13194_2020_294_Article 1..27
PAPER IN GENERAL PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE Open Access
Scientific perspectivism
in the phenomenological tradition
Philipp Berghofer1
Received: 18 October 2019 /Accepted: 13 May 2020
# The Author(s) 2020
Abstract
In current debates, many philosophers of science have sympathies for the project
of introducing a new approach to the scientific realism debate that forges a middle
way between traditional forms of scientific realism and anti-realism. One promis-
ing approach is perspectivism. Although different proponents of perspectivism
differ in their respective characterizations of perspectivism, the common idea is
that scientific knowledge is necessarily partial and incomplete. Perspectivism is a
new position in current debates but it does have its forerunners. Figures that are
typically mentioned in this context include Dewey, Feyerabend, Leibniz, Kant,
Kuhn, and Putnam. Interestingly, to my knowledge, there exists no work that
discusses similarities to the phenomenological tradition. This is surprising because
here one can find systematically similar ideas and even a very similar terminology.
It is startling because early modern physics was noticeably influenced by phe-
nomenological ideas. And it is unfortunate because the analysis of perspectival
approaches in the phenomenological tradition can help us to achieve a more
nuanced understanding of different forms of perspectivism. The main objective
of this paper is to show that in the phenomenological tradition one finds a well-
elaborated philosophy of science that shares important similarities with current
versions of perspectivism. Engaging with the phenomenological tradition is also
of systematic value since it helps us to gain a better understanding of the
distinctive claims of perspectivism and to distinguish various grades of
perspectivism.
Keywords Scientificrealism . Perspectivism. Phenomenology.Husserl . Merleau-Ponty.
QBism
https://doi.org/10.1007/s13194-020-00294-w
This article belongs to the Topical Collection: Perspectivism in science: metaphysical and epistemological
reflections
Guest Editor: Michela Massimi
* Philipp Berghofer
philipp.berghofer@uni–graz.at
1 Department for Philosophy, University of Graz, Heinrichstraße 26/5, 8010, Graz, Austria
/Published online: 16 June 2020
European Journal for Philosophy of Science (2020) 10: 30
http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi=10.1007/s13194-020-00294-w&domain=pdf
http://orcid.org/0000-0002-9044-0637
mailto:philipp.berghofer@uni-graz.at
1 Perspectivism in current debates
Advocating scientific realism, broadly speaking, means adopting “a positive epistemic
attitude toward the content of our best theories and models, recommending belief in
both observable and unobservable aspects of the world described by the sciences”
(Chakravartty 2017). It is safe to say that scientific realism is the dominant view among
the public. This is particularly due to the undeniable success of the sciences in making
predictions and in contributing to the technological advancements we witness on a
daily basis. Also among philosophers of science, the main motivation for adopting a
realist position is the notorious miracle argument which quotes scientific realism as the
best explanation for the obvious success of our scientific theories. This success would
seem miraculous if our successful theories were misleading. Despite their initial
plausibility, both scientific realism and the miracle argument have been attacked on
many fronts. Objections based on the underdetermination of scientific theories by
empirical data and the pessimistic meta induction gained such prominence in the
twentieth century that Arthur Fine was prompted to declare: “Realism is dead” (Fine
1984, 83).
Currently, realism is again the dominant stance, but most realists concede that the
attacks from the anti-realist camp require clarification and some sort of constraint of
realist commitments. The most common response to the problems surrounding realism
is to adopt a form of selective realism. Here entity realism and structural realism are the
most prominent examples, but each version of realism suffers from certain shortcom-
ings and by now scientific realism has splintered into a variety of different positions
each being vigorously attacked not only by anti-realists but also by other realists.
Accordingly, prominent voices have pointed out that the debate between realists and
anti-realists has come to a “stalemate” (cf., e.g., Chakravartty 2018, 233; Forbes 2017,
3327; Frost-Arnold 2010, 56).
So where does this leave us? In recent debates, a new version of realism has emerged
that is distinct from traditional versions of realism as well as from new versions of
selective realism. This is perspectival realism or scientific perspectivism, in short,
perspectivism. Its focus is not on certain parts of scientific theories (as it is the case
for selective realism) but it aims at rethinking the nature and scope of scientific theories
and models. The main works promoting perspectivism are Giere 2006, Massimi 2012,
2018a, b, and Teller 2001, 2011. Proponents of perspectivism typically view their
position as a via media between objectivist realism and all forms of anti-realism.
However, there is no unified picture of perspectivism; different proponents of
perspectivism differ in their respective accounts. Here I will focus on the depiction of
perspectivism offered in Giere 2006 since it seems to be closest to the ideas developed
in the phenomenological tradition.
Giere contrasts his perspectival realism with what he calls objectivist realism:
I will be arguing that there is a kind of realism that applies to scientific claims that
is more limited than this full-blown objective realism. Thus, in the end, I wish to
reject objective realism but still maintain a kind of realism, a perspectival realism,
which I think better characterizes realism in science. For a perspectival realist, the
strongest claims a scientist can legitimately make are of a qualified, conditional
30 Page 2 of 27 European Journal for Philosophy of Science (2020) 10: 30
form: ‘According to this highly confirmed theory (or reliable instrument), the
world seems to be roughly such and such.’ There is no way legitimately to take
the further objectivist step and declare unconditionally: ‘This theory (or instru-
ment) provides us with a complete and literally correct picture of the world itself.’
(Giere 2006, 5f.)
Here we find three claims about scientific theories that Giere’s perspectivism subscribes
to and that he takes to be in opposition to objective realism.
& P1: Scientific theories are fallible.
& P2: Scientific theories cannot be interpreted literally in their entirety.
& P3: Scientific theories cannot provide a complete picture of the world.
However, P1 and P2 are well-accepted claims and do not constitute a distinctive version
of scientific realism. P1 is a claim any plausible form of scientific realism must accept.
P2, as we have seen above, is advocated by all proponents of selective realism.
Accordingly, what is distinctive about perspectivism should be encapsulated by P3. It
is to be noted that P3 is an interesting and controversial claim that has been explicitly
denied by prominent voices.1 Wilfrid Sellars expresses a widespread view within
analytic philosophy of science when he says:
But, speaking as a philosopher, I am quite prepared to say that the common sense
world of physical objects in Space and Time is unreal-that is, that there are no
such things. Or, to put it less paradoxically, that in the dimension of describing
and explaining the world, science is the measure of all things, of what is that it is,
and of what is not that it is not. (Sellars 1963, 173)
As we will see below, this attitude that the common sense world is mere illusion
and that science is the measure of reality, providing an exhaustive picture of all
there is, is the main target of Husserl’s phenomenological philosophy of science.
Sellars’ claim is also clearly opposed to P3. Let us take a closer look at how Giere
motivates P3.
