Bounds of Scientism: The Phenomenological and Hermeneutic Foundations of Modern Science

Kyle  Gleadell

Taking a phenomenological and hermeneutic approach, and drawing on the work of Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger and Hans-Georg Gadamer, this thesis explains the relation between modern science and the shared meaningful world of human existence. The relation of this world and modern science is, due to the increasing intertwining of modern science and our understanding of the world, complex, and thus, I argue, in need of scrutiny. To this end, I interrogate the conceptual presuppositions and historical development of the foundations of modern science from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries onwards. Moreover, I clarify the way scientific domains and methods have been established and how they delineate modern science as distinct from the world of our common meaning and experience (despite modern science being primarily derived from the ontological structure of human existence). I argue that modern science can only offer a particular theoretical and provisional objectified and categorised description of nature. This objectification occurs through the categorisation of things according to particular scientific domains that are abstracted from the complexities of human experience. In contrast, the shared meaningful world of human existence, including our everyday concerns, projects, and experiences, cannot be objectified as it exceeds the strictures of modern scientific methods. However, the methods of modern science, which were originally limited to their specific objectified domains, are increasingly appropriated in order to explain not only natural scientific phenomena but also our shared meaningful world. This undermines not only the secure objectified foundations of scientific domains but also risks reducing the complexities of the world of human existence to scientific objectification. As I propose in this thesis, the phenomenological and hermeneutic approach of an ongoing dialogical and historical questioning of the world and the foundations of the modern sciences is crucial to clarify the relation of abstracted scientific domains and the broader world of human existence.

Bounds of Scientism: The Phenomenological and Hermeneutic Foundations of Modern Science

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