NENAD MIEVI PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE, CONTINENTAL AND ANALYTIC I) INTRODUCTION

The topic of this paper is the contrast between two traditions in contemporary philosophy of science: the mainstream continental and the mainstream analytic one. 1 I just want to sketch the landscape, in order to situate possible criticisms and possible perspective for dialogue; at the end I will venture some speculations about how the contrast came about. Let me then introduce the term mainstream continental tradition for the branch unifying authors as diverse as Heidegger, Foucault, , Gadamer, Adorno and Habermas (and the disciples and followers of each of them). I shall concentrate on Foucault, and talk a bit about Heidegger and Habermas. I submit that they are typical for what is nowadays described as continental tradition. If you disagree, and think that the very division of continental vs. analytic is wrong-headed, please take my term as a heuristic device for bringing together rather famous thinkers usually classified as continental. The main contrast with analytic tradition is then the following. The mainstream continental tradition rejects the central modern scientific rationalistic ideals, common to authors like Descartes, Locke, Kant and Frege, who saw the rationality of science as an epistemological norm. It also rejects the Wahreitsanspruch of science(s), often redefining truth itself. When dealing with science it mostly looks at non-epistemic motivation of actual historical science, very often concentrating on morally bad motives, actual or presumed, of scientists and the scientific establishment, and ascribing it to science as such. In contrast, analytic philosophy has not only historically grown out of interest in logic, mathematics and physics and philosophy-cum-methodology of them, but has focused on the presumed ability of science to reach truth/truth-likeness, or, at least, some epistemic close counterpart of truth, like ideal rational coherence. It has stressed the brave challenges of the historical heroes like Copernicus, Gallileo and Einstein, much less the abuses and shameful uses of science (eugenics, arms race and the like). The rare, but famous authors , who were less enthusiastic about the truth-goal, like Thomas Kuhn, did not go very far into non-cognitive motives of scientific establishment. So, the analytic tradition has been mainly uninterested in non-epistemic motives; and when it came to obviously bad consequences of scientific development (discovery of nuclear weapons and the like) has treated it as a political issue only marginally connected with the main tasks of science. This stark contrast between continental and analytic mainstreams is the main topic in what follows. I would like to document the claim about the mainstream continental tradition by pointing to two sharp critics of the scientific enterprise, Heidegger and Foucault, and then by illustrating the claim by looking briefly at a more moderate thinker, J. Habermas. Of course, the mainstream views are not the only ones to be found in the literature. There has been a line of thought in French philosophy very sympathetic to science, with G. Bachelard and G. Canguilhem as main representatives (and J. Cavailles as a possible third figure). They had been presented as thinkers closest to the interest of an analytic reader by historians of philosophy like Gary Gutting (2001, 2008). I shall not dwell on their work, since they are not typical for the present-day continental approach; I shall also leave aside here the early work of Merleau-Ponty, which has been in
1

Zahvaljujem organizatorima I sudionicima skupa na pozivu I na vrlo inspirativnoj diskusiji.

later decades eclipsed by an interest in his later, more phenomenological, and the last, more poetic and heideggerian phases. (One might add German philosophy of mathematics and science inspired by Husserl, e.g. the work of Oskar Becker). On the Anglo-American scene there is an interesting and famous tradition positioned between the extremes we just mentioned: pragmatism. It typically brings together the two interests in science, the interest for the truth-centered motivation, and the one for the non-epistemic motives, in an optimistic fashion. The truth-centered motivation of science is presented as laudable, and the nonepistemic motives are seen as socially good, even salutary. From Dewey to Phillip Kitcher this tradition has played an important role in American scientific and philosophical culture. Interestingly, Richard Rorty, the philosopher who tried to bridge the gap between pragmatism and continental philosophy, ended up dissociating philosophy from science. From radical naturalist (in the bulk of his Philosophy and the mirror of nature), he turned into a radical culturalist, making philosophy part of cultural politics and severing the tie with science that other pragmatists have been cultivating. Finally, there is the realistic or quasi-realistic tradition in contemporary French philosophy, starting with Michel Serres, and encompassing the work of Deleuze and Badiou (and the new star, Quentin Meillasoux). This tradition declares itself to be realistic, but its most famous representatives, Deleuze and Badiou, use particular scientific ideas or mini-theories more as metaphorical devices for philosophical speculation than as objects of study. Badiou has been connecting paradoxes in set theory with ideas of (political) revolution, and criticizing Frege for not realizing that contradictions are normally true (so that contradictory concepts dont have empty sets as their extension). Deleuze has been using ideas from biology to support views on sexual revolution, the perverse body and the nomadic way of life. This metaphoric-poetic (and practical-political) use of scientific concepts and fragments of theories continues in recent new-realists; Meillasoux is more argumentative than others, but still a bit mystical and poetic in his conclusion. We thus have the two mainstreams, the analytic and the continental one, and some more intermediary traditions: closer to the analytic side the pragmatism, and on the continental side some older rationalist philosophers of science, and then the new-realism with its metaphorical use of scientific ideas. For reasons of space we shall concentrate upon the continental mainstream, hoping to say more about the other lines of thought at some other occasion.