Giere focuses on three sources of human knowledge, arguing that all three of them
only deliver perspectival knowledge. These three sources are color vision, scientific
observation, and scientific theories. Concerning color vision, Giere summarizes his line
of reasoning as follows:
For my purposes, maybe the most important feature of perspectives is that they
are always partial. When looking out at a scene, a typical human trichromat is
visually affected by only a narrow range of all the electromagnetic radiation
available. In particular, the nearby wavelengths in the ultraviolet and infrared are
1 De Caro lists several contemporary proponents of the view that “only one true and complete description of
the world exists, which is typically regarded as being offered by the natural sciences, especially physics” in
(De Caro 2020, 58).
Page 3 of 27 30European Journal for Philosophy of Science (2020) 10: 30
simply not visually detected. And of course there is no possibility of visually
detecting gamma rays or neutrinos. (Giere 2006, 35)
Giere is obviously right in stating that human color vision is perspectival in the sense of
being partial and incomplete. What we call light, i.e., the visible spectrum, is only a
very limited portion of the electromagnetic spectrum. The question is whether this is a
philosophically interesting fact that suggests preferring perspectival realism over ob-
jectivist realism. Before we turn to this question in more detail, let us have a look at
Giere’s further arguments based on his accounts of scientific observation and scientific
theories.
His argument for the genuinely perspectival character of scientific observation
resembles his argument concerning color vision.
Humans and various other electromagnetic detectors respond differently to dif-
ferent electromagnetic spectra. Moreover, humans and various other electromag-
netic detectors may face the same spectrum of electromagnetic radiation and yet
have different responses to it. In all cases, the response of any particular detector,
including a human, is a function of both the character of the particular electro-
magnetic spectrum encountered and the character of the detector. Each detector
views the electromagnetic world from its own perspective. Every observation is
perspectival in this sense. (Giere 2006, 48)
For Giere, scientific observation is observation via instruments. But scientific instru-
ments are structurally similar to human color vision in that human eyes as well as
scientific instruments only engage with a limited scope of the electromagnetic spec-
trum. How we perceive the world, what we observe, and what data we gain crucially
depends on the make-up of the respective methods we use to observe. Giere illustrates
this by discussing how different types of telescopes produce very different images of
the Milky Way (Giere 2006, 45–49).
The problem with Giere’s line of reasoning, as discussed so far, is that when we look
at the examples he discusses, it remains unclear why there should be a clash with
standard or objectivist scientific realism. What is the distinctive claim of perspectivism,
embodied by the examples Giere provides, that standard forms of scientific realism
must reject? Objectivist realists can clearly accept the fact that human vision and
scientific observation only reveal limited aspects of nature. What they would insist
on, however, is that the physical objects in question objectively and truly have the
features ascribed to them. So when we say that from perspective X the object O has the
feature F1 and from perspective Y the same object O has the feature F2, but F1 and F2
are not inconsistent, then there is no problem for objectivist realism.
In this context, Chakravartty indicates that in order to be interesting and at odds with
realism, perspectivism must amount to “one or another form of relativism”
(Chakravartty 2010, 406). However, this objection is problematic since Giere explicitly
rejects “the unanalyzed assumption that a robust scientific realism must be objectivist
realism because otherwise it slides into constructivism or relativism” (Giere 2006, 92).
The problem is that Giere is not very precise in specifying the distinctive feature of
30 Page 4 of 27 European Journal for Philosophy of Science (2020) 10: 30
perspectival realism that makes his form of realism non-objectivist but also non-
relativist.
Chakravartty aims at clarification by making the following distinction:
As a philosophically controversial thesis, then, perspectivism would seem to take
the form of either one or possibly both of the following claims: (In the sciences,
in connection with representations such as theories and models, ...)
P1. We have knowledge of perspectival facts only, because non-perspectival facts
are beyond our epistemic grasp.
P2. We have knowledge of perspectival facts only, because there are no non-
perspectival facts to be known. (Chakravartty 2010, 407)
Chakravartty argues that none of the arguments and examples Giere provides support
either of these strong theses. What is more, Chakravartty claims that there are simple
counter-examples to P1 and P2. Such counter-examples are any facts that are intrinsi-
cally non-perspectival and can be known via scientific observation. “It is a non-
perspectival fact about charged bodies, for example, that they exert electrostatic forces
on other charged bodies” (Chakravartty 2010, 407).
It is hard to tell how Giere would respond to such examples. This is because Giere does
not talk in terms of facts. Terms such as “scientific fact” or “perspectival fact” do not occur in
Giere 2006. Instead, he stresses that scientific knowledge is always incomplete. With respect
to naked-eye observation and scientific observation, he argues that they are always partial in
the sense that they only capture certain aspects of the observed object as they appear from a
certain perspective. This is a plausible claim. Importantly, this claim is not at odds with the
claim that there are objective facts and that we can have knowledge of these facts. From my
perspective, it appears that there is a laptop on my desk, this visual experience justifies me in
believing that there is laptop on my desk, and it is objectively true that there is a laptop on my
desk. We can think of similar examples regarding scientific observations. Accordingly,
Giere’s claim that observation is perspectival and never provides a complete picture of the
observed is not at odds with realism.
However, we can see how Giere’s perspectivism might be at odds with objectivist
realism. By objectivist realism, apparently, Giere understands the view that the sciences
deliver a complete picture of the world that is free from all subjective factors. It is not
only the case that the world really has the features ascribed to it by science, there is
nothing to know about the world over and above what is described by our best
(possible) scientific theories. This means that when Giere discusses the perspectival
character of scientific theories (Giere 2006, chapter 4), he argues that scientific theories
are systematically similar to color vision and scientific observation. Unfortunately,
Giere’s discussion of scientific theories is a bit messy. He captures the basic claim
“that theoretical claims are also perspectival” in many different ways, suggesting many
nonequivalent formulations and theses. Although he provides a general picture, the
individual theses are not fleshed out in much detail. It would go beyond the scope of the
present paper to discuss these controversial theses in detail. In what follows in this
section, I will list some of these theses that I consider particularly interesting. In what
follows in this paper, I will show what role these claims play in the phenomenological
tradition.
Page 5 of 27 30European Journal for Philosophy of Science (2020) 10: 30
(T1) Science itself is only a certain perspective we can have on the world. To
describe or explain certain phenomena by virtue of a scientific theory, means to adopt a
scientific perspective.2
(T2) Science and scientific theories can never deliver an exhaustive account of the
world.3
(T3) If two scientific theories are inconsistent with each other, it does not follow that
at least one of them is false. They might both shed light on different aspects of nature
(cf. Giere 2006, 62, 94).
(T4) There is not and there cannot be one all-encompassing scientific theory to
which all the other scientific theories can be reduced.
