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第 37 卷 第 5 期（总 219 期）　自 然 辩 证 法 通 讯　Vol.37, No.5 (Serial No.219)
2015 年 10 月　Journal of Dialectics of Nature　October 2015
• 科学技术文化研究 •
科学定律、自然的必然性与海德格尔的本体论
Scientific Law, Natural Necessity, and Heideggerian Ontology
约瑟夫 • 劳斯 /Joseph Rouse
（卫斯廉大学哲学系，米德尔墩，06459）
(Department of Philosophy, Wesleyan University, Middletown, 06459)
摘　要：马丁 • 海德格尔的“存在论”科学概念与他对存在与实体之间的本体论差异的解释，形成了
一条理解科学定律及其必然性的新颖道路。就存在论的概念而言，科学是研究实践，而不是从那些实践
中提取出来的一批知识。海德格尔的本体论认为，这种实践依赖于对这个研究领域中实体的“存在”的
先验理解，而这支配了科学的方法论与概念化。这种理解既要求承诺于这个领域中的实体的整体规律性（它
们无论如何都将“以相同的方式”行动），又要求一种可靠的、有弹性的能力，它能发展与阐明一种在面
对明显不可能的结果时可支持其规律性的理解。由此，科学研究领域的规律性结合了该领域反事实的不
变性与科学家对待那些有规律实体的行为的稳定性（在无法支持其规律性时，科学家甚至会放弃整个研
究领域）。科学容易产生概念危机的可能性，确保了科学理解的真理性，而那些可通达其探究实体的基本
概念与方法，也可对实体本身做出解释。
关键词：海德格尔 科学研究 科学定律 自然的必然性
Abstract: Martin Heidegger’s “existential” conception of science and his account of the ontological
difference between being and entities develop a novel way to understand scientific laws and their necessity. On
an existential conception, sciences are practices of research rather than bodies of knowledge extracted from
those practices. Heideggerian ontology argues that such practices depend upon a prior understanding of the
“being” of entities within the research domain, which governs scientific methodology and conceptualization. This
understanding involves both a commitment to the holistic lawfulness of entities in the domain (their behaving “in
the same way” no matter what), and a reliable, resilient ability to develop and articulate that understanding in a
way that sustains its lawfulness in the face of apparently impossible results. The lawfulness of a scientific domain
thus incorporates both the counterfactual invariance of entities within the domain, and the constancy of scientists’
comportment toward those entities as lawful, even to the point of abandoning the entire domain if its lawfulness
cannot be sustained. This openness to the possibility of conceptual crisis in science is what allows scientific
understanding to be truthful, such that the fundamental concepts and methods that provide access to the entities it
investigates are also accountable to the entities themselves.
Key Words: Heidegger; Scientific research; Scientific laws; Natural necessity
中图分类号：N0　文献标识码：A　DOI:10.15994/j.1000-0763.2015.05.019
I take up an insufficiently recognized aspect of
Heidegger’s philosophical work in Sein und Zeit and
收稿日期：2014 年 11 月 4 日
作者简介：Joseph Rouse(1952-) is professor of philosophy of science. His research interests include the philosophy of scientific practice,
the history of 20th Century philosophy, philosophical naturalism, and social and cultural studies of science. Email:
[email protected]
约瑟夫 • 劳斯（1952-），卫斯廉大学科学哲学教授，主要研究兴趣包括科学实践哲学、20 世纪哲学史、哲学自
然主义、科学的社会文化研究。Email: [email protected]
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afterward. Heidegger develops a distinctive approach to
explicating the role of laws in scientific understanding,
and the sense in which the laws uncover “necessary”
re-lationships that demarcate what is possible and
intelligible in a scientific domain. This approach to laws
and the alethic modalities is not confined to Heidegger’s
occasional remarks about scientific
understanding specifically. It arises instead from
the central theme of his philosophical work, namely
the ontological difference between being and entities. ①
Recognizing Heidegger’s understanding of scientific laws
and the alethic modalities of necessity and possibility is
important for two reasons. First, the continental philosophical tradition after Husserl has most often been regarded
as neglecting or dismissing these topics. In recent decades,
the Anglo-American “analytic” and continental European
“post-phenomenological” traditions have increasingly
recognized common roots and shared concerns, but concern
with laws and alethic modalities remains a significant
dividing line. Second, the roles of laws in the philosophy
of science, and the alethic modalities in philosophy more
generally, have been central but controversial topics in
Anglo-American philosophical work. Understanding
Heidegger’s distinctive approach to these topics can thus
contribute to current philosophical debates.
Prologue
In the middle decades of the 20th C., the AngloAmerican analytic tradition underwent a dramatic shift
in its predominant conceptions of scientific laws and
necessity. In the first half of the century, empiricism was
the predominant epistemological orientation. Circa 1950,
it was widely accepted in the analytic tradition that the
only legitimate form of necessity was logical necessity,
which could be expressed in terms of formal-syntactic
relations that conveyed no substantive content. All
substantive truths were regarded as empirically contingent
and fallible. Such truths were appropriate matters for
scientific investigation rather than philosophical reflection.
Efforts to discern transcendentally necessary truths, causal
necessity (rather than just empirical regularity), or any
sense of scientific or natural law apart from contingent
regularities were regarded as ungrounded “metaphysical”
speculation. Recurrent problems in modal logic, which
sought to formalize the inferences licensed by claims
of necessity or possibility, reinforced the thought that
these alethic modalities were not legitimate topics for
philosophical reasoning, beyond what could be licensed
by first-order, extensional formal logic.
Two developments fundamentally changed this
situation in the analytic philosophical tradition. First,
influential work by Nelson Goodman (1953), Carl
Hempel (1965), and Wilfrid Sellars (1962) showed that
a more robust understanding of laws and necessity was
indispensable to empirical science. Goodman’s work
suggested that whether a concept was inductively projectable, such that general claims employing the concept
were empirically confirmed by their instances, depended
upon whether the conceptual relations it expressed were
lawlike. ② Hempel argued that scientific explanation
depended upon a distinction between scientific laws
and merely accidental generalizations, which turned on
whether the generalization would hold counterfactually
or subjunctively. ③ In Hempel’s terms, earlier empiricists
regarded all scientific claims as merely accidentally true,
①Heidegger describes this issue in different terms in the course of his philosophical work: the ontological difference, the nothing, the clearing
or disclosedness of entities, the truth of being, and “Ereignis” (most commonly translated as “appropriation”), among others. He also makes
clear that these different formulations were all directed toward the same issue. His terminological shifts were not accidental. Heidegger
was attempting to indicate an aspect of all understanding and intelligibility that is easily and normally overlooked. In our various dealings
with entities of all kinds, we cannot also attend to what allows those entities to be manifest to us in a way that lets them be manifest
and intelligible as entities. The very effort to articulate the ontological difference in words, which is the only way we can articulate it
intelligibly, nevertheless constantly risks falling into what he called “idle talk” (Gerede). In idle talk, the same words that express a hardwon understanding are repeated and passed on without understanding them, often with an ambiguity that obscures the difference between
speaking with or without understanding. His constantly shifting terminology reflected an effort to indicate the issue he was talking about
without making the terminology rigid; one cannot just learn the right words and repeat them, but must learn to see through the words to
recognize what was being indicated by them. In what follows, I shall use his early formulation: the issue he is discussing is the ontological
difference between entities and the being of entities.