II) THE TWO MAINSTREAMS: THE CONTINENTAL AND THE ANALYTIC a) Heidegger, Foucault and the aftermath Looking at the 20th century one can surmise that the mainstream is born with two twin founding events: Husserls invention of the world of life, Lebenswelt, as the cradle of science, betrayed by its progeny, and by Heideggers linking of science with technology and the ontologizing of the later notion. Heideggers accusation of science and its foundational and defining complicity with technology has probably been the turning point; with it, the continental tradition started defining itself in stark contrast to science and things scientific. Heideggers critique of science is of a piece with his critique of logic: the later, the centerpiece of analytic efforts in Frege, Russell and Wittgenstein, is the paradigm of inauthenticity and forgetfulness of Being in Heidegger. When the thought manages to address the fundamental issue of Nothing, the dominance of Verstand is broken, and the fate of the dominance of "logic" disintegrates in the

whirl of a more primordial questioning. From the mid-thirties on, the complicity of logic, science and technology is being first established, and then mercilessly exposed and denounced. Thomas A. Fay has written a sympathetic book, Heidegger: The Critique of Logic , attempting to place Heideggers cricitism in a favorable light, and I recommend it to the reader .2 Let me now turn to less radical but still tough critics of science within the continental mainstream. Remember the central role of truth and truth-related properties for the analytic mainstream. Consider now M. Foucault, the author that has done a lot of work in the history of medicine and psychiatry, closer in his interest to the actual science than Heidegger ever was. 3 Here is his famous statement about truth: "Truth" is to be understood as a system of ordered procedures for the production, regulation, distribution, circulation, and operation of statements . "Truth" is linked in a circular relation with systems of power which produce and sustain it, and to effects of power which it induces and which extends it. (2006 Foucault insists that the focus of his criticism is not merely some ideology surrounding the bad practices of medicine and psychiatry in the last two centuries, but the very core of human cognitive effort, the truth. Let me note that he is not entirely consistent in his criticism of truth; in his last works he famously extols truth-telling in parrhesia, and also praises the true knowledge of the oppressed. However, neither parrhesia nor subordinate knowledge of the oppressed have much to do with
2

Here is a quote nicely summarizing Heideggers development. As we move into the late 'thirties and beyond, symbolic logic is seen more and more as an extremely significant manifestation of metaphysics, and more precisely to be another, and extremely important, manifestation of the spirit of technicityY 7 In the Overcoming of Metaphysics it is regarded as another face of meta-physics. It is seen by Heidegger as part of man's calculative posture toward his world which is so characteristic of metaphysics, and as an indispensable tool for the advancement of technicity. Under the impact of technicity language is viewed merely as an instrument, just as the beings of man's world are seen only as available commodities to be manipulated and ruthlessly exploited according to the whim which rules at the moment. Since symbolic logic has been found to be a useful instrument in the communications media, and in the advancement of technology this approach to language has been so emphasized that all other approaches to it are either excluded or totally ignored. Of course, when philosophy tries to be more exact, it just apes science, and joins the technical madness of contemporary world (Pismo o humanizmu). Heideggers final recipe is to turn to poetic language; poetry is the way to pass from the epoch of technology to the time of the presence of Being. p. 107

I am leaving aside G. Guttings interesting characterization of Foucault as a positivist post-structuralist (2108: 834).

