The Competitiveness of Nations
in a Global Knowledge-Based Economy
January 2004
Don Ihde
Instrumental Realism: The Interface between Philosophy of Science and
Philosophy of Technology
II. The New Philosophy of
Science
Indiana University Press
Bloomington, 1991 11-44
The new philosophy of
science arises, in part, out of explicit dissatisfaction with the disembodied
and essentially idealistic and abstract notion of science often found within
the dominant traditions of the old philosophy of science.
The new philosophy of
science owes its emergence to a number of thinkers - or perhaps equally, to a
change in perspective which arose independently in many quarters. I have already suggested that the shift which
occurred to create the new philosophy of science had as one of its components a
certain taste for the concrete embodiments of science. Again, limiting mention first to
Anglo-American sources, one may note the impact of Karl Popper and Imre Lakatosz, who resituated
science within its community of mutually interested persons, while focusing
upon the emergence and development of science. The work of Stephen Toulmin
should be noted as well. One might also
mention the important work of Michael Polanyi, who
introduced the notion of tacit knowledge to the traditions of the
philosophy of science. Tacit knowledge
was clearly an appreciation of one dimension of praxis and perception, a
kind of “bodily knowledge” which plays a subterranean role even in science and
which gradually began to be appreciated by some philosophers of science. But most scholars would surely agree that in
the Anglo-American traditions, the person who most gave form to the new shape
of philosophy of science was Thomas Kuhn. [1]
I do not wish to go over
the same ground already well trod since the publication of The Structure of
Scientific Revolution (1962). The arguments and counterattacks, the
extensions and revisions, have been many. But I shall take a different approach. I shall
not address the mainline reaction, which accused Kuhn of both reducing science
to a sociology of science and of exhibiting a presumed
irrationalism, which arose from his shift of emphasis on discovery from its
previously “purely” rational basis in forms of reasoning. Rather, what I see happening in Kuhn is the
hint at a different model of interpreting science, a model which includes at
least perceptual and, insofar as Kuhn is historically sensitive, praxical features often left out of standard
accounts.
At the same time, I want to
resituate Kuhn with respect to his
11
proximity, probably unknowingly on his part, to phenomenology. My use of perception is closest to Merleau-Ponty’s in the sense that sensory, or bodily, perception
is always understood to be situated within a kind of cultural or contextual perception.
Thus, while Kuhn, in a more Wittgensteinian sense, may often be using perception
metaphorically as a kind of “intellectual” perception, here I am noting that
what is sometimes taken as metaphorical is more than metaphorical.
Kuhn does not stand alone
in what I shall describe as the praxis-perception model implicit in the
new philosophy of science. Until
recently, beyond the gaze of many philosophers, there was a parallel development
of an amazingly similar impact made upon the human sciences by the work of the
late French intellectual historian-philosopher Michel Foucault. His tutor, usually unmentioned but
all-too-clearly visible in his very invisibility, was Maurice Merleau-Ponty, the philosopher of perception par
excellence. In turn, Merleau-Ponty
draws from an even older development of a praxis-perception model of
interpretation outlined in the work of the later Husserl.
I shall examine this parallelism.
This examination will take
the shape of a chronologically discontinuous exposition which, while beginning
with Kuhn, then reverts to an earlier period beginning with Husserl
and leading back up to Kuhn’s contemporary, Michel Foucault. I do this first with respect to philosophy of
science but with deliberate focus upon the often indirect roles of technology
in these contexts.
First the Kuhnian revolution: The critical, or negative, thrust of
Kuhn’s reinterpretation of scientific development was immediately felt. It could easily be construed as a direct
attack upon the analytic-positivistic-nomological
model of science. For Kuhn, the laws of
science, the rules of operation, the system of induction and deduction - while
in no way ignored or rejected - were undercut as foundational. More basic to the operation of science was a paradigm.
In effect, what Kuhn’s negative
attack accomplished was an inversion of priorities, making the nomological model of science derivative.
Kuhn first described his
notion of paradigm in a highly general form, stating that “a paradigm is an
accepted model or pattern” which guides the development of normal science.
At first, it might be thought that such
a model was merely the particular arrangement of parts of a theory, itself a
kind of higher order, but perhaps an implicit “rule.”
In this standard example, the paradigm functions by
permitting the replication of examples any one of which could in principle
serve to replace it. In a science... a
paradigm is rarely an object for replication. Instead, like the accepted judicial decision
in common law, it is an object for further articulation and specification under
new or more stringent conditions. [2]
12
But a paradigm is presupposed by the operations
of normal science, which is to say that what constitutes the paradigm is also
more basic as a condition of the possibility for normal science. Laws, rules, the nomological
model become not founding, but founded. “Perhaps
it is not apparent that a paradigm is prerequisite to the discovery of laws
...,” [3] but the relation is soon made explicit. “Rules, I suggest, derive from paradigms, but
paradigms can guide research even in the absence of rules.” [4] Rules
become twice secondary. Paradigms are
the very means by which theory can operate: “Paradigms provide all phenomena
except anomalies with a theory-determined place in the scientist’s field of
vision.” [5] They are ultimately the ground of normal science itself:
“Without commitment to a paradigm there could be no normal science.” [6]
And while recognizing that
normal science is also the dominant way in which science operates, it too is
inverted with respect to its grounds. Revolutionary
science, which occurs through a paradigm shift, is more basic to scientific
development or advancement. Normal
science, such as that portrayed in the textbooks - or equivalently, by the nomological model - is sedimented
science. It is carrying out the
refinements and extensions of some previously adapted paradigm.
