Ethics, Hermeneutics and Philosophy of Science

Abstract

In this essay, I shall be comparing developments in Anglo-American philosophy of science over the past four decades and changes in the currency of avant-garde thinking among cultural and literary critics. These projects have little in common, it will surely be argued, aside from their each having started out with certain strong methodological commitments, and having then abandoned these in the face of accumulating problems that eventually led to such doctrines as ontological relativity, semantic holism, the ‘linguistic turn’, and the discursive construction of reality. Beyond that there is a great difference — I would readily concede — between the aims of philosophy of science in the broadly analytic mode and the kinds of thinking that claimed ‘scientific’ warrant during the period of high structuralism. Where they differ most sharply is on the issue of language, discourse, or representation, that is to say, the extent to which language may be thought of as affording referential access to a domain of real-word (extra-discursive) objects, processes, and events. For structuralists — and even more so for poststructuralists — the notion of our having such access can only be a product of those current (perhaps deeply naturalized) signifying codes that constitute ‘reality’ so far as we can possibly know it. Hence Foucault’s structuralist premise, that all kinds of knowledge, in the natural and the human sciences alike, can be shown to take rise from some particular (purely ‘arbitrary’) arrangement of signs or discursive representations.1