(T5) Science cannot be totally detached from the scientist who is doing science.4
In the following section, I will shed light on Husserl’s conception of horizontal
intentionality, highlighting systematic similarities to Giere’s account of the perspectival
character of observation. In Sect. 3, I illustrate that the claims T1, T2, and T5 play
important roles in the phenomenological tradition. In Sect. 4, I discuss Merleau-Ponty’s
partial realism that can be considered a radicalization of T5.
2 Horizontal intentionality
As elaborated in the previous section, many philosophers of science have sympathies
for the project of introducing a new approach to the scientific realism debate that forges
a middle way between traditional forms of scientific realism and anti-realism. One such
approach is perspectivism. Although different proponents of perspectivism differ in
their respective characterizations of perspectivism, the common idea is that scientific
knowledge is necessarily partial and incomplete. This epistemological claim can be
supplemented by the stronger ontological thesis that the world itself is perspectival in
the sense that at least some scientific facts are perspectival. Also, one can supplement it
with the strong methodological claim that science must become aware of the fact that it
is an agent-based endeavor in that it incorporates the first-person perspective into
science. Science must incorporate the scientist into science.5
Perspectivism is a new position in recent debates but surely it has its forerunners.
Massimi, for instance, points out that perspectivism “has a distinguished philosophical
pedigree back to Leibniz, Kant, Nietzsche, and even Wittgenstein” (Massimi 2012, 25;
cf. also Teller 2020). Matthew Brown argues that similar ideas can be found in
Feyerabend and Dewey (Brown 2009; cf. also Giere 2016). Obviously, there are
important similarities to ideas we find in Kuhn (Giere 2006, 2013) and in Putnam
(De Caro 2020; Massimi 2018b).6 Interestingly, to my knowledge, there exists no work
2 “But surely, it will be objected, scientists draw conclusions going beyond their instrumentation. Indeed they
do. But they do so only by moving to a broader theoretical perspective” (Giere 2006, 49).
3 “My reply is that theoretical claims are also perspectival. The basic idea is that conception is a lot like
perception, or, that theorizing is a lot like observing. More specifically, in creating theories, I will argue,
scientists create perspectives within which to conceive of aspects of the world” (Giere 2006, 50).
4 “[T]he picture of science that emerges is an agent-based picture” (Giere 2006, 63). Cf. also Giere 2010.
5 We will revisit this distinction between methodological and ontological claims towards the end of Sect. 4.
6 “Like Putnam’s internal realism, perspectivism too is reacting against metaphysical realism and the so-called
God’s eye view […] There cannot be an objective, unique, true description of the way the world is as soon as
we acknowledge that our scientific knowledge is always from a specific vantage point” (Massimi 2018b, 165).
30 Page 6 of 27 European Journal for Philosophy of Science (2020) 10: 30
that discusses similarities to the phenomenological tradition.7 This is surprising because
here one can find systematically similar ideas and even a very similar terminology. It is
startling because early modern physics was noticeably influenced by phenomenological
ideas.8 And it is unfortunate because the analysis of perspectival approaches in the
phenomenological tradition can help us to get a more nuanced understanding of
different forms of perspectivism. The main objective of this paper is historical: to show
that in the phenomenological tradition one finds a well-elaborated philosophy of
science that shares important similarities with current versions of perspectivism. How-
ever, there is also a systematic value in shedding light on the philosophy of science in
the phenomenological tradition because it helps us to gain a better understanding of the
distinctive claims of perspectivism and to distinguish various grades of perspectivism.
Since it is one of the main problems of current perspectivism to make clear how exactly
it differs from standard forms of realism or anti-realism, the present elaboration can
contribute to a better understanding of the distinctiveness of perspectivism. We will
start with claims shared by most phenomenologists (Sect. 3) and see how these ideas
can be radicalized (Sect. 4).
This section discusses Husserl’s conception of horizontal intentionality, clarifying to
what degree it is in agreement with Giere’s analysis of the partial nature of observation.
We will also get a first glimpse of the phenomenological doctrine that there is no view
from nowhere available, not even to science.
One of Husserl’s main contributions to a proper phenomenological analysis of
perceptual experience is his disclosure of what he calls the horizontal structure of
experience. Perceptual experiences go beyond what is directly given.9 When you look
at the laptop in front of you, your experience presents to you the laptop’s screen, case,
keyboard, etc. Your experience has a presentive or in Husserl’s terminology a self-
giving character with respect to these aspects of your laptop. But your perceptual
experience does not only intend these directly perceived aspects. What is co-given to
you within experience is the laptop’s back, that its back has certain properties such as a
smooth surface, that it also has a smooth underside, etc. You do not actually see the
back or underside of your laptop but they are co-intended aspects of your experience.
Furthermore, the laptop is not experienced as an isolated object but as embedded in a
surrounding world. Even if your attention is solely directed at the laptop, it is part of
your experience that the laptop does not float around in nothingness, but is placed on a
desk, which in turn stands on the floor here in your office at the department of your
university in your hometown and so on. In Husserl’s terminology, these co-given
objects (desk, floor, etc.) are part of the outer horizon of your experience. The hidden
but co-intended aspects of the object itself (the laptop) are part of the inner horizon of
7 Two new volumes on perspectivim were published in 2020 (Cretu & Massimi 2020; Massimi & McCoy
2020). None of the contributions addresses the phenomenological tradition.
8 For instance, Husserl’s phenomenology had a great influence on Hermann Weyl and the development of his
gauge principle (cf. Ryckman 2005; and Ryckman forthcoming).
9 Here, many of Husserl’s insights are in agreement with the findings of early experimental psychologists such
as Gestalt psychologists and the members of the Graz school. These ideas have been picked up in the recent
movement of experimental phenomenology (cf. Albertazzi 2013). Although neglected for a long time, in the
analytic tradition, there have recently been attempts to capture this distinctive character of perceptual
experiences (e.g., Church 2013, 50). Particularly notable works in this context that blur the artificial distinction
between analytic philosophy and phenomenology are Madary 2017; Smith 2010.
Page 7 of 27 30European Journal for Philosophy of Science (2020) 10: 30
your experience (Husserl 1972, 28). Husserl characterizes the perspectival character of
perception as follows:
Of necessity a physical thing can be given only ‘one-sidedly;’ […] A physical
thing is necessarily given in mere ‘modes of appearance’ in which necessarily a
core of ‘what is actually presented’ is apprehended as being surrounded by a
horizon of ‘co-givenness,’ which is not givenness proper. (Husserl 1982, 94).
This means that perception always “implies a plus ultra” (Husserl 2001, 48). According
to Husserl, the perspectival character and horizontal structure of perception is not
simply a result of the imperfection of human beings but an essential property of
perception. Not even a god could change that perceptual experiences present their
physical objects always in perspectives (Husserl 1982, 95).
When Husserl illuminates the perspectival character of perception, he not only
stresses that perception is incomplete but also that physical objects in perception always
appear from a certain point of view.
