheses, descriptions and
predictions are to be literally true of their object — they do not
allude to, they do not evoke or illuminate nature, and even when it is
said that science reads the book of nature, this is not to be the kind
of reading which effects a change in the reader who attempts to
constitute symbolic meaning in the encounter with the text. Also, the
claims of science are to be taken literally — they do not require
interpretation by those who have learned to read them. Therefore science
is most successful where it manages to become entirely unselfconscious
about its means of representation and where it establishes conditions
under which nature itself appears to produce imprints, traces, or
effects, i.e., where it leaves its mark and inscribes itself into our
representations.
The uniqueness of modern science can be said to consist in this
emphatically anti-hermeneutic stance, and the history of the philosophy
of science can be read as a series of attempts to reconstruct its
conditions of possibility. Contemporary Science Studies continue the
Kuhnian program of investigating how scientists create and sustain a
culture in which activities become normalized and routinized so that
artefacts can be distinguished from phenomena and the initial
interpretation of data gives way to the data's evidentiary power. By
arguing that science itself creates the special conditions (disciplines,
paradigms, concepts of objectivity, etc.) which create an illusion of
literalness, Science Studies deconstruct the anti-hermeneutic stance of
science and thereby tend to literally undo the constructions and
achievements of science. This is rarely done in a spirit of hostility
toward science but, on the contrary, for the sake of a scientific
description and explanation of science. And sometimes, the attempt to
enlighten science about itself aims to liberate science from its
alienation of the knower and the known, of nature and culture: If
science surrendered its anti-hermeneutic stance, saw itself as a social
science of nature that is concerned to produce interpretive
understanding rather than subsumptive explanations, if it became more
aware of its metaphors, boundary objects, standpoints, it could settle
into a wholesome dance of agency that fully integrates and respects
human and non-human actors.
Nancy Cartwright proposes not only that models are mediators between
theory and the world. They also claim a "middle ground" between two
accounts of the success of science (Dappled World, 179f., 46f.). On one
of these, science "reveals [...] directly the language in which the Book
of Nature is written". Its laws are therefore mere mirrors of nature. On
the other account, the success of science is trivial in that one cannot
first construct a world and then act surprised that certain constitutive
principles apply to it. Cartwright shows, however, that any attempt to
make things work involves a mediated immediacy. There is a constructive
process of tinkering in which the model engages theory and world in a
hermeneutic process of mutual disclosure. This is no trivial task in
that it is not easy to get things to work. Once everything fits
together, however, the model serves as a direct link between theory and
world: Science no longer interprets the world and at the moment of
success hermeneutics gives way to literalness. Once things work,
therefore, the laws of science are true of (rather than true about) what
we made. Calling them "true" is not redundant just to the extent that
now it is once again the world itself which renders the theory salient
in the model.
I will scrutinize Cartwright's notions of "fitting" (the theory to the
model, the model to the phenomena), and resolve a fundamental ambiguity
left in her proposal.
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