science, so that his main line is successfully summarized by the statement quoted. Science and its search of truth are matter of power and its systems, nothing else. Here is the interview with Pasquale Pasquino on Truth and power: Truth is a thing of this world: it is produced only by virtue of multiple forms of constraint. In societies like ours, the "political economy" of truth is characterised by five important traits . . (Rabinov , 1984:72) The traits are the following. First ,"truth" (Foucault puts it under quotation marks) is centered on forms of constraint. Second, it induces regular effects of power . Third, each society has its regime of truth, its "general politics" of truth. 4 Fourth, it is the object of immense diffusion and consumption (circulating through apparatuses of education and information); it is produced and transmitted under the control, dominant if not exclusive, of a few great political and economic apparatuses (university, army, writing, media); Fifth, it is the issue of political debate and social confrontation . All this is still compatible with truth being objective. Take the truth America has a nuclear weapon , i.e. the proposition to this effect made true certainly in 1945. Of course, it has been strictly controlled, of course, it was the army that exercised the lions share of the control. Of course, the making true, and the acquisition of truth have been very strictly observed and reported, most dramatically in the Nevada test. And after Hiroshima it became the issue of political debate and social confrontation. But all this happened because it was a truth, and not a falsity. So, the five features do not necessarily contradict the objective truth of the truth. Foucault sometimes seems to acknowledge it. He stresses that by truth he does not mean "the ensemble of truths which are to be discovered and accepted," but rather "the ensemble of rules according to which the true and the false are separated and specific effects of power attached to the true, " (2006:170). But the proposal to reinterpret truth procedurally leads in a different direction: truth is an effect of power. The question Is it really so? is hereby silenced. The reader gets the impression that one should not look at the correspondence with reality, but at regulation, distribution, circulation, and operation of statements. Next, Foucault links it directly with political issues: A "regime" of truth. This regime is not merely ideological or superstructural; it was a condition of the formation and development of capitalism. And it' s this same regime which, subject to certain modifications, operates in the socialist countries(Ibid.) And he concludes:
4

Foucault further explains:

that is, the types of discourse which it accepts and makes function as true; the mechanisms and instances which enable one to distinguish true and false statements, the means by which each is sanctioned; the techniques and procedures accorded value in the acquisition of truth; the status of those who are charged with saying what counts as true .the form of scientific discourse and the institutions which pro-duce it; it is subject to constant economic and political incitement (the demand for truth, as much for economic production as for political power). (Ibid.)

The political question, to sum up, is not error, illusion, alienated consciousness, or ideology; it is truth itself. Hence the importance of Nietzsche. (Ibid.) The same critical attitude appears in the famous pronouncements from 1970-71, in his inaugural talk at College de France: L ordre du discours . The contrast of true and false is seen as a system of exclusion. It started with Greeks: True discourse, that which inspired respect and terror, that to which all had to submit because it held sway over all, was the discourse spoken by men as of right and in accordance with the required ritual; it was the discourse that meted out justice that, prophesying the future, not only foretold what would come to pass, but participated in its coming, bringing to it mens acquiescence and thus weaving itself into the fabric of fate (1981: 54). And continued with early moderns, and the scientific will to truth. But Foucault is subtle: Certainly, when viewed from the level of a proposition, on the inside of a discourse, the division between true and false is neither arbitrary nor modifiable nor institutional nor violent. But when we view things on a different scale, when we ask the question of what this will to truth has been and constantly is.than what we see as taking shape is perhaps something like a system of exclusion.(1981:54). This is then the famous knowledge-subversive attitude of Foucault. It points to a kind of pan-archism: every knowledge and every truth is a construction of power: power and knowledge directly imply one another. And in the summary of a seminar he writes: No body of knowledge can be formed without a system of communications, records, accumulation and displacement which is in itself a form of power and which is linked, in its existence and functioning, to the other forms of power. Conversely, no power can be exercised without the extraction, appropriation, distribution or retention of knowledge. On this level, there is not knowledge on the one side and society on the other, or science and the state, but only the fundamental forms of knowledge/power. (1971: 283) Let me stay with the topic of history as science, and of its deconstruction. Some of Foucaults followers went caricatural: Foucault did not even try to determine what is true and what is false writes Jeremy Campbell .( 2001:296). Note an immediate contradiction: in the first sentence truth is produced by power, presumably every truth, whereas in the second we discover the truth when freed from power. And of course, the idea that Foucault did not even try to determine what is true and what is false is hard to square with his brilliantly documented and erudite archeological work. The proposed resolution is fictional play: We can make our own history, sifting through the idea inherited from the pat, replac-ing them with new ones, "fabricated as in a fiction." Foucault did not even try to determine what is true and what is false, but only studied the fictions themselves, the various ways in which people have thought about madness, crime, sexual identity. What this method discovers, he said, is the "arbitrariness" of understanding, of what one takes to be the truth. Games of truth are always variable and uncertain. We can always think differently about what seems to be self evident, and the starting point is a decision not to be governed.( 2001:296)

