Imagination in action: the case of historical epistemology

Before presenting evidence of the fact that the equal interaction of history and philosophy of science is not only possible but also actual, we will ask a question: to what extent is such a re-reading of Kant is legitimate? Is applying the concept of the free play of faculties to the context of scientific research acceptable? Should we not leave this concept solely to artistic creativity, and relegate scientific activity to the syntheses carried out according to the legislation of understanding? At least one argument states that such an interpretation is valid. The relationship between free imagination "schematizing without any concepts" and the scientific cognition came into being in a certain historical period and was quite definite to Kant. Perhaps, by now this relationship has changed and the antipathy between imagination and science has passed away?We refer to the essential for contemporary historical epistemology attitude to basic scientific concepts, the epistemological and ontological status of which is not always appropriate to consider as eternal and unchangeable [Daston, 2000]. If this is the case, then the relationship between science and artistic creation, since the ability of imagination belongs primarily to the latter, may also change. Perhaps it was not so unambiguous in the past. On the intersection of scientific research practices and artistic activities, in history in particular, see: [Baigrie, 1996; Jones & Galison, 1998].

What can testify to the justification of free imagination in science at present? This justification can be associated with the actualization of a certain image of science, involving criticism of the legislative power of understanding or a critical attitude to science as a system of theoretical representations. This criticism is seen in a number of significant epistemological works of the late 20th century.Identification of reasons for this tendency deserves a separate study. Here we can only note that this tendency partly continues the line of empiricism in positivist studies of science but is amplified by the critical attitude to theoretical scientific representations on the part of social sciences [Marcus & Fisher, 1986], as well as by the general postmodern intellectual situation known for its suspicion towards any universalism. R. Rorty, arguing about scientific values, criticizes the ambition of science to retain objectivity, understood in a representative way [Rorty, 1991]. J. Hacking, referring to the problem of realism in science, prefers realism of scientific objects associated with the direct experimental interaction with reality to the realism of scientific theories, which seems problematic to him [Hacking, 1983]. N. Cartwright, clarifying the status of models in science, shows that theoretical regularities do not describe regularities existing in nature, that in science "the phenomenological laws are indeed true of the objects in reality - or might be; but the fundamental laws are true only of objects in the model" [Cartwright, 1983, p. 4]. The methodology of science begins to develop the so-called non-representative approaches that emphasize an empirical component of the research [Vanini, 2015; Trift, 2007]. The criticism of science as a theoretical activity emphasizes a practical side of science, related to empirical objects and their images, giving way to imaginative schematizing without a concept. Thus, a new historical approach to the study of science emerges. Being no subject to concepts assigned by philosophy, it creates and reassembles them anew.

This new approach is associated not only and not so much with the historization of the theory of scientific knowledge, bequeathed by representatives of previous epistemological traditions, for example, French epistemology [Lecourt, 1975] or Marxist tradition [Wartofsky, 1987], but with the epistemologization of the history of science. The latter distinguishes the contemporary history of science. Modern historical epistemology takes upon itself the organization of a meeting of two equal research interests [Rheinberger, 2012, p. 111]. Works in this field do not simply describe individual scientific events or long-term processes, but refer to the genesis of contemporary epistemological problems as to a source, in which their solution can be found [Hacking, 2002, p. 24].Here we can remember one quite illustrative example of the study of "science archive" by L. Daston [Daston, 2012]. In her work, Daston describes the obligatory presence in "sciences of nature" the historical memory and the attention to individual facts of the past, traditionally characteristic to "sciences of culture". Noteworthy, at the beginning of her study, she reveals its purpose - to demonstrate rather rigorous limitations set by a quite problematic contemporary approach, which insists on the firmness of interdisciplinary differences between humanities and natural science. Here philosophy and history of science as disciplinary research strategies intersect, learning from each other and from science itself.

Let us examine two examples which demonstrate the actual work of free imagination as a synthesis of history and philosophy of science. It is crucial that this work rejects an a priori acceptance of a concept, which in some sense defines science as a subject of research. In addition, science itself is understood here as a set of research practices, which includes operating with an object never fully defined. In these examples, it is assumed that the historical analysis of scientific practices allows the forming of a new image of science, and, in this formation, universal communicability is in effect, taking into account variable representations of this image. Formally, this image of science includes two elements - objectivity as a basic scientific value, and scientific object. Substantially these characteristics are the subject of "reassembling", which imagination performs.