All orientation is thereby related to a null-point of orientation, or a null-thing, a
function which my own body has, the body of the perceiver. And again, the
perspectival mode of givenness of every perceptual thing and of each of its
perceptual determinations – on the other hand, also of the entire unitary field of
perception, that of the total spatial perception – is something new. The differences
of perspective clearly are inseparably connected with the subjective differences of
orientation and of the modes of givenness in sides.10 (Husserl 1977, 121)
A further aspect of perception is that previous experiences shape the way we perceive.
Perception is not a faculty that allows us to see the world as it is objectively,
independent from our history, background beliefs, etc. To put it differently, “experience
is not an opening through which a world, existing prior to all experience, shines into a
room of consciousness; it is not a mere taking of something alien to consciousness into
consciousness” (Husserl 1969, 232). This aspect of perception is closely related to
discussions about the theory-ladenness of perception.
Obviously, there are many similarities between Husserl’s conception of horizontal
intentionality and Giere’s analysis of perception. For Giere, human perception is always
incomplete because we only engage with a restricted part of the electromagnetic
spectrum. For Husserl, perception is essentially incomplete because it presents its
objects only one-sidedly and from a specific perspective. What is more, perception is
shaped by subjective factors such as one’s history, culture, or previous experiences. It
should be noted, however, that there are also crucial differences between Husserl and
Giere. Husserl aims at making a general point about perceptual experiences based on
10 A similar remark can be found in Husserl 1973, 116 f. It is interesting to see that the phenomenologically
minded mathematician and physicist Hermann Weyl, father of the gauge principle which is one of the
cornerstones of modern physics, basically makes the same claim, intentionally using phenomenological
terminology (quoted and discussed in Ryckman 2005, 131).
30 Page 8 of 27 European Journal for Philosophy of Science (2020) 10: 30
descriptive phenomenological reflection. For Husserl, it is essentially (a priori) true that
the object of a perceptual experience, i.e., a physical object extended in space, can only
be given perspectivally. Giere’s reasoning, on the other hand, is based on results of the
empirical sciences, particularly on how human eyes interact with the electromagnetic
spectrum. Notwithstanding the differences in scope and methodology, this might be a
good example where phenomenological and empirical investigations come to similar
conclusions, thereby complementing each other.
Although perceptual experiences are necessarily perspectival and also shaped by
previous experiences and further subjective factors, for Husserl this does not mean that
perception cannot be a source of epistemic justification. In fact, for Husserl, perceptual
experiences are the prime examples of sources of justification. According to Husserlian
phenomenology, epistemology is intrinsically linked to the study of the intentional
structures of consciousness. The most fundamental epistemological question turns out
to be how subjectivity can be the source of knowledge (cf. Melle in Husserl 1984, page
XXXI). Subjectivity is not only at the center of epistemology because justification is
always justification for a subject. More importantly, justification is gained through
subjective acts: “Subjective acts motivate everything” (Husserl 1984, 121). Here
“subjective acts” simply means intentionally directed mental states of a subject. But
which acts are justification-conferring? The answer is experiences. More precisely,
those mental states that have a presentive character, that present their objects in an
intuitive (“anschaulich”) manner. For Husserl, this not only includes perceptual expe-
riences but also, e.g., introspective intuitions and a priori intuitions (for more details on
Husserl’s conception of experiential justification, cf. Berghofer 2018a, 2020). As we
have seen above, although Husserl regards experiences as a source of immediate
justification, he is well aware that experiences are not windows to the world through
which we see how the world is in itself thoroughly objectively. Instead, experiences
present their objects in a certain way that at least partly depends on subjective factors
such as previous experiences, background beliefs, etc. In this context, Husserl empha-
sizes the role of transcendental subjectivity.
Every imaginable sense, every imaginable being, whether the latter is called
immanent or transcendent, falls within the domain of transcendental subjectivity,
as the subjectivity that constitutes sense and being. The attempt to conceive the
universe of true being as something lying outside the universe of possible
consciousness, possible knowledge, possible evidence, the two being related to
one another merely externally by a rigid law, is nonsensical. They belong together
essentially; and, as belonging together essentially, they are also concretely one,
one in the only absolute concretion: transcendental subjectivity. If transcendental
subjectivity is the universe of possible sense, then an outside is precisely –
nonsense. (Husserl 1960, 84)
Passages like this have led to much controversy in Husserl scholarship, some
interpreting this as a methodological claim (as I do), others interpreting it as a
commitment to metaphysical idealism. For our purpose, it suffices to note that for
Husserl a view from nowhere at the world is in principle impossible. This is true not
only for our perceptual encounter with the world but also for our scientific encounter.
Page 9 of 27 30European Journal for Philosophy of Science (2020) 10: 30
3 The scientific perspective
Husserl’s main work concerning philosophy of science is his The Crisis of European
Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology. According to Husserl, the success of
modern science (beginning with Galileo), i.e., the success of mathematizing and
quantizing nature, has led to several misunderstandings. Firstly, it made scientists, as
well as philosophers, believe that the methods of science are the only legitimate forms
of gaining knowledge. Husserl opposes this methodological naturalism that implies that
even philosophy must proceed like a natural science. Secondly, Husserl bemoans that
due to the objectivism of modern age it has become commonplace to take the
mathematical models and formulae to be the true reality, while the life-world, the world
of our everyday experiences, the world of tables and chairs, is demoted to some kind of
illusion (cf. particularly Husserl 1970, 48–53).11 Husserl emphasizes that mathematics
and geometry are only methods to describe physical reality, they are not the “true”
reality lying behind what we can intuitively (“anschaulich”) observe. What he criticizes
is that scientists and philosophers seem to have forgotten this and tend to confuse what
is a method with what is reality. He stresses that the life-world serves as the epistemic
grounding12 and the meaning-foundation of all scientific activities.13
Husserl’s conception of the life-world proved useful in many contexts and his thesis
that the life-world remains the epistemic foundation for any scientific theory should be
particularly interesting to proponents of perspectivism.14 However, if you wish to
abstain from using the terminology of a life-world, the basic idea remains that no
matter how abstract your scientific theories are, their justification, ultimately, lies in
ordinary experiences, in what is immediately given. In Husserl’s words, “the inductive
scientific judging” of the “exact objective sciences that by going beyond the immedi-
ately experienced deduces the non-experienced is always dependent on its ultimate
legitimizing basis, on the immediate data of experience” (Husserl 1973, 121; my
translation).
