Abstract
Husserl’s phenomenological philosophy of the physical sciences is commonly understood to be committed to some form of scientific anti-realism and to an instrumentalist interpretation of scientific theories. It denies that the unobservable entities posited by the sciences exist; and it takes scientific theories concerning those entities to be little more than tools used in the prediction of empirical states of affairs. For that reason, many commentators have taken Husserl’s phenomenology to be of limited value in illuminating the rationality of the physical sciences as they exist today given their rapid expansion in the theoretical domain since the beginning of the last century. In this contribution I argue that Husserl’s phenomenology is compatible with a realist interpretation of scientific theories. I begin with the generally accepted distinction between scientific laws and scientific theories, and proceed to argue that Husserl’s phenomenology offers an instrumentalist account of scientific laws, not scientific theories. I then suggest that a phenomenology of the theoretical dimension of the physical sciences could be carried out as a description and analysis of the constitution of indicative sign consciousness, where the givenness of an observed entity or event comes to count as a sign of an unobserved (and in some cases unobservable) entity or event.
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Notes
- 1.
Note: In the citations for Galileo, Husserl, and Schlick I give the date of original publication—or composition in the case of Husserl’s Crisis and Ideas III—as well as the date of publication for the English translation. This to help the reader keep track of the chronological order of the texts.
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Hardy, L. (2020). Physical Things, Ideal Objects, and Theoretical Entities: The Prospects of a Husserlian Phenomenology of Physics. In: Wiltsche, H.A., Berghofer, P. (eds) Phenomenological Approaches to Physics. Synthese Library, vol 429. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-46973-3_7
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