Babette E. Babich
Curriculm Vitae
On The Idea of Continental and Postmodern Perspectives in the Philosophy of Science
Babette E. Babich, Debra B. Bergoffen, and Simon V. Glynn
Introduction
Hermeneutic, phenomenological, genealogical and postmodern critiques of science may be conceived as a radicalization of those contemporary analyses of science which take their point of departure from the fundamental principle of complementarity and recognize that science can never be a mirror of nature; that there are no neutral observers; that all experiments are theory-laden; that there are no simple facts. These perspectives sensitize us to the historical, political, social, and cultural dimensions of science. They force us to revisit the epistemological claims of science and insist that we ask whether and to what extent the idea of scientific privilege can be sustained.
As post-metaphysical, the hermeneutic core of postmodernism sets itself the task of interpreting discourses and narratives. When the discourse is modern science, postmodern and continental style philosophy poses such questions as: what is the source of the power of this discourse? what is the meaning of the world provided by this discourse? what are the moral and political implications of this discourse? Given its focus on interpretation and rhetoric and its rejection of the modern distinction between the rational and the irrational, postmodernism treats the sciences as embedded in, related to, and - running up against the modern ideal of clarity and distinctness - as ineluctably contaminated by other cultural languages and practices. While some might say that this perspective negates the possibility of science, others insist that such a postmodern view allows us to understand crucial discourse and practice relationships, that a specifically continental and postmodern perspective gives us a better understanding of the hows, whats, and whys of science.
With this understanding, the modern idea of truth as reflective of nature gives way to postmodern (Nietzschean) questions of interpretation, valuation, and perspectivalism. The modern idea that the conflict of interpretations can be mediated or resolved in such a way as to provide a single coherent theory which corresponds to the way things are, gives way to the thought of an infinitely interpretable reality where diverse, divergent, complementary, contradictory, and incommensurable interpretations contest each other without, however, canceling each other out. That the traditional idea of science cannot hold in these circumstances is clear. What we explore here is the extent to which these circumstances preclude the idea of science per se. Toward this end, the following essays review the relationship between postmodernism and traditional and continental philosophies of science by examining scientific methods and disciplines, the histories of the sciences, the place of science within the modern world, the value accorded to science and the epistemology of the scientific project.
The Risks of Postmodern, Continental Approaches to the Philosophy of Science
To juxtapose postmodern and continental philosophical thought with the routinely analytic (and roundly modern) discipline of the philosophy of science is a chancy thing. Continental style philosophy is far from recognized as a viable approach to the philosophy of science(1) and the flip contentiousness seemingly constitutive of postmodern thought is, if anything, even less appropriate for the philosophy of science.>(2)
Yet it is not true that there has never been any invocation of postmodernism and its categories within traditional (read: analytic) approaches to the philosophy of science. Stephen Toulmin, one of the foremost "forecasters" of the philosophy of science, was one of the first to write on "postmodern" science and philosophy (Toulmin, 1985) and his recent Cosmopolis (Toulmin,1990) offers a gentle version of postmodern critique as it poses (and proposes an answer to) the question of the "Hidden Agenda of Modernity."(3)
Toulmin's perspective is sagely optimistic where he offers an assessment of the current (so-called postmodern) circumstance of modernity. This optimism is for the most part mirrored in the present collection. For the present authors, the postmodern condition represents not so much an established paradigmatic reversal of the modern, its difference from the plainly modern signified for example by appropriate double-coding, playfulness, pluralism, etc., as a condition of modernity as it is still in need of clarification and above all as a condition calling for recognition. Thus the postmodern condition is understood as a project proposed for reflection (or "thought") concerning just where it is that contemporary thinkers find themselves, to use Toulmin's words, with respect to "practical philosophy, multidisciplinary sciences, and transnational or subnational institutions." As such a reflective orientation, the postmodern prospect is inherently, perhaps necessarily ambivalent. For Toulmin, this ambivalence reflects two contrasting dispositions proposed as alternate responses to the contemporary condition: imagination and nostalgia. Charged by imagination, we may welcome the postmodern prospect as one "that offers new possibilities, but demands novel ideas and more adaptive institutions; and we may see this transition as a reason for hope." Or else, as Toulmin's alternative would have it, we are remanded to the fearful nostalgia of passivity and impotence, turning "our backs on the promises of the new period, in trepidation, hoping that the modes of life and thought typical of the age of stability and nationhood may survive at least for our own lifetimes." (Toulmin, 1990, 203)