To be sure, Husserl neither criticizes science per se nor its methods. And, of course,
he does not dispute its success. The sciences, particularly physics, are extremely
11 Following Jeffrey Barrett (Barrett 1999, 116), Huggett and Wüthrich recently defined “a theory to be
empirically incoherent in case the truth of the theory undermines our empirical justification for believing it to
be true” (Huggett & Wüthrich 2013, 277). Hence, if the life-world is the epistemic foundation of mathematical
physics, but mathematical physics is interpreted as revealing that the life-world is a mere illusion, this
interpretation of physics is empirically incoherent. Note that this is not to say that our ordinary world of
tables and chairs is ontologically fundamental. It may well be that physics reveals that our ordinary world is, so
to speak, an emergent world, emerging from more fundamental physics such as quantum field theory. For
similar discussions in the philosophy of quantum gravity of what it would mean for the very endeavor of
physics if it turned out that space and time are not fundamental, cf. Huggett & Wüthrich 2013; Oriti 2014. We
must not forget that “[a] central concern of philosophy of science is understanding how the theoretical
connects to the empirical, the nature and significance of ‘saving the phenomena’” (Huggett & Wüthrich
2013, 276).
12 “Straightforward experience, in which the life-world is given, is the ultimate foundation of all objective
knowledge” (Husserl 1970, 226).
13 “But the researcher of nature does not make clear to himself that the constant fundament of his – after all
subjective – work of thought is the surrounding life-world; it is always presupposed as the ground, as the field
of work upon which alone his questions, his methods of thought, make sense” (Husserl 1970, 295).
14 Giere states that Jakob von Uexkull’s conception of Umwelt “is a more elaborate version of what I am
calling a perspective” (Giere 2006, 36). He notes that “this term is borrowed from Husserl, or at least related to
Husserl’s use of this term, but I am not in a position to explore this possible connection” (Giere 2006, 123).
30 Page 10 of 27 European Journal for Philosophy of Science (2020) 10: 30
successful in what they are doing. However, he criticizes the conclusions naturalists and
objectivist realists draw from the success of science. According to Husserl, the scien-
tific method is not the only method of gaining knowledge, science does not provide an
exhaustive picture of nature, and science is not completely independent from subjective
factors.
Edith Stein, one of Husserl’s foremost pupils, put it this way: “What physics [...]
reveals pertains to the real nature but it never exhausts nature. And what evades the web
of mathematical formulas is not less ‘real’ than what is captured by mathematics” (Stein
2004, 62). Here we find three motifs that are typical for a phenomenology of physics.
First, phenomenology does not dispute the success of physics, neither does it object to
the implementation of mathematics. Secondly, however, the mathematical picture
delivered by physics only reveals one perspective of nature.15 Even if we manage to
get a mathematical grip on nature, what we gain from this can never be an exhaustive
picture of nature. “We have seen that the methods of the exact natural sciences do not
capture reality in its totality, instead they are only concerned with certain sides of
nature” (Stein 2004, 73).16 Thirdly, not being mathematizable does not imply not being
real. This is not only true for certain aspects of nature but also for totally different
entities including values, essences, and consciousness. Mathematics is extremely useful
in physics but this does not imply that any science (including philosophy, value theory,
etc.) must attempt to mathematize its objects.
The idea that scientific knowledge is perspectival and dependent upon the scientist’s
experiences and life-world features also prominently in the work of Merleau-Ponty.
“Everything that I know about the world, even through science, I know from a
perspective that is my own or from an experience of the world without which scientific
symbols would be meaningless. The entire universe of science is constructed upon the
lived world” (Merleau-Ponty 2012, lxxii).
Importantly, such phenomenological reflections on the basic epistemic role of the
life-world are supported by recent conceptions of agent-based modeling (Giere 2010)
and by experimental results concerning the relationship between perceptual and con-
ceptual learning (Landy & Goldstone 2007). The upshot is as follows: All we know
about the physical world, we know, ultimately, by way of perceptual experiences. But
our experiences do not constitute some magical purely objective view from nowhere.
Our experiences are shaped by previous experiences as well as by our beliefs and
expectations. What is more, perceptual experiences affect our concept formation and
symbolic thinking, and the concepts we use, in turn, affect our experiences. Accord-
ingly, when we do physics, when we establish a mathematical model that is intention-
ally directed at the world, we do not have a purely objective mathematical model on the
one hand and objective reality on the other hand. Instead, on both sides we have models
influenced by subjective factors.
15 “Any understanding of reality is by definition perspectival. Effacing our perspective does not bring us any
closer to the world. It merely prevents us from understanding anything about the world at all.” (Zahavi 2019,
28)
16 “Phenomenology is not out to dispute the value of science and is not denying that scientific investigations
can lead to new insights and expand our understanding of reality. But phenomenologists do reject the idea that
natural science can provide an exhaustive account of reality. Importantly, this does not entail that phenome-
nology is, as such, opposed to quantitative methods and studies. The latter are excellent, but only when
addressing quantitative questions.” (Zahavi 2019, 52)
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Referring to a famous example put forward by Arthur Eddington (Eddington
1928, ixf.), I may exemplify the above as follows: Looking at this table in front of
me is a perceptual act (precisely but perspectivally) directed at this table in front
of me. A physical-mathematical model of this table, describing its atomic structure
etc., is also (precisely but perspectivally) directed at this table. Both are legitimate
ways of being intentionally directed at the table, each elucidating different aspects
of the same object.17 They complement each other and in certain ways they
influence each other. They are both legitimate perspectives, one of them being
epistemologically more fundamental. It is our everyday experience that is episte-
mologically more fundamental because this is the one from which our mathemat-
ical model arises and the one the mathematical model, ultimately, must conform
to.18
We know from Mirja Hartimo’s analysis of Husserl’s private library that Husserl was
not only interested in modern physics but that he studied it in great detail (Hartimo
2018). However, Husserl never practiced philosophy of physics in a narrow sense. He
never engaged with, say general relativity, to draw philosophical conclusions. And he
never attempted a phenomenological interpretation or grounding of general relativity or
quantum mechanics.19 This is a bit surprising since many physicists, as well as many
philosophers of physics, believe that the downfall of classical mechanics and the rise of
general relativity and particularly quantum mechanics support key ideas of Husserl’s
phenomenology of science.20
Concerning general relativity, Merleau-Ponty states:
The physics of relativity confirms that absolute and final objectivity is a mere
dream by showing how each particular observation is strictly linked to the
location of the observer and cannot be abstracted from this particular situation;
it also rejects the notion of an absolute observer. We can no longer flatter
ourselves with the idea that, in science, the exercise of a pure and unsituated
17 A similar approach to Eddington’s example has been championed by Putnam, who explicitly refers to
Husserl in this context (Putnam 1987). Cf. De Caro 2020 for affinities between Putnam and perspectivism. Cf.
Zahavi 2004 for affinities between Putnam and the phenomenological tradition.
18 One might argue that while the life-world-perspective is epistemologically more fundamental than the
scientific perspective, the scientific perspective reveals ontologically more fundamental aspects in the sense
that ordinary objects such as tables and chairs somehow emerge from elementary particles and quantum fields.
I see no reason why phenomenologists should deny such a claim.