We should then note the tension between the two games of truth present in Foucault; the knowledge accumulating and the knowledge-subversive. This is the knowledge problem he has to deal with. The radical post-modernist reading of Foucault is captured in the phrase Power/knowledge, the title of a collection of his essays in English (Foucault, 1980). Power produces the subject, the state, knowledge and truth, is the simplified picture. And, this evil knowledge/power should be subverted. All is construction. For instance, Judith Butler tells us that juridical systems of power produce the subjects they subsequently come to represent. Butler (1990: 2).5 Leonard M. Hammer makes the same point about the state: For Foucault, the state is a creation of our discourses () (Hammer, 2007:3). Steven Best says something similar about truth: Foucault does not do theory in modern sense, which would aim at truth (1995:87) In place of the truth of politics Foucault analyzes a politics of truth that sees truth as a discourse that legitimates power and authority. (1995:118). Let us turn to deconstructionist authors probing more deeply Foucaults work, interested primarily in the task of the historian. We shall use as our guide Alun Munslow who has, in his Deconstructing history (1997), clearly opted for the radically knowledge-subverting alternative: This vision of postmodern history not only rejects the fable of the correspondence theory, which maintains that the truth is out there, but also dismisses the reconstructionist belief in a transparent narrative that permits the historical truth to emerge as if it existed beyond its description. Hence Foucault dismisses the crude myths that flow from this general position: brute factualism, disinterested historians, objectivity, progress, stability, continuity, certainty, roots, and the demarcation between history, ideology, fiction and perspective. He rejects, in his own words, empiricisms will to truth. (1997:124) In chapter seven, Michel Foucault and history, he presents the deconstructionist motivation as a noble one. In all this his main concern is to de-mythify historys claim to represent the reality of the past, and through it, its further assertion that explanation can in some way be complete, or reasonable, or realistic. this becomes clear when those possessing power make an appeal to history to rationalise their hold on power. The legitimating authority of history is also used by those trying to gain power. 1997:123 The noble goal is to subvert the power by subverting its claim to true history. The bad claim ahs a name: Historys claim to represent the reality of the past, and through it, its further assertion that explanation can in some way be complete, or reasonable, or realistic is characterized as modernist historys claim. Like Nietzsche, Foucault has come to accept that all modernist historys claims are ultimately spurious. (Ibid.) However, a lot is to be given up for this noble goal of subverting power/knowledge. Remember Foucaults engagement for serious research. Is it compatible with giving up the idea that the
5

See the discussion in Douglas V. Porpora Objectivity and phallogocentrism in Defending Objectivity,