② Goodman himself offered a different account of inductive projectibility, which incorporated the prior history of projection of a concept as
part of the evidence for its current projectibility. Many other philosophers found Goodman’s approach unsatisfactory, and saw appeals to
lawlike relations as needed to understand the difference between projectable and unprojectable concepts.
③ In standard extensional first-order logic, a conditional statement, “If P then Q”, is true whenever Q is true or P is false. Counterfactual and
subjunctive conditionals are not extensional in this way—the truth of the conditional statement does not depend solely on the truth or falsity
of its two sentential components. Such conditional claims might hold true under some counterfactual conditions (i.e., when the antecedent “P”
is false), and not hold under others, and likewise under subjunctive conditions (if “P” were to be true), it may be an open question whether
the consequent “Q” would still be true.
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and hence bereft of any capacity to explain what happens
in the world. Sellars offered a more comprehensive
conception of scientific understanding and its philosophical
significance, which emphasized the inferential role and
explanatory power of lawlike conceptual relations among
theoretical terms. These theoretical posits of conceptual
relations that were not themselves directly observable
empirically collectively composed a “scientific image” of
ourselves-in-the-world. Sellars argued that the scientific
image ought to take priority over the kinds of concepts and
relationships that were more readily accessible empirically.
A second development that fundamentally changed
the direction of Anglo-American philosophy was the
development of more adequate formal systems of modal
logic and its semantics by Ruth Barcan Marcus, Saul
Kripke and others, and work by Kripke (1980), Putnam
(1975) and others showing that modal reasoning could
make important contributions to understanding language
and mind. Reasoning about relations among “possible
worlds” that explicated conceptual necessity became an
integral part of many philosophers’ conceptual toolkit.
These two developments largely undermined
the contrasts between legitimate empirical science and
illegitimate “metaphysics” that were influential in the
first half of the century. Almost all contemporary AngloAmerican philosophers accept that the sciences themselves
advance and vindicate claims that would previously
have been dismissed as “metaphysical.” This shift in
philosophical terrain has left several prominent regions
of controversy or perplexity. There remains considerable
disagreement about whether scientific metaphysics is
sufficient for philosophical purposes, or whether conceptual
intuitions might provide resources for distinctively
philosophical insights into conceptual or metaphysical
necessities. The philosophers who enthusiastically engage
in modal reasoning also disagree about whether talk of
“possible worlds” is merely heuristic or has some more
robust metaphysical standing. The relations between
logical necessity and the kinds of “nomological” necessity
seemingly invoked by scientific laws marks another area of
controversy that may reflect a lack of clear understanding.
Finally, some philosophers of science have come to
question whether laws really do play such a prominent role
in scientific understanding. Sciences outside of fundamental
physics seem to achieve powerful insights without recourse
to laws; scientific theorizing is increasingly understood as a
process of modeling phenomena in diverse and sometimes
contradictory ways, rather than discerning a hierarchy
of increasingly general laws; and the result is often
acknowledged to be a disunified patchwork rather than a
comprehensive, systemic, lawlike account of the natural
world. These models and other theoretical constructions are
nevertheless widely regarded as empirically projectable,
explanatory, and referential in ways that parallel the roles
previously attributed to scientific laws.
In the roughly parallel philosophical tradition that
developed in continental Europe, the historical trajectory on
these topics has proceeded in almost the opposite direction.
Early 20th Century work was dominated by Husserlian
phenomenology, neo-Kantian transcendental philosophy,
and neo-Marxist dialectics. These programs accepted forms
of rational intuition, transcendental argument, or dialectical
reasoning as grounds for more robust forms of necessity
or essential structures of thought and practice than early
analytic philosophy was typically willing to accommodate.
Subsequent developments within or in response to the
phenomenological, Kantian-transcendental and Marxist
traditions were increasingly historicist and pluralist
about conceptual relationships. Claims of conceptual
necessity seemed less compelling in the face of repeated
historical changes and acculturated differences concerning
which conceptual relations and forms of reasoning
were accepted. Skepticism about claims to “necessity”
was reinforced by arguments that those conceptual and
ontological differences seemed to be systematic and farreaching, without clearly explicable development from
one to another (Foucault 1966/1970). Where the analytic
tradition was closely engaged with scientific understanding taken as epistemically exemplary, with or without
supplementation by distinctively philosophical domains,
the continental tradition typically decentered the sciences.
“Continental” philosophers and their followers tended
to place the sciences philosophically on a par with other
cultural, political or aesthetic traditions, and devoted far
less attention to the internal conceptual and practical
work of scientific inquiry. The question of whether the
sciences invoke laws or models with distinctive forms of
counterfactual or subjunctive invariance has consequently
evoked far less philosophical interest in the continental
tradition.
This brief sketch of the historical trajectories of the
past century of philosophical work in Europe and the
Americas sets the stage for my explication of Heidegger’s
account of scientific laws and the alethic modalities of
necessity and possibility. Heidegger was very influential in
the continental-philosophical shift toward a more historicist
account of conceptual understanding, and the associated
rejection of the natural sciences as central to or models for
philosophical understanding. He nevertheless was very
concerned to understand the sciences, and he joins Sellars,
Davidson, and other influential Anglo-American philosophers in recognizing the indispensability of the alethic
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and normative modalities in the sciences and other domains
of human understanding. Heidegger works out a distinctive
way to account for the modal character of all human
understanding amidst his historicist and pluralist orientation
toward the forms of intelligibility it enables. His account
also directly addresses many of the current philosophical
controversies over laws and necessity.
Heidegger on the Ontological Difference Between
Being and Entities
The explicit aim of Sein und Zeit is to “reawaken” the
question of the sense of being, which Heidegger thought
had been obscured or trivialized throughout the western
philosophical tradition. Understanding how Heidegger’s
attempt to pose and clarify this question might also help
understand scientific laws and their characteristic form of
“necessity” requires a brief review of some central aspects
of Heidegger’s project.
For Heidegger, being is always the being of some
entity or entities. More specifically, the being of an entity is
what determines it as an entity—as something that is at all
and as what it is—and thereby also lets it be intelligible as
such. Being is thus intimately connected with the (human)
ability to understand being in dealing with entities as
entities. ① Anything and everything that exists is an entity:
people, equipment, planets, languages, nations, games,
or plants, but also properties, relations, events or words,
and even such negatively characterized things as silences,
holes, or gaps. The being of those entities is not an entity,
however. Strictly speaking, the being of entities is nothing
at all; there ‘is’ no such thing as being, on Heidegger’s
account. That does not mean that there is no issue or topic
to talk about concerning the being of entities.