19 We do know, however, that Husserl was greatly interested in such a project. This is why he supported the
work of his pupil Oskar Becker who aimed precisely at a phenomenological grounding of general relativity. In
a letter to Weyl, Husserl wrote: “It [Becker’s Habilitation] is nothing less than a synthesis of Einstein’s and
yours discoveries with my phenomenological investigations on nature. […] What will Einstein say when it is
shown that nature requires a relativity-theoretical structure on the a priori grounds of phenomenology and not
on positivistic principles, and that only in this way a completely understandable, and ultimately exact, science
is possible.” (Husserl in Mancosu & Ryckman 2005, 160 f.)
20 The classical phenomenologists most explicitly arguing that phenomenology and modern physics can in
one way or another complement each other are Oskar Becker and Merleau-Ponty. Hermann Weyl and Fritz
London are notable figures in early modern physics making similar claims. For phenomenological motifs in
Hermann Weyl’s development of the gauge principle, cf. Ryckman 2005 and Ryckman forthcoming; for
phenomenological motifs in Fritz London’s interpretation of quantum mechanics, cf. French 2002 and French
forthcoming.
30 Page 12 of 27 European Journal for Philosophy of Science (2020) 10: 30
intellect can allow us to gain access to an object free of all human traces, just as
God would see it. This does not make the need for scientific research any less
pressing; in fact, the only thing under attack is the dogmatism of a science that
thinks itself capable of absolute and complete knowledge. We are simply doing
justice to each of the variety of elements in human experience and, in particular,
to sensory perception. (Merleau-Ponty 2004, 44f.)
It is to be noted that Merleau-Ponty’s remark is misleading since in the theory of
relativity observation is not linked to the location of the observer but to the frame
of reference of the observer.21 The principle of relativity implies that there is no
privileged frame of reference; the laws of physics are the same in all inertial
frames of reference. Special relativity is built upon the principle of relativity (first
postulate) and the postulate that in a vacuum the speed of light is constant for all
observers. Together, these two postulates have several implications that show that
some of the facts that we usually consider to be “objective” are in fact observer-
dependent. For instance, special relativity implies the relativity of simultaneity: It
depends on the observer’s frame of reference whether two events separated in
space occur at the same time. There is no objective or absolute sense in which we
could tell that two spatially separate events take place simultaneously. When we
turn to general relativity, we see that space and time are not absolute, not a fixed
background, but that the geometry of spacetime itself is influenced by what is
going on within spacetime, namely by the energy-momentum of matter. This
means that there is a reciprocal relationship between spacetime and what it
contains (including the embodied observer).22
All this deserves phenomenological reflections on its own, but the theory of
relativity is no focus of this paper. Instead, in the following two sections, we will
address how perspectivist and phenomenological approaches to science relate to
quantum mechanics. This focus on quantum mechanics arises naturally because when
Merleau-Ponty spells out his phenomenological perspectivism, he crucially draws on
quantum mechanics. Among the most famous of the classical phenomenologists
(Husserl, Scheler, Heidegger, Stein, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty), Merleau-Ponty was the
one most explicitly engaging with the natural sciences. He believed that modern
physics supports phenomenological approaches to science and reality and although
he also engaged with the theory of relativity, he believed that quantum mechanics best
supports phenomenological approaches. In the following section, we shed light on
Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of physics, emphasizing how he radicalizes ideas we
find in Husserl. In the final section, we shall see that there are interesting systematic
similarities between ideas we find in Merleau-Ponty and a current popular interpreta-
tion of quantum mechanics.
21 I am thankful to an anonymous referee of this journal for pressing me on making this clarification.
22 As a side note, it has been argued that general covariance in general relativity (and more precisely gauge
invariance in a broader context) “is an indication of the relational character of fundamental observables in
physics” (Rovelli 2014, 103). It would be worthwhile to discuss whether general covariance and gauge
invariance support perspectivist and phenomenological approaches.
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4 Merleau-Ponty’s partial realism
Merleau-Ponty has a reputation for having deeply cared about the natural sciences, particularly
psychology. This makes him a promising and popular point of origin for many contemporary
phenomenologists working on the interface to psychology and the cognitive sciences. It is less
well known, however, that he also explicitly addressed physics, contemplating how philosophy
and physics can enrich each other and what a phenomenologically grounded physics may look
like. This is particularly true for his “Modern Science and Nature” which is part of the lecture
courses published in La Nature. Here, Merleau-Ponty carefully engages with quantum me-
chanics, outlining his phenomenological approach to physics.
Merleau-Ponty discusses the limits of objectivity and aims at a physics that takes into
consideration the physicist who observes and experiments. He believes that modern physics,
particularly quantum mechanics, exemplifies or at least leads to a new kind of science that
engages in self-criticism, reflectively addressing its relationship to the objects it studies
(Merleau-Ponty 2003, 85). In this context, he discusses and draws on the interpretation of
measurement in quantum mechanics delivered by London and Bauer (London & Bauer
1939; 1983) that was itself heavily influenced by Husserl’s phenomenology.23
For Merleau-Ponty, physics in its most perfected form abandons the idea of deliv-
ering a completely objective picture of the world. Instead, physics needs to put the
physicist into physics and account for the fact that the life-world predates all scientific
endeavors. In his words:
But a physics that has learned to situate the physicist physically, a psychology
that has learned to situate the psychologist in the socio-historical world, have lost
the illusion of the absolute view from above: they do not only tolerate, they enjoin
a radical examination of our belongingness to the world before all science.
(Merleau-Ponty 1968, 27)
There is an increasing number of philosophers and physicists who insist “that imme-
diate experience and the world can never be separated” and agree that science cannot
“give us a complete, objective description of cosmic history, distinct from us and our
perception of it.”24 Doubting “that the physical object in itself” pre-exists physics,
23 This monograph of London and Bauer basically has two objectives: First, to provide a “concise and simple”
(London & Bauer 1983, 219) account of the measurement problem in the spirit of von Neumann’s ground-
breaking Mathematische Grundlagen der Quantenmechanik (1932). Providing the axiomatic foundations of
quantum mechanics, von Neumann’s book was one of the most influential works of early quantum mechanics.
London and Bauer were in broad agreement with von Neumann. They did not understand their monograph as
a counter project but as a more accessible version of von Neumann’s highly technical work which was written
in German. Secondly, London and Bauer shed more light on the relationship between the observed and the
observer, aiming at clarifying the role of consciousness in quantum measurement. In perfect agreement with
Merleau-Ponty they hold that modern physics reveals that “the idea of an observable world totally independent
of the observer, was a vacuous idea” (London & Bauer 1983, 220). For an analysis of the phenomenological
motifs in Fritz London’s approach to quantum mechanics and for how this approach can serve as a starting
point for a genuinely phenomenological interpretation of quantum mechanics, cf. French 2002 and particularly
French forthcoming.