Rather than representing a premodern or romantic reactionary spirit, as Jürgen Habermas and other critics of postmodern notions argue, the essays to follow do look hopefully forward. Yet it must be with both hope and trepidation (a quintessentially postmodern combination) that what follows is an ironicised critique of the prototypically modern project of the philosophical understanding as well as of the professional practice of science. Such critiques, such skepticism and irony, are inevitable. For while a latent nostalgia is not the watchword of this collection, as Freud, Nietzsche, and recent world events remind us, hope is not without anxiety (where whatever first calls for hope is sparked and defined by the threat of dis- and misappointments). Even where hope is justified, transitions never go smoothly. In this dissonance, a continuing shock to the seamlessly modern progress-ideal, the postmodern condition ultimately calls for nothing less elusive than Nietzschean "light feet."(4)
The Essays: Structure and Overview
This collection is formally postmodern in three respects. There is no one definition of either science or the postmodern; no single answer to the question of the relationship between science, the philosophy of science, and postmodernism. The modern rationalistic axiom that postmodernism, science, and philosophy of science are fundamentally incompatible is set aside. The issue of the association of postmodern critique and the philosophy of science is framed as a possibility, not eliminated in advance.
The constellation and composition of the present collection raises the question of boundaries - once again in object fashion. In asking about the prospect of a postmodern philosophy of science, these essays seek to explore the extent to which a critical (philosophical) perspective not originating in the sciences but rather in the cultural spheres of art and the humanities can be meaningfully applied to the theoretical and practical sciences. Further, consistent with the spirit of postmodernism, the configuration of this collection evokes and underlines suspicions concerning its own project. If it is the case that the boundaries between the humanities and the natural and social sciences are quasi arbitrary marks of power, might it also be the case that the move to elude and collapse these boundaries marks another power play? Is it a power play of philosophy which without directly empowering philosophy as a bastion of truth moves to regain philosophy's erstwhile position as queen of the sciences by dismantling those domains of knowledge and power which have succeeded in overshadowing it? If this last question is not the immediate subject of this volume it remains at the margin - important for postmodern thinking where the margin counts as much as anything at the center.
Whether or not we agree to call it postmodern, we can agree that we are living in a multi-national, capitalist, nuclear world society conditioned throughout by science and technology. This imperative condition of late, post, or third-stage modernity requires our attention, however we define ourselves theoretically. For modernists cannot ignore the changed and changing circumstances of enlightenment rationality or the scientific project. And postmodernists cannot ignore the question of science and the ways it is being (and might be) practiced in a postmodern world.
The first section, Postmodern Continental: Propædeutic and Parody, explores the relationship between postmodernism and the philosophy of science together with a provocative or polemical critique of analytic styles in philosophy to outline some of the disputed issues between postmodern, continental and modern, analytic philosophies of science.
A defender of the postmodernist position, Raphael Sassower argues that philosophers of science and postmodernists are often unaware of one another. Arguing that this ignorance should be remedied, Sassower offers to introduce them to each other and suggests that their awareness of each other would produce a more radical critique of science than that offered by such philosophers of science as Popper, Feyerabend, Kuhn, or Polanyi, as well as a more relevant critique of the contemporary situation than that of the postmodernists grounded in literature, architecture, or aesthetics. Distinguishing the postmodern from the pseudo-liberal critique of science, Sassower sees the work of Donna Haraway as an important link between the postmodern and feminist critiques of science and as countering the charge that postmodernism is relativist and irresponsible.
Babette E. Babich takes polemical issue with the traditional definition of the philosophy of science as such, suggesting that a genuine philosophy of science should critique rather than precommit itself to accepting and adopting science's epistemic assumptions and methods, as is the received practice and ideal of analytic style philosophy of science. Using direct (argument) as well as indirect (parodic) means, Babich challenges the unilateral conviction and coherence of the analytic style in the philosophy of science. Only by drawing from a broad range of alternative perspectives, especially those deriving from the continental tradition and, indeed, ranging beyond the assumptions of the postmodern perspective, is a critique and understanding of many of the otherwise taken for granted claims, methods, and thetic presuppositions of science possible. Only such an approach can be accounted an authentic philosophy of science.