One can immediately see
why, in its critical dimension, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions became
controversial. In a subtle sense,
however, the book became its own revolutionary fulfillment, itself a paradigm
shift in the interpretation of science - so much so that today its perspective
is itself virtually “normal.” In fact,
the response within large segments of the scientific community was such that
the very language of Kuhn began to be used by scientists in their
self-interpretations.
However, the established
philosophy of science community was less enthusiastic. Kuhn was frequently dismissed as a mere
“sociologist of knowledge,” or worse, an irrationalist,
since his model of scientific change clearly included factors other than
sheer rational calculations or logical connections. Thus, even though adapted by a now sizeable
younger generation of both historians and philosophers of science, the
persistence of the old philosophy of science remains. Philosophies, in my estimation, rarely die,
even if refuted or undercut. More
likely, they either go underground - reluctantly yielding even the smallest
terrain - or, more frequently, resuscitate themselves
in a new guise. I even suspect that the
enduring, institutional aspects of philosophy are not that different from what
happens in other forms of human industry. The historian Edward Constant once observed
that in the transition from piston-engined to
turbojet aircraft:
Old communities and traditions virtually never give birth to radically
new
13
technologies.
No manufacturer of piston aircraft
engines invented or independently developed a turbo-jet. No designer of conventional reciprocating
steam engines invented a steam turbine, no manufacturer of steam locomotives
independently developed diesel engines. In
the case of both firms and individuals, community practice defines a cognitive
universe that inhibits recognition of radical alternatives to conventional
practice. [7]
This observation on
industry appears to me to apply equally well to philosophical establishments
where the development of new fields or approaches is concerned!
The critique, however, is
only the negative side of the new philosophy of science. Its positive side is the emergence of what I
shall call a perceptual model of interpretation. Kuhn himself makes this point repeatedly:
Examining the record of past research from the vantage of contemporary
historiography, the historian of science may be tempted to exclaim that when
paradigms change, the world itself changes with them. Led by a new paradigm, scientists adopt new
instruments and look in new places. Even
more important, during revolutions scientists see new and different things when
looking with familiar instruments in places they have
looked before. [8]
Kuhn characterizes this
specifically as a way of seeing. It
is what I shall call, in this case, an example of structured macroperception. Kuhn astutely. recognized that
phenomena may be seen with different selectivities - selectivities which call into question whether the thing
seen is similar in any way to that which was previously seen. His specific metaphor for such changes was the
gestalt shift, such as occurs with ambiguous pictures (as with Wittgenstein’s
duck/rabbit; indeed, Wittgenstein is an important figure in Kuhn’s background).
Kuhn repeatedly gives
examples of such shifts, emphasizing radical discontinuities implied in
such gestalt shifts. For example, a
minor shift concerning stars and planets occurred between 1690 and 1781. Uranus was first identified as a star; then,
after a switch of interpretation, as a planet. There followed the identification of numerous
astronomical phenomena as planets rather than stars, to the extent that twenty
were identified! [9] But much more telling as a shift of vision is the
following case:
During the seventeenth century, when their research was guided by one
or another effluvium theory, electricians repeatedly saw chaff particles
rebound from, or fall off, the electrified bodies that had attracted them. At least that is what seventeenth-century
observers said they saw, and we have no more reason to doubt their reports of
perception than our own. Placed before
the same apparatus, a modern observer would see electrostatic repulsion (rather
than mechanical or gravitational rebounding), but historically... electrostatic
repulsion was not seen as
14
such until Hauksbee’s
large-scale apparatus had greatly magnified its effects. [10]
Note, anticipatorily, that there is a relation here
between perception and instrumentation (technology). Kuhn suggests that the use of the same
instrumentation can give rise to differing perceptions, but historically the
shift did not occur until the instrumentation itself changed. This is not without import, but it remained
only an underdeveloped background phenomenon within Kuhn’s approach.
For Kuhn, gestalt shifts
are shifts in seeing as (Wittgenstein). What is explicit in his interpretation are
such things as changes in what counts, selectivities
within the phenomenon: “for example... when Aristotle and Galileo looked at
swinging stones, the first saw constrained fall, the second a pendulum.” [11] Indeed, only through a shift could pendulums be perceived:
“Pendulums were brought into existence by something very like a paradigm-induced
gestalt shift.” [12] A shift of perception radically reorganizes not some
particular element, but a whole field. “Paradigms
determine large areas of experience at the same time.” [13] This analysis of scientific perception, once understood,
makes it easy to see why the nomological model must
take a different role within the interpretation of science. Only after there is some paradigm or other,
some structure macroperception or other, does what
counts as a fact become a fact. Similarly, only after there is a gestalt can
its laws be determined and refined. The
same can even be said for predictions - only after there is some formed whole
(gestalt) can there be anything like a rational prediction. As such, a perception is a kind of precursor
to a phenomenon, which then can be made ever more explicit in its detail and
implication. Kuhn’s strategy is thus a
“top down” one.