Heidegger’s claim that being “is” not an entity
is initially perplexing, but it becomes clearer when we
recognize what he is arguing against. A variety of philosophical accounts and everyday presumptions identify
another entity as what allows entities to be intelligible as
entities. For example, entities are sometimes thought to be
intelligible as appearances to a consciousness or mind; as
articulable in language; by having an essence or essential
properties; as satisfying a norm or criterion for being a
single entity or an entity of a particular sort; as recognizable
within an ongoing cultural tradition; by being caused
or created by some other entity; and so forth. Heidegger
thought any such account that attributes the determination
of entities as entities to some other entity is philosophically
confused and merely postpones the question it seeks to
address. Before we could understand such answers, we
would need to understand the being of the entities invoked
in the account: what is it to be a consciousness, a language,
or a causal power, such that relations to such an entity could
explicate how other entities intelligibly are what and how
they are? ②
Despite perplexity about such matters, and the utter
lack of any adequate theoretical understanding of the sense
of being, Heidegger thought that we each have and draw
upon a vague, average, everyday understanding of what it
means to be. We can tell the difference between whether
there is or is not some entity or entities of some kind, and
we understand how it matters to us whether that entity is.
We do not normally confuse different kinds of entity, or the
ways in which they might come into or go out of existence
as such entities: in practice, we can tell the differences
in what it is to be (or not) a physical object, a thought,
a number, an event, a word, a person, an organism, or a
chemical substance. Heidegger’s project was to start with
that everyday, average understanding of the sense of being
that is implicit in virtually anything we do. The aim was
then to articulate and clarify that pre-theoretical or “preontological” understanding.
I will quickly summarize those aspects of Heidegger’s
account that will play a role in my discussion below. Heidegger is an ontological pluralist: there are not just different
kinds of entity, but different ways to be. Equipment,
“mere things”, numbers, persons, animals and so forth are
differently, and people at least implicitly understand and
cope with those differences. We don’t look for numbers in
space and time, we understand equipment like hammers in
terms of their assigned role in a larger nexus of equipment
and projects, we recognize animals as self-moving and other
things as not, and we mostly acknowledge other persons
as living lives of their own in ways that are nevertheless
①Heidegger is adamant that only human beings understand being and thereby deal with entities as entities, but nothing I say in this paper
depends upon whether that claim is true.
② As a telling example, Heidegger’s 1925 lecture course, Prolegomena zur Geschichte der Zeitsbegriffe (Heidegger 1979/1985) began with
an extended exposition and criticism of Husserl’s phenomenology. One of his most telling criticisms of Husserl is that Husserl’s account is
completely obscure or confused about what and how consciousness is:
Husserl’s primary question is simply not concerned with the character of the being of consciousness. ... The elaboration of pure
consciousness as the thematic field of phenomenology is not derived phenomenologically by going back to the matters themselves,
but by going back to a traditional idea of philosophy. Thus none of the characters which emerge as determinations of the being of
lived experiences is an original character. (Heidegger 1979/1985, 147/107)
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mutually intelligible. Those different ways of being each
have two aspects, which Heidegger calls their “thatbeing” and “what-being”, corresponding to the traditional
metaphysical distinction between existence and essence.
Thus, what an item of equipment is is its specific locatedness
within a larger equipmental complex and the social practices
that complex makes possible; whether there is such an item
depends upon its availability or unavailability for the task at
hand. The that-being of equipment is not a binary alternative
of existing or not existing, but has a normative dimension.
There are “deficient modes” of equipmental “unavailability”:
a broken or missing hammer is still a hammer, but in an
inappropriate way whose intelligibility as a hammer is
derivative from understanding its properly functioning
availability.
Heidegger argues that our way of being is what
allows other kinds of entity show up intelligibly. He
introduces the term “Dasein” as a formal-indicative term
that refers to us as the entity that discloses other entities
and itself as entities. ① Dasein is not a self-enclosed mind,
body, or culture, but is instead an opening onto other
entities as “being-in-the-world.” Dasein always finds itself
“amidst” (bei) other entities and its dealings with them; its
own possible ways to be are entangled with the availability
of the equipment needed to take up such activities, and
with the involvement of others in an interdependent way
of life. Dasein is both a shared way of life that “clears”
an intelligible world, and the individuation of that way
of life as “in each case mine” (jemeinig). That way of
life, as intelligibly letting entities be in specific ways, is
only sustained by its various “cases” (individual persons)
continuing to live in the relevant ways. The entities
themselves are more or less independent of us, but what it
is for such things to be or not to be and their intelligibility
as entities of those kinds—their being—is integrally
connected to how we can make sense of them in going
about our lives. Heidegger makes an analogy between our
being in understanding entities as entities, and a clearing
in the dense forest: the clearing lets entities show up as
illuminated, but what is thereby visible for the most part are
the entities in the clearing rather than their illumination.
The sense of Dasein’s own being is thus fundamentally
temporal. Dasein “is” in taking up the worldly activities and
social roles in terms of which each “case” of Dasein lives
its life. Dasein in each case is a worker, a teacher, a political
activist, an artist (and also a parent, a child, a spouse, or a
neighbor, and many other overlapping ways to be). Nothing
anyone can do can ever secure his or her being in terms
of those roles, however. I am a teacher or a spouse or a
neighbor only so long as I can and do continue to do what
teachers, spouses, and neighbors do. These are possible
ways for Dasein to be, which it can “press into” by living in
those terms but can never simply be once and for all. Dasein
consequently never has determinate properties or states, but
only abilities-to-be in one way or another. Heidegger’s term
for this aspect of our being is “existence”: Dasein exists in
being “ahead-of-itself” toward some way of being that it is
always “not-yet”; it can never secure its specific abilitiesto-be once and for all, but always has to press ahead into
them as possibilities. Dasein is also “thrown” into some
possibilities and not others: its historical and cultural setting,
its own prior life-course, its affective orientation, and much
more, configure what is possible for it, and it has to be in
those terms. As a thrown project in these ways, Dasein
always finds itself amidst some dealings with entities and
having to press forward into some possibility or other.
Heidegger identifies our way of being as this unified beingahead-of-itself-as-already-in-a-world-as-amidst entities,
which he refers to as “care”. Moreover, in ways that I will
discuss further with respect to the sciences, Dasein always
faces a fundamental choice, to be itself or not to be itself: to
take responsibility for its own life, including its dependence
upon other entities, or to fall-in-with what one normally
does and let familiar social patterns and expectations
determine how it presses into thrown possibilities that are
then “unowned” (uneigentlich).