2004

historians explanation can be reasonable, as the above quote suggests? Can you do serious research without trying to represent the reality of the past? The deconstructionists, and Munslow in particular, see Foucault arguing that history is never objective because it cannot be independent of the historian and his/her own time or cultural context, and it is the power of language to create meaning rather than to discover the true direction that history has taken that is important. As a result, to be honest to him/herself and his/her reader, the historian must avoid any claims to an empiricistguaranteed disinterested objectivity located beyond the cultural frontier in which he/she lives. (Ibid.) For Foucault, objectivity is a myth, Munslow claims. It follows that, in writing history, the historian should not bother about objectivity; why bother about a mythical requirement? In one sense, the advice enjoins modesty: dont think you can be objective, since you depend on your cultural context and many other things that are not under your control! Because history is fabricated and we are implicated in it, we are wrong to conclude that somehow we can stand outside it, Munslow argues. But taken literally, the advice just says that objectivity is a myth, not a norm for the historian, as it was thought to be. The problems with the advice are immediate. Take the work of European historians struggling against nationalistic and/or Eurocentric representation(s) of history. What they were teaching their students was that objectivity is a high value. Munslow and the deconstructionists have a reply: The reasoning behind this position is Foucaults sustained attack on the reconstructionist belief in the adequate representation of reality through the narrative form. (1997: 123). In other words, Foucault subscribes to the claim that there is no way adequately to represent reality in historical narration. Munslow realizes that there is a tension between this claim and the demands of erudition, of patient studying of the documents: In spite of his assault on the epistemology of traditional history, like all historians (including deconstructionist historians) Foucault accepts the need to study the evidence in the archive. And now comes the main requirement: The essential proviso is that historys facts are understood primarily as the epistemic discursive creations both of people in the past and of the historian, written as the relationship the historian believes exists between words and things in any episteme he/she studies. 126. So, a historys fact is an epistemic creation of people in the past and the historian. But does this not open a space for arbitrariness? If there are no facts of history outside the epistemic creations of ancient and new observers/interpreters how do we judge the accuracy of the historian? 6

Munslow comes up with a solution: it is all protocols. The solution is derived from social historian Patrick Joyce and the cultural critic Antony Easthope; he actually quotes the former interpreting the later: For a fact to be accurate or no there does not have to be a relation of correspondence . . . between discourse and the real. If the epistemological debate is not resolvable, then there is no problem about discriminating accurate from inaccurate data, and tenable from untenable arguments. We do this all the time, widely different protocols obtaining in different areas. None the less, these protocols are themselves the product of history, logic turning out on inspection to depend on consensus and social construction (rhetoric). (1997: 127-128)

Let me briefly mention another line of thought that can be connected with deconstructionism. According to it history is fundamental in special way: history changes the fundamental anthropological kinds, the referents of basic categories of our understanding. For instance, what is knowledge, what is morally bad etc. changes with historical change. Lyotard had claimed that media change the nature of knowledge; this is the nice illustration of this full-fledged historical relativism. Now, what is the view of language and discourse behind the radical knowledge-subversive line? It is what we would expect. Not only is objectivity a myth, but more significantly we should recognize the sheer impossibility of the modernist theory of referentiality between word(s) and thing(s), statement(s) and evidence(s). (1997:123). Literally, the referentiality of a word is its property to refer to an object. Munslow also talks about the referentiality of a narrative, characterizing it as the accuracy and veracity with which the narrative relates what actually happened in the past.( 1997:4) If I get it right the quotation claims the following: the modernist theory (semantics, philosophy, methodology) has proclaimed that there is a referentiality relation between word(s) and thing(s). The word Foucault refers to the great theoretician, in person. This claim is wrong; it is impossible for words to refer. So, they dont. Let me call this interpretation radical view. A more moderate reading would be that we should understand referentiality in some non-modernist maybe in post-modernist) way. But Munslow never mentions any alternative understanding of referentiality, so I dont think he has and alternative reading in mind. He thinks there is no referentiality. So much about the extreme views.

He sees the rationale for the answer in the following way: because we historians are in history just as much as anyone else, it is impossible for us to disentangle representation from content. So, we should just follow the existing protocols of sorting the data into those that will be called accurate and those inaccurate. Here are three problems for this Munslow-Joyce-Easthope solution. The first is the following: one of the main intellectual attractions, also rich in emotional overtones, of Foucaults erudite work, is his choice of documents presented; he famously chooses dramatic description of items like torture or mechanisms of disciplining and controlling. In this case, an important message of the torture report is that it is a witness to the actual historical fact, intended as quite a realistic description of it. Imagine there is no correspondence between this piece of discourse and the real. It is just protocols. Imagine also that other documents are equally not corresponding to reality. How would you read them? One way would be to assume that they were a piece of sado-masochistic fantasy. Another, that they were meant as a threat never put into action. Foucault does not even dream about these options. He is adamant about these things actually having happened. What about the protocols as solution? The deconstructionist might claim that the document is accurate without corresponding to any fact simply because it constructs reality in agreement with the protocols-canons of the profession, so it is accurate in this sense. If we read the account of the torture in this way we conclude that the event has been constructed in accordance with the canons. The question remains: Were people actually tortured, and in the way described? Foucault claims they were. But in the light of protocol-proposal the claim should be reinterpreted: it only says that there is such a construct - as an event of torture. Not real, of course. This is the price for accepting the protocol account.