Within the context of
Anglo-American history and philosophy of science, the Kuhnian
adaption of a perceptual model was indeed daring. This was so not only because it cut against
the grain of the then dominant strands of the philosophy of science, but
because it did so in the absence of a much richer tradition of the interpretation
of perception itself, a tradition which was much better known in European
circles through early phenomenology (Husserl and Merleau-Ponty). Clearly,
Kuhn did draw upon the later Wittgenstein, who, among all the philosophers associated
with early analytic philosophy, perhaps most often used and referred to
perceptual examples. Learning a language
is closely linked to learning to perceive, as Kuhn clearly states:
The child who transfers the word “mama” from all
humans to all females and then to his mother is not just learning what “mama”
means or who his mother is. Simultaneously he is learning some of the
differences
15
between males and females as well as something about the ways
in which all but one female will behave toward him. His reactions, expectation, and beliefs - indeed,
much of his perceived world - change accordingly. [14]
The Kuhnian
model is, then, basically a Wittgensteinian
perceptual model. It recognized that
gestalts are perceptual contexts within which elements may be radically and
discontinuously related, not only in terms of rearrangements, but more
radically, in terms of items which drop out and disappear and in which others
appear for the first time. This places
Kuhn, with or without his knowledge or approval, very close to one strain
within perceptualist phenomenology. Moreover, in his description of scientific
perception he even approximates the notion of intentionality, which I have
suggested forms the framework for the phenomenological interpretation of
perception. If the “world” changes in a
paradigm shift, the object or reference of perception within its entire field
changes; it reflexively implies a change of some kind in the perceiver. In the structured macroperception
of the scientific community, this also occurs: “Successive paradigms tell us
different things about the population of the universe and about that
population’s behavior... But paradigms differ in more than substance, for they
are directed not only to nature but also back upon the science that produced
them.” [15] Or again, “... when paradigms change, the world itself
changes with them... paradigm changes do cause scientists to see the world of
their research-engagement differently.” [16]
So, from within the
traditions of Anglo-American history and philosophy of science there has arisen
a perceptual model for the interpretation of scientific change and development.
But is this model relevant to the
counterpart philosophy of technology? There
is at least the hint, within the context of the history of science,
that it may be. Kuhn rarely
emphasizes the role of technologies - which, for science, are usually its
instrumentation - in any thematic way. But
instrumentation, at least for all modern science, is the material condition;
better, it is the embodiment by which science perceives. Here one finds at least one clue to a possible
shift from the philosophy of science to the philosophy of technology. Yet this clue is not explicitly developed by
Kuhn, who remains primarily theory oriented.
Before following up on this
clue, however, I wish to turn to Kuhn’s unrecognized philosophical kin, the
early phenomenologists. For it was in this early twentieth-century
movement that what I shall term the praxis-perception model was more
fully developed. Thus, I am adopting
this European tradition into the family of the new philosophy of science.
The primary progenitor of
the phenomenological movement was Edmund Husserl,
whose published works appeared from the early 1900s through 1936. A French reader of his, particularly with
16
regard to the later works, was Maurice Merleau-Ponty,
who died in 1961. Both turned their
attention to the role of perception in science, and both utilized a version of
the lifeworld as an interpretative idea.
Husserl’s Crisis was published in 1936, and in it one
can find a considerable parallelism with what was to become the new philosophy
of science. Admittedly, in now rereading
the Crisis, après-Kuhn, one cannot help but discern contrasts as well. First, Husserl
continued the German tendency to view science as Wissenschaften
- although his examples indeed surrounded the rise of Modern physics in Galileo
and Descartes - rather than take the narrower focus upon natural science as
exemplary science. Then too, his aim was
in part to discern a unique rationality in Western thought; this colors his
interpretation and gives it the appearance of a normative, if not “linear,”
development. And while, as I shall
illustrate, he clearly develops an idea of something like paradigm shifts, he
also regards each change as necessarily both a gain and a loss; thus, the
question of progress becomes enigmatic (this in spite of Husserl’s
own hope for philosophical progress).
What I wish to concentrate
upon, however, is the beginning of a praxis-perception model of interpretation.
In Husserl,
this notion takes its place within the structure of the Lifeworld.
Scholars have long acknowledged that
there is a fundamental ambiguity within the idea of the lifeworld
which will set the stage for the exposition of phenomenology to follow. On the explicit level, Husserl
remains a foundationalist. This is to say that some stratum - in this
case, of human activity - is a founding stratum, while others are founded, are
dependent, upon the founding fundament. In Husserl’s case,
what is fundamental is a kind of ordinary human praxis and perception, the
world of the human interaction among material things and others. Its openness toward the other is sensory, and
this relation is focally perceptual.
This foundation in ordinary
perception and praxis is, however, not usually critically examined; it is
simply taken for granted. This ordinary
context is what is both basic and shared throughout the human community.
Consciously we always live in the lifeworld;
normally there is no reason for making it explicitly thematic for ourselves
universally as world. Conscious of the world as a horizon, we live for our particular
ends, whether as momentary and change ones or as an enduring goal that we have
elected for ourselves as a life vocation, to be the dominant one in our active
life… Thus as men with a vocation we may permit ourselves to be
indifferent to everything else, and we may have an eye only for this horizon as
our world and for its own actualities and possibilities - those that exist in
this “world” - i.e. we have an eye only to what is in “reality” here… [17]
17
Within this basic and universal domain of perception
and praxis there may occur special forms of activity with particular selectivities which may become “sciences.”
