Page 30 - Contribution To Phenomenology

REFLECTION ON THE CULTURAL DISCIPLINES 23

rather to the users of the product does not affect it that the cuhnination
is in willing and the object being willed or used. The craft of house
building as such is thus practical, although it can pertain to architecture
as an axiotic discipline. Nevertheless, to enjoy a building in a more or
less aesthetic way is different from using it to keep warm and dry in a
cold and wet winter (or cool and humidified in a hot and dry summer),
which are practical purposes of building and maintaining efforts and of
the building as a means.
The cognition that action is founded upon within the combination of
concrete practices at the disciplinary level may be scientific, and has no
doubt ever increasingly become so in this age of scientific technology. In
that case, as mentioned, the scientific basis may be made up of results
and methods from more than one theoretical discipline, e.g., physical,
chemical, and biological knowledge are used in physical medicine and
history, sociology, ethnology, etc., are, hopefully, used along with cultural
psychology in psychiatry and psychotherapy. That natural-scientific
knowledge is developed in an attitude in which the cultural characteris-
tics with which objects are always already constituted are somehow set
aside does not limit the use of such knowledge in what might be called
"scientific action" and in which a scientifically ascertained causal
connection is then constituted volitionally as a means-end relationship.
But there is additionally, however, always some non-scientific cognition
involved in action. This includes the common-sense of the amateur level.
It also includes the know-how and lore of the craft level, which is the
level where warfare was for the millenia before it began also to be
science-based or scientific. "Military science" is now arguably a discipline
of the practical sort, conquest and defense being practical purposes and
advanced preparation occurring in military schools and war colleges. The
same might be the case with law enforcement, although the present
writer is not sure that he has yet heard of "scientific policing" and
"police colleges." Finally, it is not impossible that philosophical cognition
sometimes function in the foundations of action and its justification,
philosophy, even if merely cognitive in project, being no special science
with a restricted subject matter.
Theoretical science and scientific action are often confused. In part this
is because science-based practical endeavors, technologies included, can
find it advantageous to distinguish themselves from the non-scientific and
even to go so far as to call themselves sciences and because theoretical
endeavors can analogously find it on occassion advantageous to claim