24 The quoted article by Adam Frank, Marcelo Gleiser, and Evan Thompson is a great example: https://aeon.
co/essays/the-blind-spot-of-science-is-the-neglect-of-lived-experience?fbclid=IwAR1QpuiKEPuaE3aH37
xTZA6bhHs9vstxBXt_Znw84NFkSEBdj389BuAirsA. Retrieved on February 13, 2020.
30 Page 14 of 27 European Journal for Philosophy of Science (2020) 10: 30
https://doi.org/http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
https://doi.org/http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
https://doi.org/http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Merleau-Ponty considers the “relations between the observer and the observed” to be
the “ultimate physical beings” (Merleau-Ponty 1968, 15). Underpinned by the London
& Bauer account of quantum mechanics, he doubts “the idea that every object has an
individual existence,” and instead refers to physical objects as “generic realities”
(Merleau-Ponty 2003, 92).
Furthermore, he explicitly addresses one of the most important questions of philos-
ophy of science: What do we observe in scientific measurements? Of course, this
question is particularly pressing in quantum mechanics. Contrasting the role of the
measuring apparatus in classical physics and quantum mechanics, Merleau-Ponty states
that while classically “the apparatus is the prolongation of our senses” in quantum
mechanics “[t]he apparatus does not present the object to us.” Instead, “[i]t realizes a
sampling of this phenomenon as well as a fixation. […] Known nature is artificial
nature” (Merleau-Ponty 2003, 93).
Unfortunately, Merleau-Ponty does not offer a detailed and sophisticated analysis
of what is “artificial” about quantum measurements. In general, in his discussion of
quantum mechanics we find much that is inspiring and helpful but his remarks are
often vague and in order to advance current debates we would need a more precise
analysis of how quantum mechanics supports perspectivist and phenomenological
approaches. The next section is intended to make a step towards this goal. This being
said, I believe that Merleau-Ponty is right and that there is a fundamental difference
between looking through telescopes or microscopes on the one hand and using
measuring devices in quantum mechanics on the other hand. In the case of telescopes
and microscopes, there is a rather straightforward sense in which we directly observe
the object in question. But it would be quite a stretch to say that the same is true when
looking at the photographs gained by cloud chambers and bubble chambers that
visualize the tracks of charged particles.25 What is more, while cloud chambers and
bubble chambers have a photographic readout, the devices that are now common,
such as particle colliders like the LHC, have a purely electronic readout. What we
gain from LHC experiments is data – big data. “Data pours out of the LHC detectors
at a blistering rate. Even after filtering out 99% of it, in 2018 we gathered 88
petabytes of data.”26 I do not say that there is anything genuinely problematic about
this process but it is a process that needs careful philosophical-phenomenological
reflection and it is a process that is far from delivering a purely objective picture of the
world.27
25 For a discussion of unobservable scientific entities from a phenomenological perspective, cf. Wiltsche 2012;
Berghofer 2018b.
26 . Retrieved on February 13, 2020. In this context, cf., e.g., Karaca 2017, 344.
27 For discussions of what kind of observation is taking place in LHC experiments, cf., e.g., Beauchemin
2017; Karaca 2017, 2018. Concerning the relationship between theory and observation, Beauchemin argues
that reflection on such big data experiments “indicates that the frontier between theory and observation is
blurry and that the dichotomy theory-experiment should be revised” (Beauchemin 2017, 275). Although
Beauchemin stresses the theory-ladenness of LHC experiments, he does not dispute the objectivity of the
corresponding empirical facts. Similarly, Karaca argues that “the exploratory data selection procedure carried
out in the ATLAS experiment is theory-laden in the sense that its implementation is crucially dependent on the
aforementioned theoretical models that the experiment is aimed to test” (Karaca 2017, 350; cf. also Karaca
2018, 5449), insisting, however, that no vicious circularity is happening there (Karaca 2018, 5450). Werner
Callebaut has explicitly argued that Giere’s perspectivism “provides the best resources currently at our disposal
to tackle many of the philosophical issues” surrounding big data biology (Callebaut 2012, 69).
Page 15 of 27 30European Journal for Philosophy of Science (2020) 10: 30
The point is that similar to Giere, Merleau-Ponty rejects the idea that scientific
observation provides us with an objective picture of nature. Of course, they differ in
their respective reasons for rejecting this idea. Giere emphasizes that scientific instru-
ments only engage with a limited aspect of nature. Merleau-Ponty seems to stress that
according to quantum mechanics the act of observing inevitably affects the observed
reality (e.g., when electrons, depending on the experimental setup, either behave like
particles or like waves).
Another important similarity to Giere is that Merleau-Ponty aims at establishing
a position that is in between objectivist realism and anti-realism, namely a version
of realism that rejects the ideal of providing a complete and purely objective view
of the world and that takes into account the subject that is doing science. To get a
better grip on Merleau-Ponty’s approach to the scientific realism debate, let us see
which positions he rejects. One might think that phenomenologists feel sympa-
thetic to instrumentalist accounts (and for some phenomenologists this is certainly
true), but Merleau-Ponty clearly opposes such views. Merleau-Ponty does not use
the term “instrumentalism,” but he introduces the following position:
Physics should not be conceived as a search for the truth, it should give up
determining a real physics: it would be only an ensemble of measurements
linked to equations, allowing [us] to foresee the result of future measure-
ments. Formalist physics receives all freedom, but it loses its ontological
content. It signifies no mode of being, no reality. (Merleau-Ponty 2003,
95f.)
This position, expressing the core ideas of instrumentalism, is rejected by him
without much argument. For Merleau-Ponty, it is clear that physics, correctly
interpreted, indeed tells us something significant about the nature of reality.
Physics is not a mere tool to make predictions, nor can reality be reduced to what
is measured and observed.
He goes on, drawing on the work of the French physicist and logician Paulette
Destouches-Fevrier, to point out that it would also be a mistake to adopt an
idealist position. The problem with idealism is that just like standard realism it
amounts to a form of objectivism. To be more precise, idealism is an objectivism
that “objectifies human representations” (Merleau-Ponty 2003, 96). Instead,
Merleau-Ponty is convinced that “[t]he relations between reality and measurement
must be conceived outside of the dichotomy of in-itself/representation” (Merleau-
Ponty 2003, 96). Acknowledging that “[p]hysics cannot be realist in the classical
sense” but “cannot be idealist, either,” Merleau-Ponty chooses to term his position
“a ‘partial realism’ or a ‘participationist’ conception” (Merleau-Ponty 2003, 97f.).
This terminology, adopted from Paulette Destouches-Fevrier, highlights the inter-
relatedness and inseparability of the observer and the observed. The term “partial
realism” emphasizes that although this view is not a traditional form of realism, it
is supposed to be some form of realism. Returning to our initial question of how
to place Merleau-Ponty in the scientific realism debate, we need to ask: which
form of realism? What are the fundamental objects of reality according to his
partial realism, his participationist conception?