Imagination in Historical Epistemology - Two Cases of Constructive Interdisciplinary Communication

The first case concerns the study of the concept of "epistemic virtue", that is, the regulatory ideal of scientific activity, which in the traditional interpretation is associated with objectivity. D. Daston and P. Galison, in their fundamental work Objectivity, question this concept [Daston & Galison, 2007]. The authors prove that the identification of science and objectivity and also the use of objectivity as an absolute characteristic of science are not correct either historically or conceptually. They assert that objectivity is not the only and everlasting epistemic virtue, but that it arose at a certain time (not earlier than the first half of the 19 th century), and there are reasons for its occurrence and the enhancement of its power. The text combines two levels of reassembly - of the concept of epistemic virtue as such, which is diverse, and of the concept of objectivity, which is considered an epistemic virtue along with such concepts as "truth to nature" and "trained judgment", but which is also quite ambiguous since it orients different scientific practices in various ways.

The methodological approach used in this text is important to us. At the core of this approach lies the rejection of the dogmatism of a certain sense of a concept, which leads to a shift of focus from the readymade concept to concrete practices (in the case Objectivity to the practice of making scientific atlases). As a result of the analysis of practices, a new assembly of the concept emerges. "If actions are substituted for concepts and practices for meanings, the focus on the nebulous notions of objectivity sharpens" [ibid., p. 52]. That is, the construction of a concept occurs, not the application of a ready-made concept to a scientific experience. Such a construction, "a non-teleological history of scientific objectivity", can only have the most formally defined purpose - to show how under one word converges different kinds of practices [Daston & Galison, 2007, p. 29]. A meaningful definition of objectivity - objectivity as overcoming of subjectivity - should be the result of this process. Noteworthy is the fact that in this concept, defined only formally, there is a place for other, not yet considered meanings of objectivity, and each of them is determined by which kind of subjectivity hinders scientific cognition in each particular case. In other words, the methodological approach of historical epistemology, implemented in this text, corresponds to the criticism of theoretical representations, and opens up opportunities for the work of free imagination, that is the schematization without any readymade concept. It is interesting that the concept of objectivity is also defined by the authors in a non-representative way: "Objectivity is blind sight, seeing without inference, interpretations, or intelligence" [ibid., p. 17].

The reassembly of the concept of objectivity in this text can be considered not only in the context of criticism of scientific representations, but also as an illustrative example of a combination of historical analysis and philosophical problem solving, in the question of the basic guidelines of scientific activity. "History alone", state L. Daston and P. Galison, "cannot make the choice, any more than one can make the choice among competing moral virtues. But it can show that the choice exists and what hinges on it" [ibid., p. 42]. Let us pay attention to the essential difference between the approach of historical epistemology and the rational reconstruction of the history of science. In the second approach, history, according to I. Lakatos, is subject to the normative methodology of the philosophy of science. Normativity means an opportunity to explain the choice made between competing theories, that is, to make an "appraisal of the solutions already there" [Lakatos, 1981, p. 108]. In the first approach, history shows the contingency of each specific scientific solution; its actual variations and possible alternatives. In addition, historical research, being equally active in the disciplinary synthesis, motivates philosophizing by showing alternatives, "turning an apparent axiom - things could never have been otherwise than we known them - into a matter for reasoned argument" [ibid., p. 376]. In this case, we begin to understand not only why scientists put objectivity in the foreground as an ideal and what problems this choice involves, but also what alternatives, not contrary to the standards of science, this choice allows.

Worth mentioning is the special attention that historical epistemolo- gists pay to science and its "voice", which is not found in the epistemological reflections of scientists or hidden in their theoretical texts in the form of adherence to certain themata (G. Holton). This "voice" reveals itself clearly, not in scientific concepts but in images - diagrams, drawings, photographs taken with the help of complex devices. The transformations of these images (intuitions) demonstrate the work of scientific imagination, which remains hidden from the normative methodology of a philosopher of science.