Science in this concept will both be
related to, but, in specific ways, distinguishable from, the lifeworld foundation in ordinary experience. The lifeworld may
contain various “worlds.” “The
goal-directed life which is that of the scientist’s life-vocation clearly falls
under the generality of the characterization just made, together with the
‘world’ that is awakened therein in the communalization of scientists… as the
horizon of scientific works.” [18]
Here Husserl
retains his usual lofty perspective but also anticipates the awareness that
embodies science in its community and activity. It is clear that experience within the horizon
of the world and the different “worlds” which can be constituted within the lifeworld is the framework by which development in science
can occur. Returning again to “The
Origin of Geometry,” we find one slightly more specific hint of how such an
analysis might take shape:
Geometry and the sciences most closely related to it have to do with
space-time and the shapes, figures, also shapes of motion, alterations of
deformation, etc., that are possible within space-time, particularly the
measurable magnitudes. It is now clear
that even if we know almost nothing about the historical surrounding world of
the first geometers, this much is certain as an invariant, essential structure
that it was a world of “things” (including the human beings themselves as
subjects of this world); that all things necessarily had to have a bodily
character... and [these] can be secured at least in [their] essential nucleus
through a careful a priori explication, [in that] these pure bodies had spatio-temporal shapes and “material” qualities… Further,
it is clear that in the life of practical needs certain particularizations of
shape stood out and that a technical praxis always [aimed at] the production of
particular shapes and the improvement of them according to certain directions
of gradualness. [19]
To this point one may contrast several aspects of the lifeworld with the “worlds” of sciences. First, ordinary perception and action is
primary and universal and is simply presupposed by the actual scientist. Second, the lifeworld
may be said to include the “world” of science, but not vice versa. And third, there is a marked contrast between
the “perceptions of the sciences and perception in the lifeworld.”
Here we continue to take account of the
first sense of lifeworld as founding fundament.
The ordinary perception, examined critically and reflectively, is shown
to be different from scientific perception. In his case studies on the origins of
geometrical method, Husserl notes that:
In the intuitively given surrounding world, by abstractively directing our view to the mere spatiotemporal
shapes, we experience “bodies” – not
18
geometrically-ideal bodies but precisely those bodies that we actually
experience, with the content which is the actual content of experience. [20]
This perception is what I
call microperception; it is more
narrowly sensory in its original understanding. The base stratum of the Husserlian
lifeworld continues to be this domain of human
interaction with a material-surrounding world.
Geometry, when it does
arise, does so from a particularization within the perceptual field: Certain
shapes are noticed, preferred, perfected, etc., and by a gradual process of
abstraction and variation, move from that base toward the imaginatively ideal. Geometry originates from a certain kind of
perception and praxis:
The geometrical methodology of operatively determining some and finally
all ideal shapes, beginning with basic shapes as elementary means of
determination, points back to the methodology of determination and measuring in
general, practices first primitively and then as an art in the prescientific, intuitively given surrounding world. [21]
As these shapes are selected, chosen, and perfected,
new interests and praxes arise with a trajectory toward idealization. “Out of the praxis of perfecting, of freely
pressing toward the horizons of conceivable perfecting ‘again and again’
limit-shapes emerge toward which the particular series of perfectings end.” [22]
In short, one begins
to get a special geometrical praxis.
In this new type of praxis,
perceptions also change. A new praxis is
an acquisition, which once acquired may become familiar; its origins and
the means by which it was attained are forgotten. That which becomes familiar becomes
transparent and taken-for-true. It
becomes a kind of “perception,” but now, while intuitive, something beginning
to approximate a macroperception, a “cultural”
perception. It is precisely this
movement which characterizes Husserl’s interpretation
of the rise of Modern Science in the figures of Galileo and Descartes.
I shall not sketch out the
whole of this interpretation. But what Husserl asks is: What constitutes the realm of the
taken-for-granted which would have been part of Galileo’s perspective upon
geometry? And with some subtlety he
traces not only what Galileo could take for granted but, in a reconstruction,
makes us aware of what we take for granted. This level actually arises much later, after
the paradigm shift Galileo instigated was solidified.
According to Husserl, what was “obvious” to Galileo was a long tradition
of the relation and application of ancient geometry in a Platonistic
guise such that the empirical world could be mathematized
with a certain intuitiveness - but only to a point. Partial measurements and correspondences were
known from antiquity (and revived in the
19
Renaissance). Thus, without
further specifying origins, proportions between lengths of strings and sounds
(harmonics) and between selected shapes (triangles, etc. - not initially rough
or complex shapes) and their elaboration in plane geometry could be taken for
granted. But a new type of universalization, a new perspective, is taken by Galileo, a
perspective which only much later can become so taken-for-granted that it
becomes intuitive.
The problem revolves around
sensory perception. Shapes, already
closely subsumed under ancient geometry, are only a part of the sensory world. In addition, there are what Husserl calls plenary or specific-sense qualities (colors
will do for an example). These do not
easily fall under the geometric praxis: “The difficulty here lies
in the fact that material plena - the specific
sense-qualities - which concretely fill out the spatiotemporal shape-aspects of
the world of bodies cannot, in their own gradations, be directly treated
as are the shapes themselves.” [23]
Some means must be devised,
then, to account for these plenary qualities, or else one must realize
that the geometrical method is only a special and limited praxis related to one
aspect of the world. Galileo’s
invention, Husserl claims, is the development of an indirect
means of mathematizing the plena.
Galileo must find a means to translate
plenary phenomena into spatial ones in order for them to become
available for geometrical analysis. And
that is what he does.
Conceptually, this move,
well known in both Galileo and Descartes, first denies to the objects their
plenary qualities in the doctrine of primary and secondary qualities. Put baldly, the object-in-itself is purely a
geometrical entity, a res extensa; its plenary qualities are located not in the
object but in the subject. Colors are
“subjective.” But now, since we see a
thing as both extended and colored, there must be some way to subsume color
into geometrical analysis. And it is
here that the indirect geometrization begins
to take shape. There must be some index
of regularity which, while not directly spatial, can be related to some
“spatial” measurement, directly or through a process of translation.