An “Existential” Conception of Science and the
Lawfulness of Scientific Domains
The most basic aspect of Heidegger’s philosophy of
science in Sein und Zeit is his commitment to the priority
of an “existential conception of science” (Heidegger 1963/
1962, 357/408). The central claim is that science should be
understood as something Dasein does, such that sciences
have Dasein’s way of being, as “existence.” To “exist”
in Heidegger’s sense is for an entity’s own being to be at
issue in its being. If a science “exists,” then what it is, and
whether it is and continues to be is never something settled,
but depends upon its ongoing practice. Heidegger contrasts
an existential conception of science to more traditionally
epistemological conceptions that identify a science as
“the totality established through an interconnection of
true propositions” (Heidegger 1963/1962, 11/32), and do
so through “the kind of ‘logic’ which limps along after
[a science], investigating the status of some science as it
chances to find itself, in order to discover its ‘method’”
(Heidegger 1963/1962, 10/30). An existential conception
① “Formal indication” is the use of a term or terms to pick out an entity in a way that circumvents familiar preconceptions of what and how it
is. Heidegger thought that all genuinely philosophical concepts are formal-indicative.
94 《自然辩证法通讯》第 37 卷 第 5 期（2015 年 10 月）: 1-4
refuses to identify a science with an extant body of
knowledge and its methodological norms, because such
a retrospective conception is precisely what the research
activity that constitutes a science actively seeks to surpass.
What we need to understand is how this identification
of a science with the directedness of scientific research
“beyond” any already-articulated body of knowledge offers
a way to understand scientific laws and their characteristic
“necessity.”
Heidegger emphasizes that Dasein, as “existing”
in this way, is not something occurrent (vorhanden)
with definite properties and relations, but instead is its
possibilities. Heideggerian possibilities are not determinate
possible states of affairs or “possible worlds” that are
not (yet) actual. They are instead configurations of and
involvement in a situation as oriented toward what is “not
yet.” Heidegger starts by identifying possibilities with
possible ways for Dasein to be, its Seinskönnen (abilitiesto-be, or literally, “can-be’s”). Dasein’s comportment in
everything it does is “for-the-sake-of” some more-or-less
definite ability-to-be. As being-in-the-world, however,
Dasein is always amidst entities, and in understanding itself
as a possible ability-to-be, it also understands other entities
in terms of their possibilities:
As an ability-to-be, any being-in is an abilityto-be-in-the-world. Not only is the world, qua world,
disclosed as possible significance, but when that
which is intraworldly is itself freed, this entity is
freed for its own possibilities. That which is available
(zuhanden) is discovered as such in its serviceability,
its usability, and its detrimentality. ... But even the
‘unity’ of what is occurrent in manifold ways, of
nature, can be discovered only if a possibility of it
has been disclosed. (Heidegger 1963/1962, 144/184,
translation modified)
In our everyday dealings with equipment, such
“availabilities” are the possibilities with respect to which
entities are familiarly disclosed, by “projecting” them
onto those possibilities in dealing with them as equipment
available “in-order-to” allow some ability-to-be of Dasein.
Sciences disclose entities in terms of a different kind of
possibility.
Heidegger identifies the kind of projection within
which sciences thematically disclose entities in their
possibilities as the theoretical or “mathematical” projection
of nature. As he emphasizes in section 69b of Sein und
Zeit, it is not sufficient for a scientific understanding that
one merely stand back from manipulation of equipment
and look away from its equipmental character. After all,
scientific practice has its own forms of manipulation, and
some sciences (Heidegger’s examples are economics and
contextually-situating biography) thematize entities in
their availability, without those entities thereby losing their
character as equipment. Disclosing entities thematically
instead requires understanding and dealing with them in
terms of an alternative understanding of these entities in
their being. Heidegger argues that what is decisive here is
the “a priori” projection of a regional understanding of the
being of entities that constitutes a scientific domain: “The
more appropriately the being of the entities to be explored
is understood under the guidance of an understanding
of being, and the more this whole domain of entities
has been articulated in its attributes as a possible area of
subject-matter for a science, all the more secure will be the
perspective for one’s methodological inquiry” (Heidegger
1963/1962, 362/413). The ontological articulation of a
domain of entities is what determines how to approach,
encounter, and explicate entities scientifically in any
particular science.
Heidegger’s choice of mathematical physics as his
central example, and his blanket use of the term “occurrent”
(vorhanden) for the being of any entity disclosed in any
scientific domain obscures his evident commitment to
the plurality of science-constituting regional ontologies.
Mathematical physics seems to govern “nature herself” in
a mathematical projection (1963/1962, 362/413-14), since
everything in nature can be identified by a physical state
description of its position and momentum. ① Mathematical
physics may encompass every natural entity, but it is
nevertheless not thereby all-encompassing. A “complete”
physical state description of an entity leaves entirely opaque
whether that entity is a living organism, a commodity with
a market value, part of a geologically significant formation,
or a ritual object within a cultural practice. A regional
ontology not only provides the grounds for determining
what is or is not within its domain of inquiry, but also in
which aspects those entities are intelligibly disclosed by
understanding them in terms of the basic concepts that
constitute that science’s “subject-matter.”
①Writing in 1927, Heidegger took for granted classical physics and its conception of the state description of a physical entity as fully
specifiable by a scalar position and vector momentum. The same point would apply, however, if one instead projected a quantum
mechanical state description specifiable by a Schrödinger wave function, which evolves deterministically in time, but only specifies the
probability and partial indeterminacy of the system’s position and momentum. Moreover, as we shall see, part of Heidegger’s concern was
how to understand the replacement of one regional ontology by another, such as the advent of a quantum mechanical understanding of
physical entities in place of classical physics.
95
What a regional ontology thus projects is what is
possible for any entity within that domain, and hence also
what is impossible for it. Empiricists since Hume have
been suspicious of modal attributions within the sciences,
because empirical experience seems only to show us
what is actually the case, and not what must be so or can
be so. That suspicion reflects what Heidegger thought to
be a characteristic limitation of any retrospective, nonexistential conception of scientific understanding. Scientific
understanding does not provide an encyclopedic summary
of past experience, but instead projects how to encounter
and deal with entities in a domain. Heidegger would have
endorsed Marc Lange’s claim that “a basic presupposition
of scientific research is that we do not need to examine
everything to know everything. Rather, a few observations,
restricted in space, time, and other respects, sometimes
suffice to render salient a hypothesis that is accurate to all
unexamined cases in a remarkably wide range of cases”
(Lange 2000a, 240-241). Scientific understanding runs
ahead of any factual determination of what is actually so, in
order to let entities show themselves in a determinate way.
Thus, Heidegger insisted that “only ‘in the light’ of a nature
which has been projected in this fashion can anything like a
‘fact’ be found and set up for an experiment regulated and
delimited in terms of this projection. The ‘grounding’ of
‘factual science’ was possible only because the researchers
understood that in principle there are no ‘bare facts’.
(Heidegger 1963/1962, 362/414).
How does a scientific projection of entities onto
their possibilities supposedly ground empirical inquiry?
It does so by establishing and sustaining the capacity to
tell the difference between what is a relevant and correct
determination of an entity in the domain and what is not.