b) Habermas and the moderate approach Let me now pass to the most moderate of the mainstream authors, J. Habermas, with apologies for brevity. In his early work he criticized the negative view of science, common to his first idol, Heidegger, and to his later guide, Adorno. Science is not bad in itself, it is not to be condemned, let alone demonized. Then, in his Knowledge and human interest, he offered a positive view, which soon become famous. According to it, there is a plurality of legitimate human interests, and one of the three main ones is the interest in controlling nature, which gives birth to technology. This is where science belongs. Empirical-analytic inquiry is the systematic continuation of a cumulative learning process that proceeds on the pre-scientific level within the behavioral system of instrumental action. Hermeneutic inquiry lends methodical form to a process of arriving at mutual understanding (..).. The first aims at the production of technically exploitable knowledge, the second at the clarification of practically effective knowledge. Empirical analysis discloses reality from the viewpoint of possible technical control over objectified processes of nature, while hermeneutics maintains the intersubjectivity of possible action-orienting mutual understanding () 1972: 191 So, science is geared to the technically exploitable knowledge, to the control of nature. Now, what is the relation of this knowledge to truth? What does it reveal to us about the nature of things? Well, within the sphere of instrumental action, reality is constituted as the totality of what can be experienced from the viewpoint of possible technical control.(Ibid).7 Habermas stresses the specifically restricted mode of experience and of language describing it. And the theoretical language reduces to calculation with an ultimately technological purpose. For him the allegedly pure language of scientific theory is the result of abstraction from the spontaneously evolved, pregiven material of ordinary languages; the theme of Lebenwelt and alienation from it is there, in a linguistic dressing. He talks of objectified "nature", in scare quotes, nature that differs from the spontaneously evolved (naturwchsig), pregiven material of experience connected with ordinary language. (192) Both restricted language and restricted experience are by definition results of scientistss intellectual and/or experimental operations. Not a word about experiments teaching us about the true nature of reality behind the immediate experience. Not a word about the epistemic power of mathematical symbolism to teach us about the nomic basic structure of reality: Galileos idea that the book of nature is written in the language of mathematics is replaced by the view according to which the language of mathematics is just another technology in the service of more concrete technologies. For Habermas from the Knowledge and human interest period the two preferred interests are the communicative-hermeneutical and the emancipatory ones. Only in connection with emancipatory interest does science have any chance to become authentic, but Habermas is not very clear about the way this might happen. In his later work, the hermeneutic and the emancipatory are famously melted

In the original German: konstituiert sich die Wirklichkeit als Inbegriff dessen, was unter dem

Gesichtspunkt moglicher technischer Verfgung erfahren werden kann. (Suhrkam, 236)

together, in a very successful theory of communicative action. Science remains on the margin. Let me very briefly return to the opposite camp. Contemporary realist mainstream in the analytic philosophy of science (early Punam, Boyd, and others) stands in clear and marked contrast to its continental counterpart. The standard scientific realism maintains not only that there is a reality independent of human constructions, but that it is discoverable, and moreover, that it is discoverable primarily by scientific method. Science is geared to avoiding falsity, to truth, or something very close to it. The ultimate explanations have to be true, or very close to truth; even most routine and understandable approximations have to be defended by their relatedness to the exact picture of facts. This is the main motivation of the good scientist; the rest is a matter of sociology and psychology, marginal to the main task. The present-day anti-realism about science is very, very moderate compared to continental theorizing. In the most popular version, due to B. van Fraassen, it presents science as geared to empirical adequacy: the empirical data are there, true-to-observable-facts, and the theory has to systematize and possibly explain them. Data are not our construction, only theory is. And the theory building is guided by very strong demands of rationality, demands that can at least to some extent be not only systematized, but formalized in a mathematical way (Bayesian or other). Authors closest to the continental option(s) are philosophically minded historians of science, like Kuhn and Feyerabend. Kuhns idea of paradigm-shift and his explanations of it dispense both with realism and non-relativist rationality, so that a relativist Kuhnianism is very attractive for the continental readers. Feyerabend comes closest to the continental mainstream, by his relativism, his giving up of epistemic goal, and his insistence of non-epistemic motivations of scientific communities.