Now with regard to the “indirect” mathematization
of that aspect of the world which in itself has no mathematizable
world-form, such mathematization is thinkable only in
the sense that the specifically sensible qualities (“plena”)
that can be experienced in the intuited bodies are closely related in a quite
peculiar and regulated way with the shapes that belong essentially to
them. [24]
In this perspective, not
yet intuitive, Galileo dramatically paves the way for Modern physics such that,
today, second thoughts are rarely given to the procedure:
20
What we experienced in prescientific
life, as colors, tones, warmth, and weight belonging to the things themselves
and experienced causally as a body’s radiation of warmth which makes adjacent
bodies warm, and the like, indicates in terms of physics, of course,
tone-vibrations, warmth-vibrations, i.e., pure events in the world of shapes.[italics
mine] [25]
So much of this is taken
for granted that undergraduates can even say that they “see” wave lengths.
This is to say that once gestalted, the Galilean perspective becomes a kind of macroperception which can be taken for granted with new
modifications possible. But it is
precisely here that the ambiguity in Husserl reaches
its own apex. For if the new
means of understanding phenomena becomes a genuine cultural acquisition as the
investigation into the origins by means of a praxis become transparent, it
overlooks the contrast with the fundamental lifeworld.
But now we must note something of the highest
importance that occurred even as early as Galileo the surreptitious
substitution of the mathematically substructed world
of idealities for the only real world, the one that is actually given through
perception, that is ever experienced and experienceable
- our everyday lifeworld. This substitution was promptly passed on to
his successors, the physicists of all the succeeding centuries. [26]
Husserl seems to be saying that the lifeworld
is, and must be, the sensory lifeworld, based in the
relations between actional humans and the concrete,
material world of things and beings, which are bodily. And these are intuitively, perceptually
available to everyone. Then a second
type of intuitability also occurs, such as that
exemplified in the Galilean revolution, in which certain combinations of praxically attained perspectives can make possible another intuitable attainment, a cultural acquisition, like a
science.
However, such an
acquisition is also ambiguous. Because
what is gained by the very means of mathematization, Husserl argues, loses an essential sense of concreteness by
overlooking the fundamental lifeworld.
Galileo, the discoverer... of physics, or physical nature is at once a discovering
and a concealing genius. He discovers
mathematical nature, the methodical idea, he blazes
the trail for the infinite number of physical discoveries and discoverers. [But] immediately with Galileo, then, begins
the surreptitious substitution of idealized nature for prescientifically
intuited nature. [27]
The acquisition of the new
paradigm conceals the fundament of the ordinary dimension of the lifeworld.
In this context, however,
two remarks are called for: First, it
21
should now be obvious that Husserl
clearly developed something similar to the notion of a paradigm shift. This is, in essence, his interpretation of
Galileo. Galileo “sees” the world differently,
and once this perspective is established, it can itself become a tradition
which persists. Here is normal science,
a way of seeing and interpreting phenomena which contrasts with the world of
ordinary activity and seeing. In this
sense, and specifically by means of an experiential analysis, Husserl anticipates the new philosophy of science.
For Husserl,
praxis and perception are the focal basis of the lifeworld.
The lifeworld
is that structure of experience which is both perceptual and historical. It contains sediments and traditions
and what Husserl proposed in his reexamination of
the rise of Modern Science.
Interestingly, at this very
opening point, a long-persistent misunderstanding of Husserl
and phenomenology has barred the way to seeing Husserl
as forerunner to the new philosophy of science. It is thought that Husserl
always began with “immediate experience,” which was intuited. Therefore, the misunderstanding usually
goes, phenomenology becomes a merely “subjective” procedure. What fails to be noted is that for
phenomenology, all intuitions, as well as all sediments and traditions, are
constituted, not given. Givenness is always merely indexical or preliminary.
Intuitions and traditions,
when examined critically, are shown to be what they are only when their
constituting field or context is made apparent; and that is what Husserl did with Galileo. “Given” intuitions or traditions are truly
parallel to what Kuhn takes as normal science, while the establishing of a
perspective, as with Galileo, is a revolution in science. Truth - the obvious, the transparent - is what
it is because it is already familiar, constituted, sedimented. But
this, in turn, must be referred to both the field which makes the constituting
possible and to the activity which does the constituting (or, the revolution
which establishes it).
The second comment relates
to the tension between Husserl’s two senses of perceivability which may be found in the idea of the lifeworld. Husserl himself retained the hard sense of perceivability for that founding dimension of the lifeworld or perception in its micro-(sensory)
signification. The second or macro-
(hermeneutic-cultural) signification was for him an aperceptive
sense. But insofar as
the second sense of perception is used and insofar as it could be gestalted into a taken-for-granted cultural tradition, it
is clearly also “intuited.” Furthermore,
Husserl allows that there is both an ordinary and a
mathematical praxis possible within the lifeworld. However, he was still a foundationaljst
in that the first, hard sense remained for him the founding stratum.
While Husserl
retained microperception as foundational, making (specific
scientific) macroperception derivative, even if
“higher,” Kuhn
22
as the later counterpart to this observation emphasizes
the second dimension of perceivability. For Kuhn, it is primarily macroperception
which is foundational. In a rough sense,
specific perceptions (scientific observations) take place within a paradigm or macroperception. Scientific perception, while clearly
bodily-perceptual in some sense, is primarily that of the macro-order, a
specific formation of the hermeneutic-cultural order.
Interestingly, the movement
toward the more obvious discontinuities and polymorphous qualities of cultural macroperception also characterizes some of the moves of the
post-Husserlians. It occurs dramatically in the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty.
