Dimitri Ginev - The Tenets of Cognitive Existentialism

The Tenets of
Cognitive Existentialism

SERIES IN CONTINENTAL THOUGHT

Editorial Board

Ted Toadvine, Chairman, University of Oregon

Elizabeth A. Behnke, Study Project in Phenomenology of the Body

David Carr, Emory University

James Dodd, New School University

Lester Embree, Florida Atlantic University

Jos Huertas-Jourda, Wilfrid Laurier University

Joseph J. Kockelmans, Pennsylvania State University

William R. McKenna, Miami University

Algis Mickunas, Ohio University

J. N. Mohanty, Temple University

Dermot Moran, University College Dublin

Thomas Nenon, University of Memphis

Rosemary Rizo-Patron de Lerner, Pontificia Universidad Catlica del Per, Lima

Thomas M. Seebohm, Johannes Gutenberg Universitt, Mainz

Gail Soffer, Rome, Italy

Elizabeth Strker, Universitt Kln

Nicolas de Warren, Wellesley College

Richard M. Zaner, Vanderbilt University

International Advisory Board

Suzanne Bachelard, Universit de Paris

Rudolf Boehm, Rijksuniversiteit Gent

Albert Borgmann, University of Montana

Amedeo Giorgi, Saybrook Institute

Richard Grathoff, Universitt Bielefeld

Samuel Ijsseling, Husserl-Archief te Leuven

Alphonso Lingis, Pennsylvania State University

Werner Marx, Albert-Ludwigs Universitt, Freiburg

David Rasmussen, Boston College

John Sallis, Boston College

John Scanlon, Duquesne University

Hugh J. Silverman, State University of New York, Stony Brook

Carlo Sini, Universit di Milano

Jacques Taminiaux, Louvain-la-Neuve

D. Lawrence Wieder

Dallas Willard, University of Southern California

DIMITRI GINEV

Ohio University Press, Athens, Ohio 45701
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Ginev, Dimitur.

The tenets of cognitive existentialism / Dimitri Ginev.

p. cm. (Series in Continental thought)

Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index.

ISBN 978-0-8214-1976-2 (hc : alk. paper)

1. SciencePhilosophy. 2. ScienceResearch. 3. Hermeneutics. 4. Philosophy and science. 5. Existential phenomenology. 6. Feminist criticism. I. Title. II. Series.

Q175.G5224 2011

507.2dc23

2011018467

To Tomy Tantiloff-Antonova
(18921988)

2. Is the Existential Conception of Science a Kind
of Philosophy of Science?

In writing this book, I benefited from chances to discuss my ideas in several settings: University of Pittsburgh, Penn State University, Catholic University of America, Humboldt University in Berlin, University of Melbourne, Ruhr-University in Bochum, University of Oslo, and Western Kentucky University. For conversations through the years that have provoked me to develop the project of cognitive existentialism, I am indebted to Azarya Polikarov, Joseph Kockelmans, Patrick Heelan, Robert Cohen, Babette Babich, Oswald Schwemmer, Nicholas Rescher, Gernot Bhme, Robert Crease, Peter Janich, Pierre Kerszberg, Howard Sankey, Hans-Peter Krger, Hans Rainer Sepp, Arvin Voss, Joseph Margolis, John Rundell, Cassandra Pinnick, and Jrgen Mittelstrass. I am especially grateful to Ted Toadvine, editor of the Series in Continental Thought, for encouraging me. For her advice and support, I thank Nancy Basmajian of the Ohio University Press. I was fortunate to profit from Deborah Wisemans remarkable skill and benevolence in improving stylistically the text of this book. I express my deep gratitude to her.

Modified versions of , published in fall 2010 by Telos Press Publishing (New York).

I will introduce the concept of cognitive existentialism against the background of the distinction between a hermeneutic and an objectivist understanding of the world. The latter is traditionally related to science, whereas the former is conceived as inherent in forms of artistic and religious experience. Yet if a dimension of interpretative understanding of the world is attributed to the kind of realist attitude adopted by the practitioners of scientific research, then the idea for a hermeneutic realism would seem plausible and reasonable. In fact, hermeneutic realism is a term coined by Patrick Heelan (1983a) for the construal of the world that ensues from sciences readable technologies. The world that is ready-to-hand in the process of scientific research is constituted as manifolds of meaningful texts by means of readable technologies. In this formulation, reading and constitution are intimately related. Texts are not written before initiating a research process. They are artifacts of doing scientific practices, caused to be written by nature on human instruments within the dynamics of the changing configurations of such practices. Hermeneutic realism stresses that the world is always already meaningfully constituted, being thereby a textualized and readable reality. Heelan (1983b) argues that the texts brought into play by scientific practices of observation, instrumentation, experimentation, calculation, classification, measuring, and so on serve as codes for the perceived objects in normal scientific everydayness. Being subjected to an ongoing reading, the reality of scientific research is always in a process of constitution. This claim is to be clearly differentiated from the claim that the reality of scientific research is constructed by theoretical idealizations.

There is no kind of scientific objectification (based on theoretical idealizations) that might occur beyond a configuration of practices. By the same There is no theoretical world constituted outside a horizon of possibilities projected by an interrelatedness of scientific practices. Furthermore, the particular mode of being-in-a-theoretical-world (say, the mode of existence of a scientific community) does not amount to its being determined by a conceptual framework since the latter is always situated in practices whose dynamics might revise it. The open horizon of interrelated practices transcends each and every conceptual framework, exposing it thereby to possible extensions and modifications. The mode of being-in-a-theoretical-world is rather the way of being involved in theoretical practices like eliminating ad hoc hypotheses, constructing data-models for interpreting a system of partial differential equations, carrying out an experiment for verifying the validity of a theoretical prediction, modifying a mathematical formalism for the sake of achieving better conceptual homogeneity of a theory, or repeating an experiment with the purpose of integrating a new explanatory scenario into an established theory.

Hermeneutic realism is opposed to the objectivist construal of the world whose kernel is epistemological representationalism.out something else (24). Accordingly, the mind, which designs practices, is not the place of representing what is going on in the world, but a source of constant intervening by means of which what is out there gets provoked.