Nature's Suit: Husserl's Phenomenological Philosophy of the Physical Sciences

Conclusion

C o nc l u s i o n ................................... Our study of Husserl’s phenomenological philosophy of the physical sciences has been governed by two overriding considerations: the question concerning the epistemic status and existential import of scientific theories; and the reception of Husserl’s philosophy of science in the anglophone secondary literature. Besides giving a general exposition of Husserl’s phenomenology as it bears upon the question of science through a close examination of the primary texts, we have also addressed specific positions attributed to Husserl in the secondary literature. A number of those attributions to which we devoted most of our attention not only detract from the prima facie plausibility of Husserl’s philosophy of science—they are also seriously mistaken. They were, in brief, that Husserl’s philosophy of science is foundationalist and therefore represents science as a system of rigid dogmatic belief closed to future experience; that Husserl’s philosophy of science is ambiguous with respect to the cognitive value of the scientific enterprise; and that Husserl’s philosophy of science is committed to the instrumentalist interpretation of scientific theories and hence dismisses as mere fictions the entire array of theoretical entities that has been posited in the course of modern scientific explanation. By way of conclusion I will review these allegations and the reasons why they should be rejected. 1. husserl’s “dogmatism” A particularly pointed version of the charge of dogmatism comes from Christopher Prendergast’s work titled “Phenomenology and the Problem of Foundations: A Critique of Edmund Husserl’s Theory of Science.”1 There Prendergast held that Husserl’s commitment to the strong foundationalist conception of scientific knowledge effectively prevented Husserl from 196 conclusion grasping the central characteristics of systems of empirical scientific belief, namely, their methodological flexibility and their revisibility in the face of new evidence. Similar criticisms are made by Cornelius van Peursen and Herbert Marcuse.2 We found such charges to be unjustified on two counts. First, although Husserl was throughout his philosophical career an adherent of the strong foundationalist account of science, he limited the validity of that account to the purely deductive sciences. Such sciences display a deductive unity derived from their axioms. Being both self-evident and indemonstrable, axioms form their foundations. But in section 72 of the “Prolegomena to Pure Logic” in the Logical Investigations, Husserl clearly states that the empirical sciences, including the physical sciences, do not find their basis or unity in their deductive structure. Nor are they founded, once and for all, upon certain selfevident axioms. Rather, their unity is to be located in the idea of empirical explanation. Their laws are not certain, but only more or less probable on a given body of empirical evidence (LI I, 246 / H XVIII, B 255). The theories of the empirical sciences are thus “frequently modified in the course of scientific progress”; as the “process of knowledge progresses,” we “progressively correct our conceptions” (LI I, 246 / H XVIII, B 255). Moreover, the strong foundationalist idea of science was itself “idealized” as a direct consequence of the later Husserl’s theory of evidence. Even the eidetic sciences could now no longer claim to have final insight into necessary states of affairs. For once the method of the eidetic sciences was developed as a form of induction over imagined possibilities, all de facto eidetic claims were relativized to future evidence. Furthermore, due to the ineluctably temporal structure of experience, even the reflective apprehension of mental processes within consciousness could no longer claim to lay hold of adequate evidence. Phenomenological claims, too, are relativized to the course of future evidence. This point has been persuasively argued by Elisabeth Ströker, as we noted in chapter 1.3 Husserl’s “foundationalism”—if one can still speak of such—is thus functional rather than substantial. While priority relations in the order of cognition are still recognized, at each level the achievement of certainty through adequate evidence counts only as an Idea in the Kantian sense, as an ideal to be approached but never attained. The cognitions of the eidetic sciences still lie at the foundations of the empirical sciences; but this is not to say that such cognitions have been secured, or can be secured, once and for all. Similarly, the cognitions of phenomenology are intrinsically prior to those of conclusion 197 the positive sciences; but this is not to say that they have been, or could be...