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32Hermeneutics of experimental science in the context of the life-worldPhilosophia Mathematica (2): 101-144. 1972.
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19Comments and CritiqueScience in Context 3 (2): 477-488. 1989.The ArgumentIn this rejoinder to Gyorgy Markus, I argue that although there are nonphilosophical hermeneutical studies of communication among scientists from which much can be learned about scientific practices, there is also the philosophical genre of a hermeneutics of natural science, with which this paper is concerned. The former is the nonphilosophical use of hermeneutics in the study of texts and historical sources; the latter is a philosophy pursued within a working canon of philosophical …Read more
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31Perception as a Hermeneutical ActReview of Metaphysics 37 (1). 1983.IN A recent work I have attempted to show that visual space tends to have a Euclidean geometrical structure only when the environment is filled with a repetitive pattern of regularly faceted objects carpentered to exhibit simple standard Euclidean shapes, and tends to have a hyperbolic structure when vision is deprived of these clues. I conclude that visual perception--and by analogy, all perception--is hermeneutic as well as causal: it responds to structures in the flow of optical energy, but t…Read more
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160Hermeneutical Philosophy and Pragmatism: A Philosophy of Science (review)Synthese 115 (3): 269-302. 1998.Two philosophical traditions with much in common, (classical) pragmatism and (Heidegger's) hermeneutic philosophy, are here\ncompared with respect to their approach to the philosophy of science. Both emphasize action as a mode of interpreting experience.\nBoth have developed important categories – inquiry, meaning, theory, praxis, coping, historicity, life-world – and each has\noffered an alternative to the more traditional philosophies of science stemming from Descartes, Hume, and Comte. Pragma…Read more
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39Interpretation and the structure of space in scientific theory and in perceptionResearch in Phenomenology 16 (1): 187-199. 1986.
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194The role of consciousness as meaning Maker in science, culture, and religionZygon 44 (2): 467-486. 2009.Two hundred years ago, Friedrich Schleiermacher took critical issue with Immanuel Kant's intellectual notion of intuition as applied to human nature (Wellmon 2006). He found it necessary to modify—"hermeneutically," as he said—Kant's notion of anthropology by enabling it to include as human the new and strange human tribes Captain Cook found in the Pacific South Seas. A similar hermeneutic move is necessary if physics is to include the local contextual empirical syntheses of relativity and quant…Read more
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38Husserl and the Sciences: Selected Perspectives (review)International Philosophical Quarterly 45 (3): 405-406. 2005.
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19The lifeworld and scientific interpretationIn Kay Toombs (ed.), Handbook of Phenomenology and Medicine, Kluwer Academic Publishers. pp. 47--66. 2001.
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An Anti-epistemological or Ontological Interpretation of the Quantum Theory and Theories Like itIn Babette E. Babich, Debra B. Bergoffen & Simon Glynn (eds.), Continental and postmodern perspectives in the philosophy of science, Avebury. pp. 55--68. 1995.
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77Why a hermeneutical philosophy of the natural sciences?Man and World 30 (3): 271-298. 1997.Why a hermeneutical philosophy of the natural sciences? It is necessary to address the philosophic crisis of realism vs relativism in the natural sciences. This crisis is seen as a part of the cultural crisis that Husserl and Heidegger identified and attributed to the hegemonic role of theoretical and calculative thought in Western societies. The role of theory is addressed using the hermeneutical circle to probe the origin of theoretic meaning in scientific cultural praxes. This is studied in G…Read more
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Husserl's philosophy of scienceIn William R. McKenna & J. N. Mohanty (eds.), Husserl's Phenomenology: A Textbook, University Press of America. pp. 387--428. 1989.
