Fundamental Demands on the Construction of a Theoretical Object of Strictly Scientific Empirical Studies of Literature

Abstract

When we start out from the assumption that theories can never adequately represent an unknowable realm of stimulators of our senses, this implies the construction even of the objects themselves of scientific empirical theories, which is here taken to be wholly dependent on practically relevant explanatory purposes for the advancement of practical capacities only. This also means that explanatory empirical theories alone can be scientific empirical theories in a strict sense, whereas descriptive empirical theories, as implying the assumption of some fundamental substance-construct, may only be justified within science insofar as they fulfill an adequate service function of some required data acquisition. This article, being also based on the constructivist point of view that there is no independent object of knowledge at all, consists for a large part in a sketch of a sequence of object-constructs as resulting from different and successively more effective ways of making attempts at survival in the evolution of mankind and the development of its social practice. The object-construct of scientific empirical explanatory theories as the latest of them is here conceived as empirical practical quasi-action with the function of enabling new know-that for the improvement of practical capacities in various fields of our highly specified practice. As special kinds of empirical practical quasi-actions for a future fruitful construction of objects of scientific empirical explanatory theories are here proposed: process (in a narrow sense), origination of meaning, and origination of a practical action. It must be understood as a “political” decision when the author intends to develop an object-theory of scientific empirical studies of literature as that of originations of a kind of communicative cooperative practical actions.