Erwin Schrödinger called attention to the way that quantum
mechanics highlighted this issue by taking of measurable
physical quantities to be indeterminate prior to their actual
measurement:
In general, a variable has no definite value before I measure it; then measuring it does not mean
ascertaining the value that it has. But then what does it
mean? There must still be some criterion as to whether
a measurement is true or false, a method is good or
bad, accurate or inaccurate— whether it deserves the
name of measurement process at all. Any old playing
around with an indicating instrument in the vicinity of
another body, whereby at any old time one then takes
a reading, can hardly be called a measurement of this
body. (Schrödinger 1935/1983, 158)
Quantum mechanics makes this issue acute, but the problem
arises in any science. Any empirical determination of any
entity in some definite respect requires a dual determination
of both the standards that govern such determinations, and
the application of those standards to the case at hand. Hasok
Chang (2004) nicely illustrates the general problem in the
case of the “two-point method” for measuring temperature
in which one calibrates a thermometer by marking out equal
units of their length between two fixed points (such as the
freezing and boiling points of water):
The procedure operates on the assumption
that the fluid expands uniformly (or linearly) with
temperature, so that equal increments of temperature
results in equal increments of volume. To test this
assumption, we need to make an experimental plot of
volume vs. temperature. But there is a problem here,
because we cannot have the temperature readings until
we have a reliable thermometer, which is the very
thing we are trying to create. If we used the mercury
thermometer here, we might trivially get the result
that the expansion of mercury is uniform. And if we
wanted to use another kind of thermometer for the test,
how would we go about establishing the accuracy of
the thermometer? (Chang 2004, 59)
The problem is that the same data set by itself cannot specify
standards for both the proper performance of the relevant
measurements and their correct outcome, yet both must be
at issue in any measurement.
No single measurement can serve this dual purpose,
since its very character as a measurement presupposes
standards for proper performance of a correct determination
in some respect. If whatever empirical outcomes we collect
thereby specify the standards for their own correctness,
then that process would have failed to specify any respect
in which an entity has been measured. In Chang’s example,
simply identifying temperature with the linear expansion of
mercury provides no way to distinguish the measurement
(length of the mercury column) from what is measured
(temperature), or hold the former accountable to the latter.
Modal considerations become indispensable for this
purpose. As John Haugeland summarized the key point in
his own commentary on Heidegger,
Observation and measurement only make
sense if there is, in principle, some way to distinguish
between correct and incorrect results. ... The only
fundamental way to establish that something must be
wrong is to show that some plurality of results are not
mutually compatible. And that, finally, presupposes
antecedent constraints on what combinations would
and would not be possible—which is to say, laws.
(Haugeland 2013, 175-176)
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While Haugeland’s point here is important, from Heidegger’s standpoint it cannot be laws that provide this
constraint, at least not as laws have usually been understood.
I will argue that it is not laws (a special kind of entity) that
allow for a difference between correctness and incorrectness
of scientific measurements or other empirical results.
It is instead the lawfulness of a scientific domain, as an
ontological determination of a “region of being.” The
necessity or lawfulness of scientific laws is an ontological
issue, which cannot be explicated in terms of entities.
We first need to see why it cannot be laws that play
this role, on any of the most familiar accounts of laws. On
empiricist accounts, laws are just regularities within the
world, which have the wrong direction of fit (a “violation”
of the law only shows that the regularity does not hold, or
only holds within a limited scope; it cannot impugn the
observed result). Modally stronger conceptions of laws
don’t do better, however. Conceptions of real necessities in
the world, or of necessary relationships among universals
(Armstrong 1983, Dretske 1977) seem metaphysically
mysterious; Heidegger would surely have dismissed such
conceptions as needing ontological clarification before they
could clarify anything else. ① More commonly, however,
modally relevant laws are identified not with real necessities
in the world, but as qualifications on the truthfulness of
some assertions. Alethic modalities such as logical necessity
or natural necessity are most commonly understand as
aspects of the logical behavior of truth claims. To see what is
wrong with appealing to laws as necessary truths, however,
we need to consider briefly why Heidegger thought that
assertions are derivative modes of understanding and that
their truth presupposes a more basic sense of truth.
Heidegger has a distinctive and detailed account of
language, which is too intricate to explicate in detail here.
Only three points from that account are needed, however,
to set the stage for grasping how Heidegger understands the
alethic modalities to be regional-ontological determinations
of the being of entities rather than features of assertions
as a special kind of entity. First, the word ‘assertion’ is
ambiguous. In both German and English, it refers both to
the speech act of asserting, and to a sentence or proposition
as what is asserted. ② Heidegger takes the asserting to
be primary, as something Dasein does or can do. What
Dasein does in asserting is to indicate and communicate an
interpretation of “something as something” (for example,
a liquid as having a temperature or an object as having
a velocity). What is asserted, a sentence or proposition,
is a sign, understood as “equipment for indicating,” but
its equipmental role is subordinate to Dasein’s asserting
as that for-the-sake-of-which the sign is used. Second,
Heidegger takes the speech act of asserting as derivative
from the interpretation it communicates. In making an
assertion, Dasein points out and shares with others some
particular interpretation of an entity. Third, the success or
failure of such assertions is determined by whether they
uncover the entity as the entity it is, or cover it over and
obscure it. Truth as a supposed “correspondence” between
a sentence and a state of affairs is dependent upon a more
fundamental sense of truth as “being-uncovering.” “Beinguncovering” is an assessment of Dasein’s comportment
towards an entity as either letting the entity show itself as it
is in some respect, or obscuring that aspect of the entity. We
are now in a position to understand Heidegger’s account of
the “lawfulness” of a scientific domain as ontological.
Understood existentially, sciences are ways in which
human beings comport themselves toward entities within
the world. To comport oneself toward entities as entities is
to understand them, where understanding is a kind of ability
or competence in dealing with them as something that is,
and is in a definite way. That is what Heidegger means by
“understanding being”; a “regional” understanding of being
is a more specific competence in comporting oneself toward
entities as entities of that sort. Such understanding, in any
ontological domain, provides a threefold guidance to any
comportments toward entities in that domain, and toward
the possibility of further developing that understanding by
interpreting it explicitly. Heidegger (Heidegger 1963/1962,
section 32) calls this three-fold guidance the “prestructuring”
(Vorstruktur) of any interpretation of entities by a prior
understanding of their being. First, it constitutes one’s “prepossession” (Vorhabe) that orients you within the domain by
providing an initial sense of what you are dealing with, how
① Such appeals to necessary relations between universal properties or metaphysically primitive relations are yet another case of trying to
understand the being of entities (in this case, their scientific intelligibility) by appealing to another entity. Appealing to the laws to account
for the scientific intelligibility of some domain of entities is no better than appealing to God or some other first cause, or to the essential
structures of transcendental consciousness, since we would in each case need first to understand what it is to be such a thing, and how such
a thing could be and is authoritative over events in the world.
② What is asserted can be further broken down into token utterances (“what” is asserted by someone on some occasion) and their
types (such that the same assertion could be made by different people on different occasions), whether those types are understood
as sentence-types (the same sequence of word-types in a single language) or propositions (the same sentential content, whether
uttered in English or Chinese, or in one or another semantically equivalent sequence of a single language). These distinctions will
not play a role in what I say here.