The next section, On Nature, Science, and the Theory of the Human Sciences, specifically addresses intersections between hermeneutics and phenomenology and the philosophy of the natural and human sciences. These essays articulate the hermeneutic, historical, and social dimensions of the natural sciences, analyze the role of metaphor and analogy in the history and practice of science, and suggest that a postmodern perspective would resolve many of the so called paradoxes of contemporary science, to bridge the gap between traditionally styled or analytic essays in the philosophy of science and the broadly continental project of the present collection.
Patrick A. Heelan's challenging conception of an "anti-epistemology" argues that the quantum theory needs to be given what he names an ontological rather than an epistemological interpretation. An epistemological interpretation is one related to cognitive content while an ontological interpretation is relative to the activity of representing the cognitive content. These theories describe phenomena as revealed through socio-historical processes of empirical inquiry by local communities of expert witnesses rather than as objective realities. Such theories imply a role in the scientific account for two non-classical freedoms, i.e., for social factors and for history. The ontological viewpoint here proposed is inspired by traditions as old as Aristotle and as new as Heidegger and has the further postmodern virtue of using quantum theory to elaborate an interpretive account of objectivity applicable to the social as well as the physical sciences.
Robert P. Crease explores the analogy between the conceptual prestructuring or interpretation of experience, and the scripting or scoring of a theatrical or musical performance, to further suggest the affinity of nature and culture. Like the symbols on a musical score, which have a relationship both to the notes that are played, and to the other symbols (notes) scored, scientific theories relate both to the world and to each other. The former relationship, Crease suggests, is the focus of the experimentalist, describing the "performances" of the facts, while the latter is the focus of the theoretician, who is concerned with consistency between theories. Moreover, just as we cannot simultaneously observe every aspect or element of an historically and socio-culturally located performance, so scientific performances or experiments are similarly located and presented perspectivally.
Simon V. Glynn traces the route from the phenomenological reduction, via Heidegger's ontological hermeneutics to the deconstruction of dualistic epistemologies and the concomitant demise of correspondence theories of truth and veridicality. He finds a parallel route, from the reduction of supposedly experience-independent, intrinsic identities of objects, to empirical properties which vary with context, and which may therefore be deconstructed into systems of extrinsic or structural relations. This, Glynn points out, amounts to the demise of absolute, non-relational, identity. Showing how the application of such a postmodern epistemology to Einstein's Relativity Theory, Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, Quantum Field Theory, and Niels Bohr's theory of Complementarity, dissolves many of the paradoxes associated therewith, Glynn suggests its further application to more recent paradoxes in physics.
Expanding on the conceptual underpinnings of observation, Daniel Rothbart examines how analogical models are pivotal to the observation of phenomena. As is clear from the practice of conceiving electricity as analogous to a fluid, or referring to the information "processing" capacities of the mind, or to light waves, analogies enable science to render comprehensible the ostensibly incoherent patterns of nature. So when an experimenter "reads" tracks in a cloud chamber as the passage of small particles, such a reading depends upon the analogical projection of patterns from familiar symmetries. Rothbart concludes that the human intervention that characterizes every level of scientific access to nature's secrets includes the creative discovery of powerful analogies in nature.
Charles Harvey argues that the reductionistic meta-narrative ideals of totalization inveterate to both the natural and the human sciences are conceptually feasible and performatively demonstrative. Nevertheless, due to the sense-parameters distinguishing "the natural" from "the human," the two types of sciences can never be semantically conjoined. Yet, Harvey also argues, in a postmodern world, we are best off letting the sciences methodologically totalize, while teaching ourselves a phenomenological calm about life-wordly sense-gambits, a learning project which might be balanced with an existential agility about what we count as real, and when we do so.
The ultimate section, On Application: Praxis and Critique, presses this last postmodern challenge to the modern demarcations used to distinguish the natural and social sciences from each other as well as from other interpretive strategies. The authors question the role of metaphor in science and ask about the relationship between science and its environs. Specifically attending to controversial issues, such as sexism, racism, AIDS, and, most radically, the connection between science and Eros/Thanatos, these essays shift the focus from the natural or physical sciences to the social and human sciences.