Within the phenomenological
traditions, Merleau-Ponty was the preeminent
philosopher of perception. His Phenomenology
of Perception (first published in English in 1962) remains the classic
study in the field and, in the context here, was the work which most thoroughly
distinguished a phenomenological theory of bodily-sensory perception. His later Visible and the Invisible (first
published in English in 1968), while a posthumous unfinished work, displays a
modification which focuses upon the dimension of cultural perception or macroperception as I interpret it. My reference to him here, however, must be
limited to taking note of the emergence of certain features of a
praxis-perception model of interpretation relevant to the context of philosophy
of science and technology.
Merleau-Ponty read and adapted Husserl
into the French world, but his focus began with the later Husserl
of the lifeworld period. In the earlier Phenomenology of Perception there
is a kind of structural adaptation of the lifeworld
notion. The base of the lifeworld, as in Husserl, could
be said to be common experience:
All my knowledge of the world, even my scientific
knowledge, is gained from my own particular point of view, or from some
experience of the world without which the symbols of science would be
meaningless. The whole universe of
science is built upon the world as directly experienced, and if we want to
subject science itself to rigorous scrutiny and arrive at a precise assessment
of its meaning and scope, we must begin by reawakening the basic experience of
the world of which science is the second-order expression. [28]
There is thus a distinction, similar to Husserl’s, between a common, primary relation to the world
and a special, secondary (perhaps higher), scientific relation to the world. Phenomenology, as Merleau-Ponty
sometimes characterized it, was the philosophy which must take the measure of
this difference.
If the foundation of the lifeworld could be found in common experience,
pre-critically it remains only that which is taken-for-
23
granted. The task of a
critical phenomenology was to awaken its sense - and here Merleau-Ponty
also adapted a version of the Husserlian epoche:
It is because we are through and through compounded of
relationships with the world that for us the only way to become aware of the
fact is to suspend the resultant activity, to refuse it our complicity... or
yet again, to put it “out of play.” Not
because we reject the certainties of common sense and a natural attitude
towards things - they are, on the contrary, the constant theme of philosophy - but
because, being the presupposed basis of any thought, they are taken for
granted, and go unnoticed, and because in order to arouse them and bring them
into view, we have to suspend for a moment our recognition of them. [29]
So far, fairly standard Husserl - but Merleau-Ponty
interprets the primary world-self relation (intentionality) as actional and perceptual. In defense of his thesis he claimed, “The
perceived world is always the presupposed foundation of all rationality, all
value, all existence.” [30] Thus, in a complex and broadened phenomenological sense,
he makes perception basic:
I cannot put perception into the same category as the
synthesis represented by judgements, acts or
predications. We must not, therefore,
wonder whether we really perceive a world, we must instead say: the world is
what we perceive... To seek the essence of perception is to declare that
perception is, not presumed true, but defined as access to truth. [31]
Perception, in this sense, is access to truth, the
limits within which even rationality can occur: “Rationality is precisely
measured by the experience in which it is disclosed. To say that there exists rationality is to say
that perspectives blend, perceptions confirm each other, a
meaning emerges.” [32]
By making perception
foundational, Merleau-Ponty could be said to be
something of a phenomenological “empiricist,” even though his interpretation of
perception radically differs from any empiricist sensation theory. However, by initially identifying perception
with the foundationalist interpretation given it by Husserl, Merleau-Ponty falls into
the same trap regarding science, which we have previously noted in Husserl’s interpretation of Galileo:
Scientific points of view, according to which my
existence is a moment of the world’s, are always both naive and at the same
time dishonest, because they take for granted, without explicitly mentioning
it, the other point of view, namely that of consciousness, through which from
the outset a world forms itself around me and begins to exist for me. To return to things themselves is to return to
that world which precedes knowledge, of which knowledge always speaks, and in
relation to which every scientific
24
schematization is an abstract and derivative sign-language, as is
geography in relation to the country side in which we have learnt beforehand
what a forest, a prairie or a river is. [33]
I shall contend that by relating common perception to
scientific perception in this foundationalist way,
the contrast between the praxis of ordinary existence and scientific activity
is not only too sharp, but it overlooks another strategy entirely, a strategy
which could have been developed from within the phenomenological perspective
itself.
The point here, however, is
to take brief account of the praxis-perception model which occurs in the works
of Merleau-Ponty as a potential contribution to both
the philosophy of science and the philosophy of technology. In general, the modifications upon Husserlian phenomenology have long been recognized as existential
reinterpretations. “[Phenomenology] far from being, as has been thought, a
procedure of idealistic philosophy... belongs to existential philosophy: Heidegger’s “being-in-the-world” appears only
against the background of the phenomenological reduction.” [34] Note that existential here means precisely the kind of
“materiality” which occurs in praxis and perception; it is primarily an account
of a world-body-as-me relation rather than the analysis of “pure consciousness”
as intimated by Husserl.
This is to say that the
I-world correlation, which is intentionality, is reinterpreted by Merleau-Ponty to be a correlation between the experienced
environment - the world - and my experiencing of it as an incarnate or embodied
being. This version of perception thus
focuses upon bodily concreteness and revolves around the various dimensions of
bodily existence. The immediate
consequences of a theory of perception are clear. Not only is body (as experiencing or “lived”
body) implicated in all perception and the condition of what and how something
is perceived, but “the theory of the body is already a theory of perception.” [35] Thus, in the explication of this theory, existential
spatiality or bodily position must be constantly accounted for:
When I walk around my flat, the various aspects in
which it presents itself to me could not possibly appear as views of one and
the same thing if I did not know that each of them represents the flat seen
from one spot or another, and if I were unaware of my own movements, and of my
body as retaining its identity through the stages of these movements. [36]
Here we return to one of the points made concerning
phenomenological relativity. Whether or
not it is interpreted foundationally, there is some kind of peculiar privilege
of bodily existence with respect to any phenomenological perspective. At least, this is so for all microperception. Not
to take account of spatiality
25
(position), temporality
(existential time), or the various dimensions of actional
perception (mortality, expressiveness, even sexuality) would be inadequate and
would dehumanize the account.
