Phenomenology, Science Studies, and the Question of Being Dennis Desroches (bio) Thus all sciences which relate to this natural world, though they stand never so firm to me, though they fill me with wondering admiration, though I am far from any thought of objecting to them in the least degree, I disconnect them all, I make absolutely no use of their standards, I do not appropriate a single one of the propositions that enter into their systems, even though their evidential value is perfect, I take none of them, no one of them serves me for a foundation. Husserl, Ideas1 Part I Introduction It is easy to forget that crucial moment around the turn of the twentieth century when the logical positivism of philosophy of science is finally called to account by Edmund Husserl in much the same way that Neils Bohr calls classical physics to account.2 If the work of Michael Polanyi, Ludwik Fleck, Thomas Kuhn, Paul Feyerabend, and others later on comes to ground (more or less) subsequent rejections of positivist and foundationalist treatments [End Page 383] of scientific method and practice—rejections that have led to the many remarkable insights attributable to what we now call "science studies"—we must nevertheless recall that the ground of this ground, as it were, has been debated with great philosophical rigor in the domain of phenomenology for nearly a hundred years.3 It seems important to recall this, given that the very conditions of possibility of science studies are often taken for granted by us today in a way that they were not when, for example, Kuhn was writing his magnum opus. What I mean by "science studies" in this regard might seem a little strange, for I conceive it to include certain fields that have more recently been distinguished from science studies "proper"—particularly social constructivism, as well as certain other strains of antifoundationalism that emerge in the philosophy of science.4 My reason for conceiving them under the same rubric is tactical as much as it is logical, and has to do with my attempt here to foreground one of the underlying epistemological assumptions that all of these fields share regarding the question of "being." I mean to suggest, specifically, that the enabling condition of science studies, broadly conceived as it is here, can be discerned in what ranks as one of intellectual history's most radical hermeneutical maneuvers: the transcendental reduction of phenomenology, known by the maxim, "to the things themselves." The consequences of this reduction, and the manner in which a critique of its place in the genealogy of science studies can open new "ontological" domains of inquiry, will be the subject of this paper. That such domains have already begun to appear in the work of Michel Serres and Donna Haraway (to name just two examples)5 may, I hope, [End Page 384] justify the critical and theoretical speculations to which science studies is subjected below. 1. The Phenomenological Rejection of Science That science studies is not only indebted to, but continues to depend upon, the transcendental reduction is not likely to be taken too seriously by proponents of science studies at first. Phenomenology has appeared to be no friend to science—a position that stands in stark contrast to later interpretations of science studies' relationship with the "exact" sciences, which, as Joseph Rouse has noted, depend on the fact that "cultural studies' interpretive readings are [a] part of the culture of science and not an explanation or interpretation of it from 'outside.'"6 Rouse also makes the point that "it is important to recognize that the traffic across the boundaries erected between science and society is always two-way."7 On the contrary, as if Husserl's rejection of the [End Page 385] natural sciences' hold on reality in the epigram above does not go far enough toward constituting this inside/outside distinction, key thinkers in the phenomenological vein have appeared to champion precisely that division even more vigorously. Maurice Merleau-Ponty once suggested that "Husserl's first directive to phenomenology, in its early stages, to be a 'descriptive psychology,' or to return to the 'things themselves,' is from the start a...