Debra B. Bergoffen draws our attention to the ambiguity of the body of knowledge metaphor. Though usually understood with reference to the object of scientific discourse (the mysterious feminine body that must be tortured to reveal her secrets) it can also refer to the knowledge produced by science. Influenced by Nietzsche and Lacan, Bergoffen asks: How shall we understand science's promise to provide us with a reliable body of knowledge? Pursuing this question allows her to decipher our understandings of the object and project of science and to challenge the demand for a unified body of knowledge. Attending to what Lacan has taught us about the powers of the imaginary, Bergoffen alerts us to the Nietzschean possibilities of a "Gay Science," - a science that recognizes the needs for coherence, consistency, and unity as it celebrates the heterogeneity of the given and pursues the fluidity of the lived body.
Taking up the question of the relation between scientific knowledge and power, Chip Colwell focuses on Foucault's analysis of the relation between the medical narrative and economic, social, and political institutions. Public support for the sick lead to their removal from home into hospitals or clinics where the patient could more readily be objectified as the site of symptoms and where previously localized medical discourses became the grand narrative of medicine. The clinician's control over the body of the diseased meant that Death, traditionally the point at which the secrets of the disease were irrevocably lost, became, via autopsy, the point of revelation. Like other forms of knowledge, medical knowledge is mediated by economic, political, and social institutions, and thus by the relations of power, which it therefore reflects, and to which in turn it contributes. Colwell suggests that the postmodern doctor would recognize the grand medical narrative in all its importance and in its objectifying tendencies as only one among a number of possible discourses on disease.
Ladelle McWhorter explicates Foucault's notion of power as a non-reified process or event, emanating from many points, and at least as capable of generating institutions and the relations between them - and thus institutionally constituted notions of truth and knowledge for instance - as of being a reflection of them. Attempting to demonstrate that Foucault's analysis may be extended beyond the social sciences to the natural sciences, she turns to biology as a case in point. Arguing that the account given by biologists of the relations between species and races provided justification for slavery, taboos against interracial marriages, etc., McWhorter claims that such classifications consolidate, extend, and reflect the interests of those at the center of power.
Following a Heideggerian reading, Felix O'Murchadha points out that our knowledge of the world implies a view of and therefore a relation to the world and that we are constituted by those very perspectives and acts of interpretation by which we come to what we name the truth. The cultural and the natural world are mediated by the same conceptual or symbolic systems and hermeneutic interpretations that constitute the human as such. In consequence, the concerns of epistemology (theoretical knowledge) and practical existence (ethics) are pragmatically united; our knowledge of the world is inherently ethical.
Radicalizing this last point of inquiry, Neil Gascoigne asks whether we can make sense of the self-conscious, ethically responsible, subject if the subject/ object dichotomy has been deconstructed. When postmodernists, as well as some modernists, reject the noumenal or transcendental self that Kant identifies as the free center of a universal ethics, they leave us with the empirical self, as a reified ego unable to escape causal determinism, and thereby incapable of assuming ethical responsibility for its actions. Arguing that we can distinguish what is represented from how it is represented, and that such a distinction may leave room for an ethically responsible subject in spite of its misrepresentation as a reified ego, Gascoigne notes that such a solution is not without difficulties. It is for instance, sometimes claimed (Freud, Marx) that the outside observer is in a better position than the actors themselves to comprehend the true meaning and significance of their actions, a claim which in effect reinstates the absolutist perspective of a transcendental signifier or noumenal I.
Alphonso Lingis notes that Martin Heidegger set out to bring to light the history of the specific form of the technological imperative at work in our theoretical and practical reason. But Lingis argues that Heidegger's account does not sufficiently distinguish what is specific to the diverse ordinances that command our perception, our technology, and our social fields as the lived world and body. The representations science constructs of the perceptual field, the technological field, and the social field are not continuous with one another. As an illustration of Lingis's emphasis on the ordinance of the lived body and its environmental referentiality, the dialectic tension between disembodied and embodied reification is offered in a precisely physicalistic context by Brian Pronger. In the final essay of this volume. Pronger examines the tendency to reify reflective or analytic distinctions and finds this correlative with the tendency to objectify or hypostatize the self. Pronger identifies this tendency with Thanatos which he contrasts with Eros: the erotic urge to the synthetic unity of being in the process of lived becoming. While modern science is, from Pronger's point of view, clearly in the service of Thanatos, a postmodern science would acknowledge, along with Eros, the unity and thus the essential relatedness of all elements of existence.