III) CONCLUSION

The paper has presented a brief map of positions in contemporary philosophy of science, stressing the continental-analytic contrast. In the mainstream continental tradition science is not seen as occupying itself with reaching truth, so its Wahreitsanspruch is being squarely rejected. Together with it, the mainstream has been rejecting the central modern scientific rationalistic ideals, common to the central tradition of modern philosophy. Its proponents have been looking for bad, non-epistemic motivation of actual historical science. A relatively new school of new realists has been making poetic and metaphorical positive use of science, and this is all. Why did it all happen? Leaving aside external factors (facts about the organization of university and the like), one can perhaps point to two internal ones: very strong political and social engagement of some of the main proponents and a tradition of thinking and presenting the a-rational as metaphysically and epistemic basic. Foucault and the Frankfurt school are good examples of the first, Heidegger and Derrida of the second and most of the postmodernists of both motivations. With Foucault, it is the rebellion against institutional medicine and psychiatry that acts as underlying motive; and once the engagement is taken, it tends to block the usual theoretical precautions and qualifications.

On the other hand, the (re-)discovery of the a-rational, or even irrational (as contrary to rational) as a central topic for philosophy has been a very important task of continental tradition. (I am using more neutral a-rationalist for views that just set aside the rationality, irrationalist for explicit enemies of it). The two did play a role before, but in a more tame fashion. Humean desire is a relatively homely matter, and the human passions in Pascal, La Rochefoucauld and other French Enlightment authors lack a cosmic dimension, which they receive only within the post-Kantian tradition. How does this happen? Let us state the central a-rationalist thesis about the forces at work in human mind: The central element of human mind is a-rational, it is either will, desire or affect. This a-rationalizing might take several forms. Typically it involves setting aside pure cognitive (epistemic) rationality. Often one ends up by replacing it with practical one, for instance in some Marxist, Pragmatist (Rorty) and neoHeideggerian authors (like Dreyfuss). In the wake of German idealism, the a-rationalist thesis is combined with general anti-realism. Human mind creates or co-creates reality, and the geography of the human mind s at the same time the cosmography of the whole of being. If not the human mind, then an absolute, mind-like entity, Geist, or Absolute. But, if mind creates reality, and the mind is arational, then a-rational forces create reality. If the human and historical are directly ontological, then the fierce passions ruling our heart and our political conflicts govern, or co-govern the very Being itself, or are just identical to it. The world is the will, as Schopenhauer proclaimed, it is an artifact of the willto-power, as Nietzsche claimed. In short, the basic reality of the world is akin to the a-rational element of human mind. After Schoppenhauer, with the late Schelling the two theses enter the scene of the late German Idealism, in the three initial decades of the nineteenth century. (German historicans of philosophy and culture have dug out interesting connections with the peak of German romanticism, but we cannot enter the topic here). According to the new creed, the central element of human mind is a drive; more importantly, a basic element of reality (including, in the first place God) is a-rational. It was Heidegger who turned phenomenological investigation into the analysis of the existential relation between Dasein and Sein, and then into a poetic-hermeneutic investigation into human destiny. He started in Being and Time with the idea of human involvement with the world, as an antidote to skepticism. (One route from there is the pragmatist one, taken by many of his American interpreters). In later works the involvement is characterized as living poetically(dichterisch). Human being belongs to the very ground of being, that it is ontologically most intimately connected to it. Second, the relationship between the two is primarily poetic, as opposed to say, epistemic, or logic. Man is the poem, Gedicht of Sein. And of course, the philosopher is expressing this in a poetic way, not in cold theory, nor in a sequence of arguments. This is the positive view to be opposed to logic and science. I submit that this rejection of the rational is one of the main grounds for the mainstream continental understanding of science and of its epistemological message. This is just a hypothesis, like most of the claims made in the paper. However, I hope that they might be roughly correct, and that they can clear the complicated landscape of contemporary understanding(s) of science and its philosophy.

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