Rationality, Empirical Ontology, Reflexivity, and Ontological Difference
Rationality, Empirical Ontology, Reflexivity, and Ontological Difference

Summary/Abstract: While supporting the anti-foundational ontological turn in science and technology studies, the author criticizes the tendency towards the radical empiricization of empirical ontology. The article discusses two crucial arguments against this tendency. On the cognitivist argument, empirical immediacy is inevitably shaped and mediated by non-empirical assumptions. According to the hermeneutic argument—which is of great greater importance—any empirically immediate state of affairs is the upshot of actualizing possibilities projected by interrelated practices upon horizons of practical existence. Thus, what is given as empirical immediacy is ineluctably “produced” within the potentiality for practical being. Following this argument, a non-empirical extension of empirical ontology is suggested. The starting-point of this extension is the integration of radical reflexivity into ethnographic descriptions of multiple realities. A further step consists in the introduction of double hermeneutics to studies of empirical ontology. Finally, the significance of ontological difference for these studies comes under scrutiny.

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