I shall briefly outline a
few of the succinct features of the Merleau-Pontean
theory of perception:
1) The recovery of lifeworld perception is understood by Merleau-Ponty
to be the task of rediscovering the complexity and multidimensionality of
perception. In the critical part of his
analysis - and it should be noted that the science which he criticizes is
primarily psychology - his objections include the various types
of reductionism which characterize much twentieth-century human science. What is primitive in perception is its
richness:
A wooden wheel placed on the ground is not, for sight, the same
thing as a wheel bearing a load. A body
at rest because no force is being exerted upon it is again for sight not the
same thing as a body in which opposing forces are in
equilibrium.... [v]ision is already inhabited by a significance
which gives it a function in the spectacle of the world and in our existence…
The problem is to understand these strange relationships which are woven
between the parts of the landscape, or between it and me as incarnate subject,
and through which an object perceived can concentrate in itself a whole scene
or become the image of the whole segment of life. Sense experience is that vital communication
with the world which makes it present as a familiar setting of our life. It is to it that the perceived object and the
perceiving subject owe their thickness. [37]
The perceptual primitive is complex, multidimensioned. In
this sense, the analysis is non-reductive.
2) Although the various
senses are discussed throughout the Phenomenology of Perception, it is
also clear that bodily motility, action, is basic. Not unlike much psychology, various illusions
and perceptual deception fascinate Merleau-Ponty. He finds the clue to explanation residing
primarily in full, bodily engagements with these (an illusion can maintain
itself only through a certain distance and abstraction). In a discussion of the inverting-glasses
experiments (glasses which presumably invert our “visual image” of the
environment) and of distorted rooms (which look normal only at a distance and
from one position but, if entered, are obliquely constructed and thus
non-familiar), the illusory quality depends upon praxis and bodily action. “What counts for the orientation of the
spectacle is not my body as it in fact is, as a thing in objective space, but
as a system of possible actions, a virtual body with its phenomenal ‘place’
defined by its task and situation. My
body is wherever there is something to be done.” [38]
Bodily existence is both actional and oriented. Directions are not arbitrary but refer to
bodily capacities and relations within potential
26
tasks (thus up/down, right/left, and forward/back belong in
oriented ways to a being of upright posture).
We must not wonder why being is orientated, why
existence is spatial, why [the body’s] co-existence with the world magnetizes
experience and induces a direction in it. The question could only be asked if the facts
were fortuitous happenings to a subject and an object indifferent to space,
whereas perceptual experience shows that they are presupposed in our primordial
encounter with being, and that being is synonymous with being situated. [39]
3) If body-world relations
interpreted actionally are basic, the perceptual
model which ties much of the Merleau-Pontean strategy
together is that of the gestalt figure/ground phenomenon:
When Gestalt theory informs us that a figure on a
background is the simplest sense-given available to us, we reply that this is
not a contingent characteristic of factual perception... it is the very
definition of the phenomenon of perception, that without which a phenomenon
cannot be said to be perception at all. The perceptual “something” is always in the
middle of something else, it always forms part of a
field. [40]
This is why, for a phenomenological analysis, there
can never be an isolated thing-in-itself. All things are related to some context or
other. This “invariant” for
phenomenology, however, derives from its perceptualism.
In Merleau-Ponty’s
case, the gestalt model even relates to bodily motility in basic ways:
My body is geared onto the world when my perception presents me with a
spectacle as varied and as clearly articulated as possible, and when my motor
intentions, as they unfold, receive the responses they expect from the world. This maximum sharpness of perception and
action points clearly to a perceptual ground, a basis of my life, a
general setting in which my body can co-exist with the world. [41]
4) If the basic model for
analysis revolves around figure/ground relations, there is a related whole/part
strategy which also governs the analysis. In the discussion of illusions, it again
becomes clear that there is a weighted difference between the whole (world) and
its parts (particular objects or perceptual takings). “There is absolute certainty of the world in
general, but not of any one thing in particular.” [42] These top-down and whole-part strategies are common to most
phenomenological procedures.
5) Since within any given
context or whole there can be uncertainty about parts, the human perceptual
situation is both fluid and ambiguous. If
we join Merleau-Ponty in accepting that the
27
primitives of perception are complex and multidimensioned,
there is within his mode of analysis a suggestion of a different volatility, of
a certain polymorphous quality. I shall
take one particularly ambiguous example, that of three-dimensional visual
effects from two-dimensional drawings (long favored examples for psychology
experiments). Merleau-Ponty
contends:
Organization in depth is destroyed if I add to the ambiguous drawing
not simply any lines (Fig. 3 stubbornly remains a cube) but lines which
disunite the elements of one and the same plane and join up those of different
planes (Fig. I). What do we mean when we
say that these lines themselves bring about the destruction of depth? Are we not taking the language of associationism? We
do not mean that the line EH (Fig. 1), acting as a cause, disorganizes the cube
into which it is introduced, but that it induces a general grasp which is not
the grasp in depth.
