Page 26 - Contribution To Phenomenology

REFLECTION ON THE CULTURAL DISCIPLINES 19

science in general seeks theoretical knowledge, one species can be
concerned with form and include logic, mathematics, and grammar as
subspecies. These rely on a procedure called formalization by which the
contents of assertions are abstracted from leaving the form. Most if not
all cultural sciences employ or apply formal techniques today, so they are
no longer purely "qualitative," but this methodological addition is also not
essential to what they are. That would be analogous to claiming that road
building was not road buUding until naturalistic science arose and began
to be applied in it. And if formal techniques were essential, then
disciplinary efforts historically or structurally prior to the addition of the
formal techniques would not be scientific. Was Aristotle's physics not
physics?
In contrast, one may speak of material or contentual sciences, which
require no such abstraction from all content. Then it can be recognized
that the cultural sciences are the most concrete among the contentual
sciences in that the cultural characteristics that objects have for the
cultural practice investigated in the cultural sciences are not abstracted
from, while in the natural sciences the cultural characteristics that all
objects always already have in non-scientific life are abstracted from. (The
qualifier "non-scientific" protects the possibility of objects having
discipline-specific scientific value and use, e.g., a good experiment as good
from the standpoint of the community of naturalistic scientists.)
The cultural sciences can be regarded philosophically in many ways,
only some which are mentioned in this essay. One perspective concerns
the difference of the cultural and other kinds of positive science, which
has just been addressed, but that the allegation whereby Dilthey
contrasted the natural sciences as explaining with the Geisteswissenschaften
as understanding is false deserves mention; sciences of both kinds both
explain and understand.^^ Other positions here would contrast the
particularizing and empirical with the generalizing and nomothetic
disciplines, something that seems more to pertain historically to an alleged
difference between the social and the historical subspecies of the cultural
sciences and, in any case, it can now be seen as more a difference of
emphasis than of essence because all contentual sciences are concerned
with both the empirical and particular and the general and nomic.

Sciences (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1992).
^ Makkreel, loc. cit.