Another case of translating self-evident axioms into objects of reasoned discussion is advanced by H.-J. Rheinberger in his work On the History of Epistemic Things, where he focuses on the concept of a scientific object [Rheinberger, 1997]. Traditional epistemology assumes invariance as an essential feature of scientific objects. It is this feature that determines the reproducibility of the experiment and characterizes the objectivity of an object [Nozick, 1998], as long as the analysis is limited to the "context of justification", while the "context of discovery" is considered insignificant. H.-J. Rheinberger describes one history - or even a biography - of such scientific objects as cytoplasmic particles, which have played a major role in emergence, between 1935 and 1965, of what is in molecular biology now known as RNA - Ribonucleic acid. He not only shifts the focus to the "context of discovery", to the "coming into being of scientific object"; he suggests we should problematize invariance as an essential quality of scientific objects instead of working within a framework of normative conceptual dichotomy of discovery and justification, and pay attention to scientific practices as such, which always include two kinds of objects.

The first is the "epistemic thing". Rheinberger uses this term to refer to a scientific object, participating in the event of "coming into being", that is in the process of inclusion into the stable scientific objecticity, which has obtained the naming and strictly defined characteristics. Cytoplasmic particles as epistemic things initially have fallen into the focus of interest of various sciences (cancer research, biochemistry, molecular biology, cytomorphology, etc.). They have been studied with a help of various technical means (differential centrifugation with modification of its conditions, "amino acid tracing", electron microscopy, etc.), had different localizations and even different names (mitochondria, microsome, "ribonucleoprotein" particles, ribosomes). Only one quality of these particles was considered indisputable by scientists - their participation in the protein synthesis. The epistemic things as objects of research appear fundamentally uncertain and vague and "this vagueness is inevitable because, paradoxically, epistemic things embody what one does not yet know" [Rheinberger, 1997, p. 28]. In the case of epistemic things, there is no a priori established connection between the concept and the referent. Moreover, no concept regarding them exists altogether. All that can be done is to give a list of constitutive practices, which each time redefines the object differently. Scientists must create this concept step by step with the help of imagination schematizing without any concept.

The second kind of objects is the "technical thing". These are the stable objects that provide practices of research, experimental conditions, models, ready-made concepts, instructions, equipment; things that with the help of which an object of study becomes articulated or visible in one sense or another [Rheinberger, 1997, p. 29]. The difference between technical and epistemic things is situational. The fate of the second is to b ecome a stabilized object, to acquire a stable naming, a certain referent, and eventually, to become a technical thing for subsequent scientific practices. In other words, the two types of scientific objects are not on separate stages of scientific research, they constitute no hierarchy of importance but complement each other, and their difference is purely functional. They and their mixtures (hybrids) also form the lab environment and vary as "`materials and methods' (technical things) `results' (half-way hybrids) and`discussions' (epistemic things)" [ibid., p. 30].

Similar to Daston and Galison, Rheinberger uses several levels of reassembling. Firstly, he re-assembles the concept of scientific object and he employs the method of "reading a history of objectivity from material traces" not "reading a history of objectivity from concepts" [ibid., p. 4]. Secondly, he demonstrates how re-assembly of a scientific object occurs in scientific practice. The concept of an epistemic thing, which corresponds to one of numerous functions of scientific research, characterizes, as Rheinberger puts it, "redefinition" occurring in a laboratory. On both levels, a non-representative strategy emerges, the movement "from the bottom up", if, of course, we following the spirit of traditional rationalist epistemology and assemble scientific practices and theoretical representation in a hierarchy. Rheinberger's historical study, as well as Daston's and Galison's work, partakes in the philosophical transformation of the image of science. History, in principle, ceases to be a historian's business alone but, thanks to the discovery of the historicity of scientific objects, becomes an essential part of science itself. What a historian used to call "rearrangement" and "reorientation" defining the object of scientific activity is now part "of the time structure of the innermost differential activity of the system of investigations themselves" [ibid., p. 178].

Thus, we see how interdisciplinary communication works between history and philosophy of science in the historical epistemology. Moreover, this communication allows various studies to interact on equal terms and offers history an active role. Furthermore, science itself participates in this communication; scientific practices uncover all pre-formed images of scientific activity, and enrich scooping from the space of possible alternatives, which historical study provides. The transcendental basis of such communication can form the ability of imagination, schematizing without any given concept. The ability of imagination works on the borderline between the real and the possible and therefore helps to build an image of science, which respects different viewpoints and is open to new transformations.

Список литературы / References