Abstract
In this article I propose that a postphenomenological approach to science and technology can open new analytical understandings of how material artifacts, embodiment and social agency co-produce learned perceptions of objects. In particle physics, physicists work in huge groups of scientists from many cultural backgrounds. Communication to some extent depends on material hermeneutics of flowcharts, models and other visual presentations. As it appears in an examination of physicists’ scrutiny of visual renderings of different parts of a detector, perceptions vary in relation to social and bodily experiences. Vision in physics has seemingly allowed an objective perception at a convenient distance of the body. This article challenges this view and proposes that the variations can be analysed as cultural at two echelons with the help of a postphenomenological approach combined with cultural psychological theory of artifacts. A third echelon presumably constitutes the phenomenological limit to culture in science. Even this last resort of subjectivity can be embraced by a postphenomenological approach. The process of culturalization in physics can be defined as a process of situating knowledge in a body whose continuous learning of micro-and macro perceptions makes scientific renderings unstable. Taken together postphenomenology, following the distinctions between body one and body two, and combined with cultural psychological learning theory, enables new insight into what constitutes culture in science.
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Notes
Ihde (2003a) does acknowledge though that Merleau-Ponty in the posthumously printed The Visible and the Invisible shows deeper insights into what Ihde calls “macroperception,” the hermeneutically meaningful perception which is culturally embedded.
In Ihde’s earlier work, Technology and the Lifeworld (1990), he makes a distinction between “microperception” and “macroperception.” The first focuses upon the experienced active sensing and motile body; the latter upon the cultural-hermeneutic dimensions of embodiment. Later, in Bodies in Technology (2002) a parallel set of distinctions, “body one” and “body two,” are introduced. For both distinctions, embodiment necessarily has both dimensions.
Ihde has referred to these relations between body and technology as embodiment relations, hermeneutical relations and alterity relations. In relation to my discussion here I would like to underline that when we combine Ihde’s postphenomenology with learning theory we find that (in Ihde’s terms) hermeneutical and alterity relations are intertwined with embodiment relations through social relations, which is why I abstain from using these terms here.
Clarke thus claims Merleau-Ponty is compatible with what Ihde names postphenomenology and refers to this quote from the Phenomenology of Perception: “to feel one’s body is also to feel its aspect for the Other” (1962, p. 245).
There might be different positions on the nature/culture debate within the group of theorists working with cultural historical activity theory. I make no distinction between learning the cultural meaning of the Sycamore tree or the cultural meaning of a wooden chair. In other words in terms of learning the cultural meaning of artifacts no distinction can be made between “natural objects” and “cultural objects.”
In this framework there is no reference to the concept of intentionality, but it might be connected with the concept of motivated action in the cultural–historical framework. Though some of the early proponents actively dissociated themselves from transcendental phenomenology, in the new version of postphenomenology the views become compatible.
As for monuments, as houses, Vygotsky mentions that the very essence of civilization can be seen as building monuments on purpose so as not to forget.
There is also a gender dimension to these reactions but it will go too far to discuss this here.
Some young experimental physicists might not have actually visited the crypt, but they have seen the photographs of the barrel, and the workers working in the shaft, which can also give them an embodied sense of shape and size.
Though there is no space for an analysis of variation of gendered perspectives here, it can be noted that it is not accidental that Georg is both the most experienced learner, has the most situated perspective, and is a male. Female physicists are most often younger, less experienced, and thus have lesser chance of a more situated knowledge.
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Hasse, C. Postphenomenology: Learning Cultural Perception in Science. Hum Stud 31, 43–61 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10746-007-9075-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10746-007-9075-4