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24The new relevance of experiment: A postmodern problemTheoretical and Philosophical Psychology 9 (2): 11-19. 1989.Today when congressional committees are investigating laboratory notebooks, when the media debate the possibility of cold-fusion, and advertising presents drugs as remedies for everything from infertility to hair loss, the stage is set for the postmodern crisis of confidence in science. This crisis was ushered in by F. Nietzsche, and taken up by M. Heidegger, J. Habermas, Critical Theory, the Strong School of the Sociology of Science, by Margaret Thatcher, on the right and by Jacques Derrida, on…Read more
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48Complementarity, context dependence, and quantum logicFoundations of Physics 1 (2): 95-110. 1970.Quantum-mechanical event descriptions are context-dependent descriptions. The role of quantum (nondistributive) logic is in the partial ordering of contexts rather than in the ordering of quantum-mechanical events. Moreover, the kind of quantum logic displayed by quantum mechanics can be easily inferred from the general notion of contextuality used in ordinary language. The formalizable core of Bohr's notion of complementarity is the type of context dependence discussed in this paper
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55Scientific Objectivity and Framework TranspositionsPhilosophical Studies (Dublin) 19 (n/a): 55-70. 1970.The classical notion of scientific objectivity is a property of propositional truth. It is the property of being open to testing and inspection, in principle, by all men, although in practice perhaps, the testing of a scientific claim is restricted to the members of a community of professional experts. It is, moreover, the property of being stable in time, true eternally as it were; for objective truth is thought to express what is so independently of human interests, initiatives, bias, social c…Read more
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109Phenomenology, Ontology, and Quantum PhysicsFoundations of Science 18 (2): 379-385. 2013.This essay is dominated by three themes that recur contrapuntally in Heisenberg’s writings: observation, description, and ontology—prompted always by a concern about the role played by the subjective inquirer in scientific meaning-making, and by the ontology of scientific claims. Among the related themes are; the tension between paradigmatic concerns with structure and philosophical concerns with reality, the possibility of scientific revolutions, such as relativity and quantum mechanics, that c…Read more
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26McGuire, James E., and Barbara Tuchanska. Science Unfettered: A Philosophical Study in Sociohistorical Ontology (review)Review of Metaphysics 55 (2): 403-404. 2001.
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30The Role of Subjectivity in Natural ScienceProceedings of the American Catholic Philosophical Association 43 (n/a): 185-194. 1969.
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120Husserl's later philosophy of natural sciencePhilosophy of Science 54 (3): 368-390. 1987.Husserl argues in the Crisis that the prevalent tradition of positive science in his time had a philosophical core, called by him "Galilean science", that mistook the quest for objective theory with the quest for truth. Husserl is here referring to Gottingen science of the Golden Years. For Husserl, theory "grows" out of the "soil" of the prescientific, that is, pretheoretical, life-world. Scientific truth finally is to be sought not in theory but rather in the pragmatic-perceptual praxes of mea…Read more
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35The Logic of Framework TranspositionsInternational Philosophical Quarterly 11 (3): 314-334. 1971.
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20Quantum mechanics and the social sciences: After hermeneuticsScience & Education 4 (2): 127-136. 1995.
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44Comments to heelans thesisJournal for General Philosophy of Science / Zeitschrift für Allgemeine Wissenschaftstheorie 6 (1): 137-138. 1975.
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56Hermeneutical Realism and Scientific ObservationPSA: Proceedings of the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association 1982. 1982.Using the methods of hermeneutic phenomenology, and against the background of the principle that the real is what is or can be given in a public way in perception as a state of the World, and of the thesis established elsewhere that acts of perception are always epistemic, contextual, and hermeneutical, the writer proposes that objects of scientific observation are perceptual objects, states of the World described by theoretical scientific terms and, therefore, real. This thesis of Hermeneutical…Read more
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21The primacy of perception and the cognitive paradigm : Reply to de MeySocial Epistemology 1 (4). 1987.
Patrick A. Heelan
(1926 - 2015)
Areas of Specialization
Philosophy of Physical Science |
General Philosophy of Science |
Areas of Interest
Philosophy of Cognitive Science |
Continental Philosophy |