97
those entities relate to one another, and how it matters to
deal with them in an appropriate way. Second, its “preview”
(Vorsicht) governs how one initially approaches and deals
with entities in the domain, in ways appropriate to those
entities, such that one encounters and responds to them
rather than to something else. Third, its “pre-conception”
(Vorgriff) provides some more or less definite sense of what
would be success in comporting oneself toward those in the
relevant ways.
To understand entities scientifically is to comport
oneself towards them in ways guided by and responsive to
the pre-structuring of a “regional” understanding of entities
as constituting a scientific domain or subject-matter, and of
comportment toward them as research that aims at further
explication of that very understanding. Scientific research
aims to uncover entities in its domain as they are, and to do
so in significant and revealing ways. Central to a scientific
regional understanding is a grasp of and commitment to the
lawfulness of entities in that domain. Entities are lawful if
they would continue to show themselves “in the same way”
they have before, and indeed, would continue to do so no
matter what else happens. This form of “counterfactual”
invariance, according to which entities maintain the same
pattern of behavior in the face of any actual or possible
circumstances, determines the entities in a double-edged
way. On the one hand, it serves as criterial for the entities
themselves: any entity that does not or would not behave
in the same way as other entities in that domain is not an
entity in that domain. On the other hand, if some entity
that is in the domain were to behave in ways that do not
maintain the lawful invariance of the domain, then there
would be something wrong with the understanding of being
that supposedly constituted it as a scientific domain.
That double-edged normativity is not just determinative
of entities in the domain, however. It is also binding on
Dasein, at least in so far as it understands (is competent
over) a scientific domain. If entities do belong to a scientific
domain, then they must behave in accord with what they
are, as determined by the lawfulness of the domain. For
Dasein to comport itself scientifically, however, is to commit
itself to maintain the lawful invariance of the domain. That
involves comporting itself toward entities in the domain
in ways appropriate to such entities, and comporting itself
differently in relevant ways toward entities that are not in the
domain. More important, it requires articulating and refining
its understanding of the domain as lawfully invariant (going
on in the same way no matter what) so as to maintain that
invariance in the face of apparently “misbehaving” entities.
After all, some entities may seem to belong to the domain
when they do not. Others that are in the domain may seem
to behave in ways at odds with its lawfulness, that is, not in
the same way others have. In the face of such apparently
recalcitrant behavior, Dasein must revise its understanding
and its comportment. Any improperly performed measurements or identifications must be recognized as such and
rejected, either as a misperformance on that occasion, or as
a systematic error whose avoidance must be projected onto
subsequent performances. Errors in the performance of the
relevant scientific skills are not the only form of apparent
divergence from lawfulness in scientific domains, however.
Sometimes it is not the performances that go wrong, but the
very understanding of being that guided those performances.
In such cases, scientists are committed to repairing that
understanding such that it preserves the lawful invariance
of the entities. The patterns of behavior and skillful recognition that were previously taken to display the lawful invariance of the domain instead covered it over in at least
some respects. These errors are then revealed and rejected
by revising the regional understanding of being so as to
restore its lawfulness, perhaps in part by ruling out some
previously accepted behaviors or performances in order to
accommodate newly discovered ones.
Such revisions in scientific understanding do not
trivialize the constitutive commitment to the lawfulness of
a domain. That commitment would be trivial if scientists
too readily revised their grasp of a domain of entities as
lawful in response to appearances of apparently recalcitrant
events. There are three reasons why a science’s regionalontological commitments are not usually revised in a
trivializing way. First, any such reinterpretations of a
regional scientific ontology must be projectable. It is not
enough to find a pattern that successfully accommodates
all or most actual events discerned so far in that scientific
domain. The new pattern must enable scientists to recognize
subsequent events as either belonging to the domain
and continuing to behave “in the same way,” or ruling
them out as not belonging to that domain. Moreover, that
understanding must be communicable such that anyone
in the field might be capable of understanding the relevant
pattern of lawfulness. Second, the interpretive refinement
and articulation of scientists’ understanding of that lawful
pattern further constrains subsequent interpretation. A prior
understanding of being guides all interpretation, but the
interpretation in turn develops and further specifies that
understanding, and it is this more refined articulation of
the lawfulness of the domain that then guides subsequent
interpretation. Finally, it is not only the behavior of entities
in the domain that must remain appropriately invariant, but
also the comportment of scientists in their understanding.
That does not mean that a regional-scientific understanding
of being must be unchanging, but that the changes must be
intelligible as responsive to the entities in the domain. The
98 《自然辩证法通讯》第 37 卷 第 5 期（2015 年 10 月）: 1-4
current understanding of the invariant applicability of the
science’s “basic concepts” must be intelligible as a further
development of an earlier understanding.
The lawfulness of a scientific domain is thus not merely
the compilation of whatever patterns of invariance happen
to hold counterfactually for entities that happen to fall within
that domain. Heidegger instead takes the basic concepts
that contribute to a regional understanding of the being
of entities in a scientific domain collectively to constitute
the domain as an intelligible subject matter. Marc Lange’s
(2000, 2007) account of laws is suggestive of Heidegger’s
point. Lange points out that laws and accidental truths do
not seem completely different in their modal behavior.
Under a wide range of counterfactual suppositions, various
accidental truths would still have remained invariant (if I
had worn a purple shirt today, most scientific contingencies
would remain true). On the other hand, genuine laws do not
remain invariant on all counterfactual suppositions. If it is a
law of materials science that copper conducts electricity, that
law would nevertheless not remain true under the counternomic suppositions that copper is an insulator, or that copper
has no electrons in its outer shell. Lange then argues that
the lawfulness of the laws is only determined holistically
for domain-constituting sets of laws, as a form of maximal
invariance. Laws remain invariant under any counterfactual
supposition consistent with the set of laws, whereas for any
set containing at least one accidental truth, there are some
counterfactual suppositions consistent with the set under
which the accidental truth would not have remained true
(indeed, that is what identifies it as an accident; it does not
hold true under all relevant contingencies).①
This constitutive role for the lawfulness of regional
ontologies also extends to determining what it would be in
each case for new cases to go on “in the same way” as cases
already examined and articulated scientifically. Once again,
Lange’s account of laws illustrates a point that Heidegger
makes, but less explicitly:
A discipline’s concerns affect what it takes for an
inference rule to qualify as “reliable” there. They limit
the error that can be tolerated in a certain prediction ...