References
Babich, B.E. (1994), "Philosophy of Science and the Politics of Style: Beyond Making Sense," New Political Science: A Journal of Politics and Culture, Summer/Fall 1994: 30/31, pp. 99-114.
Babich, B. E. (1993), "Continental Philosophy of Science: Mach, Duhem, and Bachelard," in Kearney, R. (ed.), Routledge History of Philosophy: Volume VIII, Routledge, London, pp. 175-221.
Bergoffen, D. (1990), "Nietzsche's Madman: Perspectivism without Nihilism," in in Koelb, C. (ed.), Nietzsche as Postmodernist. Essays Pro and Contra, State University of New York Press, Albany, pp. 57-71.
Baudrillard, J. (1992), "The Ecstasy of Communication," in Jencks, C. (ed.), The Postmodern Reader, Academy Editions, London, pp. 151-157.
Bohm, D. (1992), "Postmodern Science and a Postmodern World," in Jencks, C. (ed.), The Postmodern Reader, Academy Editions, London, pp. 383-391. Also in Griffin, D.R. (ed.), The Reenchantment of Science: Postmodern Proposals, State University of New York Press, pp. 57-68.
Bohm, D. (1981), Wholeness and the Implicate Order, Routledge, London.
Borgmann, A. (1992), Crossing the Postmodern Divide, University of Chicago Press, Chicago.
Eco, U. (1984), Postscript to The Name of the Rose, Weaver, W. (trans.), Harcourt, Brace Jovanovich, New York.
Griffin, D.R. (1988), "The Reenchantment of Science," in Griffin, (ed.), The Reenchantment of Science, State University of New York Press, New York, p. 1-56. Abridged in Jencks, The Postmodern Reader, pp. 354-72.
Lyotard, J.-F. (1979), La Condition Postmoderne: Rapport sur le savoir, Les Editions de Minuit, Paris. (1984) Bennington, G. and Massumi, B. (trans.), University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis.
Toulmin, S. (1990), Cosmopolis: The Hidden Agenda of Modernity, University of Chicago Press, Chicago.
Toulmin, S. (1985), "Pluralism and Responsibility in Post-Modern Science," Science, Technology & Human Values, 10:28-37.
Rosenau, P. M. (1992), Postmodernism and the Social Sciences, Princeton University Press, Princeton.
Simpson, L. C. (1995), Technology, Time, and the Conversations of Modernity, Routledge, New York.
Notes
1. This is not because there are no proponents of such approaches to the philosophy of science but because these approaches go unrecognized: presumably unread and quite crucially uncited. See however the first named editor's essays, Babich (1994), (1993), and below.
2. Postmodernism hardly enters mainline or traditional analytic style philosophy although it figures in the socio-political axis in positive reference made by such continental authors as Jean Baudrillard, Umberto Eco, and Jean-François Lyotard. Popular science authors like the more religiously minded physicists such as, for example, the late David Bohm, tend to use the term postmodern fairly freely. For further discussion of the alliance between religion and science, especially ecology, see Griffin. In philosophy of technology there is some evidence of a serious reception of the concept of the postmodern condition, particularly with regard to its multiculturalist and feminist dimensionality (see, among others, Borgmann and Simpson). In the social sciences invocations of the postmodern are common enough to be featured in titles (e.g., Rosenau: Postmodernism and the Social Sciences). It is of course telling, as a failure to which the present volume is addressed, that discussions of the postmodern, be it condition or quandary, are not featured in contemporary philosophy of science with its dominant focus on natural science.
3. Toulmin himself, although a master of the analytic art of non-citation, names Frederick Ferré the "pioneer" of postmodernity in the natural sciences but adds "see also the final essays in Stephen Toulmin, The Return to Cosmology." Toulmin, 1990, p. 213.
4. See on this, the first two named editors' contributions to Clayton Koelb, ed., Nietzsche as Postmodernist (Albany, SUNY 1995) in particular, Debra Bergoffen's "Nietzsche's Madman: Perspectivism Without Nihilism."
NB: This background was borrowed from a clever page site designed by Enrico Graf (www.wolfsburg.de/~graf)