It is understood that the line EH itself possesses an individuality only if I grasp it in that light, if I run
over it and trace it out myself. But
this grasp and this delineation are not arbitrary. They are indicated or recommended by
phenomena. The demand here is not an
overriding one, simply because it is a question of an ambiguous figure, but in
a normal visual field, the segregation of planes and outlines is irresistible;
for example, when I walk along an avenue, I cannot bring myself to see the
spaces between the trees as things and the trees themselves as a background. It is certainly I who have
the experience of the landscape, but in this experience I am conscious of
taking up a factual situation, of bringing together a significance dispersed
among phenomena, and of saying what they of their own accord mean. [43]
What may be noted from this
discussion is that: (a) such ambiguous phenomena, in his interpretation, have a
certain gradation of ambiguity but are clearly polymorphous in some degree; and
(b) the gradation of polymorphy, however, is related
to certain “bodily engagement” possibilities. Thus Merleau-Ponty
contends that reversibilities from such abstract and
disengaged drawings are not repeatable within the more
28
engaged praxis of motion (walking down the tree-lined
avenue). Yet, within the ambiguous
gestalt that the figures present, there is a range of perceptual polymorphy.
From this limited
exposition of the praxis-perception model emerging from the Phenomenology of
Perception it should be clear that it focuses upon what I call microperception, that is, the action and perception which
occurs in our bodily or incarnate engagement with the immediate environment or
world. What remains unclear is how this
model of bodily-perceptual engagement relates to the development of either the
new philosophy of science or the philosophy of technology.
I will make only one basic
comment with respect to the philosophy of science. By adding an analysis of perception and
indicating how it is a constant in the emergence of truth or rationality, Merleau-Ponty clearly belongs to that group of thinkers who
would necessarily see the praxis of science as both an engaged and an embodied
form of action. It should also be
obvious, particularly from the central role gestalt models play, that the
analysis of perception supplements what Kuhn later developed in The
Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Indeed,
the specific analysis of perception is considerably beyond the depth of either
Kuhn’s or Wittgenstein’s use of perception. But this is not to claim that Merleau-Ponty applied his insights to the institution of
science. That was not his aim.
If the role
of perception, especially at the microperceptual
order of things, does not immediately seem to fit the concerns of
philosophy of science, the opposite is the case with respect to the philosophy
of technology. The materiality of body
carries with it, particularly with regard to artifact use, certain rather
immediate implications. Merleau-Ponty offers three examples in the discussion of
bodily spatiality:
A woman may, without any calculation, keep a safe distance between the
feather in her hat and things which might break it off. She feels where the feather is just as we feel
where our hand is. If I am in the habit
of driving a car, I enter a narrow opening and see that I can “get through”
without comparing the width of the opening with that of the wings, just as I go
through a doorway without checking the width of the doorway against that of my
body. [44]
In Polanyi’s
parlance, these phenomena would be examples of tacit knowledge, since they
are a kind of “know how” without explicit conceptual judgment attached to them.
But they are more - they are examples of
how artifacts (technologies) may be used or experienced in use. They are examples of what I call embodiment
relations. Such relations are
existential (bodily-sensory), but they implicate how we utilize technologies
and how such use transforms what it is we experience
29
through such
technologies. Merleau-Ponty
is more precise in his example of the blind man’s cane:
The blind man’s tool has ceased to be an object for
him, and is no longer perceived for itself; its point has become an area of
sensitivity, extending the scope and active radius of touch, and providing a
parallel to sight. In the exploration of
things, the length of the stick does not enter expressly as a middle term: The
blind man is rather aware of it through the position of objects than the
position of objects through it. The
position of things is immediately given through the extent of the reach which
carries him to it, which comprises besides the arm’s own reach the stick’s
range of action. [45]
I contend that this
experiential phenomenon has implications not only for the philosophy of
technology, but for the philosophy of science. The feather, the automobile, and the cane fall
into the same existential use as many scientific instruments, a use that has
simply been ignored in most of the standard analyses but which belongs
essentially to the expansion of insight needed within a new philosophy of
science.
If the primary contribution
toward both philosophy of science and, potentially, the philosophy of
technology may be found in the analysis of microperception
in its sensory-bodily dimensions, there is also a growing awareness on Merleau-Ponty’s part of what I call macroperception
in its interaction with microperception. Unfortunately, these later insights received
were far less developed, but they are indicated in his later work, The
Visible and the Invisible. He was
clearly aware of the role of culture in relation to perception:
It is a remarkable fact that the uninstructed have no awareness of
perspective [in art] and that it took a long time and much reflection for men
to become aware of the perspectival deformation of
objects... I say that the Renaissance
perspective is a cultural fact, that perception itself is polymorphic and that
if it became Euclidian [sic], this is because it allows itself to be oriented
by the system... What I maintain is
that: there is an informing of perception by culture which enables us to say
that culture is perceived. [46]
Here is a clear, emerging awareness of the interaction
between and the interrelatedness of micro- and macroperception.
Although there does not
seem to be any indication that Merleau-Ponty applied
the gestalt and phenomenological notion of field and focus or figure and ground
to this interrelation, his analysis is clearly open to that suggestion. But Merleau-Ponty
does not simply absorb microperception into macroperception in a Wittgensteinian
nor, as will follow, a Foucaultean way.
The late Michel Foucault
(d. 1983) will be the last thinker I shall discuss as a European counterpart of
the new philosophy of science.
30
Such a choice might seem strange to some phenomenologists, because Foucault characterized himself as
antiphenomenological. Yet in spite of this self-characterization, I
shall argue that Foucault develops precisely the praxis-perception model which
is needed for a philosophy of technology.
He was, in fact, a student of Merleau-Ponty;
there is substantial internal evidence that much of his work was effectively a response
to Merleau-Ponty. (He was an avid reader of Heidegger as well.)
On the other side, there is an as yet unappreciated appropriateness to placing Foucault in this discussion. He was a strict contemporary of Thomas Kuhn; and his first major work, Madness and Civilization