as well as deem certain facts to be entirely outside the
field’s range of interests.... With regard to a fact with
which a discipline is not concerned, any inference
rule is trivially accurate enough for that discipline’s
purposes. (Lange 2000a, 228)
Some astronomical predictions are reliable only to
an order of magnitude, whereas quantum electrodynamics
makes some predictions that are accurate to 10 decimal
places. More important, a regional ontology also determines
what is tolerable “noise” whose presence does not undermine the lawful invariance signaled by empirical investigation. Physicists, for example, describe lawful patterns in
mechanics that overlook the near-omnipresence of frictional
resistance. Functional biologists (in fields such as genetics,
physiology, anatomy, development, and the like) describe
the characteristic morphological or behavioral patterns of
a species while treating variation within the population
as irrelevant noise. The variations that can be ignored as
“noise” in functional sub-fields are nevertheless central
to the lawfulness of evolutionary biology. Moreover, the
unifying patterns of a lawful domain can be articulated in
a disunified way. Classical mechanics treats all motions as
governed by F = ma, but this lawful pattern is displayed
by a motley group of models that identify and relate the
relevant forces and masses. For many situations, F = ma is
modeled in multiple, conceptually incompatible ways, to
allow for different degrees of precision and to incorporate
and account for more or less subtle aspects of the behavior.②
Heideggerian regional ontologies also limit the range
of counterfactual suppositions under which the domain
must go on “in the same way.” Medical patterns need not
①Lange notes that this approach to the collective counterfactual invariance of a set of laws is not circular. One does not first specify a set of
laws, and then use it to determine the conditions under which they must remain counterfactually invariant. Any non-maximal set of true
statements that remains true under any counterfactual supposition consistent with the set thereby defines a level and domain of necessity.
Unlike Heidegger, Lange assumes that the candidates for laws are true statements, but I show (Rouse 2015, ch. 8), without specific
reference to Heidegger, that Lange’s approach does not depend upon this assumption.
②Wilson (2006) is replete with examples of conceptual discontinuities in classical mechanices and materials science. An especially telling
example of the divergent articulation of F = ma is the near-canonical case of billiard ball collisions:
In point of fact, it is quite unlikely that any treatment of the fully generic billiard ball collision can be found anywhere in the physical
literature. Instead, one is usually provided with accounts that work approximately well in a limited range of cases, coupled with a
footnote of the “for more details, see ...” type. ... [These] specialist texts do not simply “add more details” to Newton, but commonly
overturn the underpinnings of the older treatments altogether. (Wilson 2006, 180-181)
In the case of billiard balls, a sequence of models incompatibly treats them first as point masses, then rigid bodies, almost-rigid bodies with
corrections for energy loss, elastic solids distorting on impact, then with shock waves moving through the ball, or generating explosive
collisions at high velocities, and so on. Some of these models also break down the response of the balls upon impact into stages, each
modeled differently, with gaps and overlaps.
99
remain reliable under counterfactual claims about human
evolution, biological patterns retain their lawfulness without
remaining invariant under counterfactual suppositions about
the earth’s gravitation, and sociological patterns retain their
invariance without regard to counterfactual enumerations
of human chromosomes. Overall, an understanding of or
competence over the regional ontology that demarcates
a scientific domain provides the basis for the normativity
of any scientific discovery of entities in that domain, and
does so without appealing to “norms” as a special kind of
entity. Such understanding guides scientists in telling the
difference between correct and incorrect determinations
of entities along multiple dimensions: accuracy, precision,
relevance, conceptualization, explanatory power, scientific
significance, sameness and difference, and much more.
This coupling of counterfactual invariance and its
normativity is Heidegger’s existential-ontological account
of what is usually understood as natural or nomological
necessity. The lawful invariance (“necessity”) disclosed by
scientific regional ontologies does not merely incorporate
what it would be for the future behavior of the entities
discovered there to go on “in the same way” as in previously discovered cases. It also calls for a correlative
invariance in Dasein’s comportment toward entities in that
domain. Scientific disclosure of a domain requires that
scientists acquire and exercise the conceptual-articulative
and practical skills that allow entities to show themselves as
entities that display the relevant ways of being, as lawfully
invariant. There are several aspects to the constitutive
lawful invariance of Dasein’s scientific comportments. On
the one hand, scientists’ skills, when properly performed,
must be generally reliable: correct performance of the
measurements, calculations, experimental designs, and the
like must normally yield “correct” outcomes, in the sense
that the outcomes sustain and display the lawful invariance
of the entities discovered. Scientists must also be able, with
some reliability, to tell the difference between proper and
improper performance and correct or incorrect outcomes.
Scientific disclosure of an intelligible domain also requires
a more subtle kind of invariant comportment, however,
which Haugeland described as resilience:
Resilience ... is a kind of perseverance born
simultaneously of adaptability and self-assurance. ...
[A] paradigm of resilience [is] an expert who “knows
full well” that he or she can do something—and so
is not turned aside or discouraged at the first, or even
the second, sign of recalcitrance. Adjust a bit here,
try that a little longer, don’t fall for every semblance
of trouble. (Haugeland 1998, 322)
Resilience is a kind of practical constancy that maintains
itself in the face of apparent invariance in the behavior of
the entities within a scientific domain. If scientists were to
give up too easily in the face of apparent counterexamples
to the regional ontology that constitutes a scientific domain,
without adjusting and refining their understanding, scientific
domains could not display conceptual intelligibility for
long.
Dasein’s resilient constancy in its scientific comportment does not entail rigid sameness in what it does, however.
What is needed to sustain the lawful invariance of a scientific
domain is a flexible, sensitive responsiveness to what
happens with its equipment and materials, its conceptual
articulations, and the phenomena they manifest. The relevant skills, concepts, and manifestations are invariant not
by failing to change, but by changing in accord with the
resilient scientific commitment to disclose and sustain the
intelligibility of the domain as lawful. This resilience is
expressed in what Heidegger discusses as the ongoing interplay between understanding and interpretation, which I
mentioned above as the ontological “pre-structuring” of interpretation. The first two aspects of that pre-structuring exhibit
what Haugeland described in a different context as two forms
of pattern recognition—in the case of scientific domains, the
relevant pattern is the lawful invariance of the behavior of
those entities:
On the one hand, there is recognizing an integral,
present pattern from the outside—outer recognition we
could call it. On the other hand, there is recognizing a
global pattern from the inside, by recognizing whether
what is present, the current element, fits the pattern—
what would, by contrast, be inner recognition. The
first is telling whether something (a [lawful] pattern)
is there; the second is telling whether what’s there
belongs (to a [lawful] pattern). (Haugeland 1998, 285)
Outer recognition is a scientific “pre-possession”, an overall
grasp of the lawfully invariant pattern that constitutes the
domain as scientifically intelligible. Inner recognition is a
scientific “preview” of how to interpret specific phenomena
as exhibiting or sustaining that lawful invariance. The third
aspect of scientific pre-structuring is its “pre-conception”,
an understanding of what it would be for these two forms
of pattern recognition to fit together successfully, and of
how to adjust one’s understanding to maintain or restore the
lawfulness of the domain in the face of apparent conflict.
In the normal course of scientific work, such accommodation proceeds successfully, although it typically requires
imaginative but painstaking effort to show how to extend
the explicit articulation of the domain so as to sustain the
lawfulness of its basic conceptual relations. The possibility of
failure nevertheless highlights one of the most distinctive and
100 《自然辩证法通讯》第 37 卷 第 5 期（2015 年 10 月）: 1-4
central features of Heidegger’s “existential” conception of
science:
The real progress [of research] comes not so
much from collecting results and storing them away
in ‘manuals’ as from inquiring into the basic makeup
(Grundverfassungen) of each particular area. ... The
real ‘movement’ of the sciences takes place when their
basic concepts undergo a more or less radical revision
which is transparent to itself. The level which a science
has reached is determined by how far it is capable of
a crisis in its basic concepts. In such immanent crises
the very relationship between positively investigative
inquiry and those things themselves that are under
interrogation comes to a point where it begins to totter.
(Heidegger 1963/1962, 9/29, translation modified)
Such crises threaten the intelligibility of the entire scientific domain. This possibility of the impossibility of an
understanding of being is what Heidegger (1963/1962,
division II, chapter 1) calls “death” in the existential sense.①
Death in this sense is not an event that happens to a scientific
field, because if there is no sustainable lawful invariance
within its domain, there is no scientific field for it to happen
to. A regional understanding of being opens possibilities
for exploring and understanding the entities articulable
in those terms: the skills, concepts, methods, and factual
determinations that make up a scientific practice only amount
to a discovery of entities if they articulate an intelligible
ontological domain. If there “is” no lawfully invariant pattern
to articulate, then there are also no skills, concepts or facts
to articulate it. To abandon an ontological domain is also to
dissolve the ontic determinations it supposedly enabled.
Although ontological regions therefore never “die”, the
existential possibility of their death plays an indispensable
role in scientific understanding. When Heidegger said that
a science’s level of development is indicated by whether it
is capable of conceptual crisis, he recognized that extensive
articulation of an outer-recognizable pattern of lawful
invariance is required before some inner-recognizable
phenomena could be definitely ruled out as impossible.
Moreover, the science must be sufficiently developed to
override its practitioners’ resilient efforts to revise and
refine their skills, performances and discoveries so as to
accommodate seemingly impossible determinations. After
all, one must understand a great deal about a scientific
domain to close off the very possibility of an imaginative
revision that would allow for a projectable accommodation
of persistently recalcitrant discoveries. Such a closing
off from revision also demands a high level of scientific
responsibility. It sometimes is appropriate for a science to
proceed in the face of apparently impossible discoveries.
These recalcitrant empirical phenomena or conceptual
problems may only indicate an isolated restriction on the
scope of the domain, tolerable noise that does not override
a “real pattern” (Dennett 1991) of lawful invariance, a
local effect that can be attributed to “external” influences
not relevant to the field, or an issue that can be temporarily
set aside as too complex to unravel at the science’s present
stage of development. These ways of circumventing crisis
nevertheless also serve as a recurrent temptation toward a
scientific version of “unowned” existence. A willingness to
accommodate apparently impossible outcomes would allow
everyday scientific practice to continue with near-impunity,
seemingly invulnerable to conceptual crisis (Heidegger
1963/1962, sections 35-38). In that case, however, the
effort to understand a scientific domain would have fallen
into what Heidegger called “curiosity, ambiguity and idle
talk”. That would be a mere semblance of understanding,
disconnected from the entities it is supposedly about.
That is why Heidegger said that in conceptual/ontological
crises, the relation between inquiry and the objects under
investigation “begins to totter” (Heidegger 1963/1962, 9/29,
quoted above).
For Heidegger, the truth or falsity of scientific claims
and other comportments toward entities presupposed a
regional understanding of the being of those entities, and of
①All commentators recognize that “death” in Heidegger’s sense is not equivalent to the perishing of an organism, or the social demise that
dissolves the normative statuses of a person (after one’s demise, one is no longer married, cannot inherit property, cannot be subject to
criminal charges, etc.). The most widespread interpretations of Sein und Zeit nevertheless take Heideggerian death to remain conceptually
linked to human mortality and an understanding of the possibility of our own non-being. Haugeland (2013) and Blattner (1994) exemplify
alternative readings that more sharply differentiate Heideggerian death from human perishing or demise. In (Rouse forthcoming), I
show how to accommodate these seemingly incompatible interpretations. Dasein is the entity that understands being, and its “end” is the
possibility of the impossibility of that understanding; to that extent, Haugeland reads the book rightly. An existential understanding of
human mortality nevertheless exemplifies such a collapse of ontological intelligibility. Understood existentially, mortality is the possibility
of the impossibility of “publicness”, the understanding of being that governs dasein’s unowned (uneigentlich) everydayness, in which its
“self”-understanding is taken over by “the anyone” (das Man). This accommodation also makes clearer why an existential understanding
of mortality would be the proximal focus of Heidegger’s discussion even though the phenomenon of existential death is far more inclusive:
the collapse of the intelligibility of publicness and the anyone-self is the liminal possibility that calls attention to the possibility of “owned”
(eigentlich) selfhood.
101
Dasein’s own being in its comportment toward them.① Only
a reliable, resilient practice guided by an understanding
of the lawful invariance of the domain lets entities show
up as determinate and determinable, that is, as entities.
The more fundamental sense of scientific truth, however,
is an understanding of and free comportment toward the
finitude of any such disclosure. Such a resolute scientific
practice encompasses the resilient effort to uncover and
accommodate possible challenges to its own basic concepts
and skills, and thus to “repeat itself” by maintaining its
constancy (Heidegger 1963/1962, 307-308/355-356). Yet it
also remains open to the possibility that no such effort can
succeed, such that “the certainty of the resolution signifies
that one holds oneself free for the possibility of taking it
back” (Heidegger 1963/1962, 307-308/355). Such a possible
renunciation of an entire domain and the comportments and
discoveries it enabled is also a form of faithful repetition of
the underlying ontological commitment, faithful to the end
in the anticipation (Vorlaufen) of death: “this holding-fortrue, as a resolute holding-oneself-free for taking back, is
owned resoluteness which resolves to keep repeating itself
(Heidegger 1963/1962, 308/355). Dasein thereby discloses
its finite dependence upon the entities to be discovered. Only
in this openness to taking back its ontological commitment
in the face of the possibility of its own impossibility does an
understanding of being remain accountable to the entities
thereby disclosed. Otherwise, scientific understanding would
be a willful imposition of categories and comportments on
entities rather than a disclosure of those entities in their own
possibilities. And only thereby does Dasein itself become
free for its ownmost possibility and responsibility. By thus
“taking-over-being-a-ground” of its own comportments, and
remaining free for taking it back, Dasein is its disclosedness,
as finitely dependent upon a free comportment toward
entities as they are in truth.
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［责任编辑　孟建伟 郝苑］
①Heidegger took the truth or falsity of assertions to be only a special case of true or false comportments toward entities. Skills, performances,
perceptions, and appearances can also be true or false, as correct or incorrect discoveries of entities in accord (or not) with an understanding
of the being of those entities. Both truth and falsity presuppose the more fundamental sense of truth as the disclosure of the being of entities
which articulates the intelligible possibility of truth and falsity alike.