30 Page 16 of 27 European Journal for Philosophy of Science (2020) 10: 30
In this context, he calls reality a “structural plane,” and continues by quoting a long
passage from Destouches-Fevrier.28 Here Destouches-Fevrier says that reality “tran-
scends the opposition object-subject.” The focus is on the “structural relations” between
subject and object. These structural relations “refer not to an object, but to certain
mathematical forms necessary for the description of the relation of the subject to the
object.” The ontological significance of the structural relations is highlighted by
pointing out that “they are independent of the results of the processes of measurement”
and by perhaps misleadingly comparing them “to the Platonic objectivity.”
(Destouches-Fevrier quoted in Merleau-Ponty 2003, 98).
Unfortunately, Merleau-Ponty does not do much to clarify or go beyond these
remarks of Destouches-Fevrier. However, in The Visible and the Invisible he holds that
modern physics is obliged “to recognize as ultimate physical beings in full right
relations between the observer and the observed” (Merleau-Ponty 1968, 15). In this
light, there is little doubt that Merleau-Ponty subscribes to the structuralist view drafted
by Destouches-Fevrier.
Accordingly, concerning our questions of how to understand the fundamental
objects of reality according to Merleau-Ponty’s partial realism, we get the following
answer: The fundamental objects are the structural relations between the observer and
the observed. These relations can neither be reduced to the objective nor to the
subjective. Reality transcends this opposition. Reality can only be understood or even
consists in the relations between the observer and the observed.29 Admittedly, all this
remains vague. However, in the next section, we shall see that there is a novel
interpretation of quantum mechanics that agrees with Merleau-Ponty that quantum
mechanics should be understood as revealing the fundamental relatedness between
subject and object: QBism. Before turning to a more substantial discussion of quantum
mechanics, let me briefly recapitulate and put into perspective what we have achieved
so far.
In Sect. 1, we have seen that for Giere science is an agent-based endeavor. This idea
is fleshed out by Husserl in terms of the life-world serving as the meaning-foundation
for all the individual sciences. Merleau-Ponty radicalizes this idea by making the
ontological claim that reality is in some sense observer-dependent (perhaps not neces-
sarily mind-dependent). Of course, phenomenologists are not committed to this strong
claim of observer-dependence, ontologically understood. Husserl argues that subjec-
tivity and subjective experiences constitute the source of all knowledge and justification
28 Unfortunately, in the English translation (Merleau-Ponty 2003, 98), the quotation marks are missing.
29 Merleau-Ponty’s partial realism denies the existence of individual observer-independent physical objects
and intrinsic properties. Instead, as we have seen, it regards the “structural relations” that refer “to certain
mathematical forms necessary for the description of the relation of the subject to the object” as the
fundamental entities. Accordingly, Merleau-Ponty’s partial realism has much common ground with structural
realism. In current debates, structural realism is a form of selective realism that focuses on the mathematical
structure of scientific theories. A distinction is made between epistemic and ontic structural realism. Broadly
speaking, while epistemic structural realism says that structures are all we can know, ontic structural realism
(OSR) says that structures are all there is. OSR enjoys much popularity and comes in many flavors, ranging
from the claim that objects (at the fundamental level) do not possess intrinsic properties to the eliminativist
version, according to which there are no objects but only structures (for more details, cf. Ladyman 2016;
Berghofer 2018c). Of course, the difference between Merleau-Ponty and proponents of OSR is that the latter
do not regard their structural relations as relations between subject and object. Proponents of OSR presuppose
the observer-independence of physical reality.
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but this is an epistemological claim and Husserl’s transcendental idealism can be
interpreted as a methodological-epistemological project free from strong metaphysical
implications. According to Husserl’s understanding of the mathematical sciences
including theoretical physics, these sciences strive for a maximum of objectivity by
looking at the world from the third-person perspective, mathematizing and quantizing
their target system. And although full objectivity can never be gained because the
scientists’ life-worlds remain the epistemic grounding and meaning-foundations for all
scientific theories, for Husserl there is nothing wrong with the individual sciences to
proceed in this manner.30 We only need to be careful in how to interpret scientific
theories and be aware of their limitations.31
Merleau-Ponty goes beyond such interpretational claims. There is at least one
methodological and one ontological claim he adds.32 The methodological claim is that
the sciences, particularly physics, must refrain from aiming at a purely objective
account of the world. Instead, they must incorporate the first-person perspective into
science. Only by doing so can science unveil the most fundamental structures of reality.
The ontological claim is that reality is essentially observer-dependent and that the
fundamental objects are relations between the observer and the observed. Merleau-
Ponty’s position seems to qualify as a version of perspectival realism since he rejects
objectivist realism and aims at a position in between objectivist realism and anti-
realism. Scientific theories are perspectival in the sense that they need to incorporate
the scientists’ relations to the objects. Scientific facts are perspectival in the sense that
they depend on, or, perhaps more accurately, consist of the scientists’ relations to the
objects.
Nevertheless, one might doubt that Merleau-Ponty’s partial realism is a form of
realism after all. This is because scientific realism is usually associated with an
ontological commitment to the mind-independence of reality. However, we have to
note, first, that Merleau-Ponty’s partial realism does not amount to a form of traditional
anti-realism (instrumentalism, idealism, constructivism) and, secondly and more im-
portantly, that Merleau-Ponty would strongly deny the anti-realist claim that the
sciences cannot tell us anything about the nature of reality. In this regard of aiming
to be in between standard versions of realism and anti-realism, Merleau-Ponty’s partial
realism shares significant similarities with QBism, classified by its chief advocate
Christopher Fuchs as a “participatory realism.” Fuchs insists that quantum mechanics
must be understood “as being part of a realist program, i.e., as an attempt to say
something about what the world is like, how it is put together, and what’s the stuff of it”
(Fuchs 2017, 117). Importantly, according to Fuchs, the conclusions he draws from
quantum mechanics are not something we need to artificially read into it. Quite the
30 However, it should be mentioned that there are some passages in Husserl’s oeuvre that suggest that physics
in its most elaborated form would successfully make the physicist and her life-world subjects of investigation,
abandoning the idea of a purely objective third-person perspective (Husserl 1970, 295; 2002, 287). It is not
entirely clear, however, whether here Husserl wants to say that physics must be phenomenologically clarified
so that physics (as it is) can be ultimately grounded and justified. Or whether his claim is to be understood in
the Merleau-Pontyan sense that physics can only succeed in its goal of clarifying nature if it succeeds in
incorporating the physicist into the physical theories.
31 “There is no pure third-person perspective, just as there is no view from nowhere. This is, of course, not to
say that there is no third-person perspective, but merely that such a perspective is, precisely, a perspective from
somewhere. It is a view that we can adopt on the world.” (Zahavi 2019, 54)
32 Cf. the beginning of section 2 for a similar distinction we made in the context of perspectivism.
30 Page 18 of 27 European Journal for Philosophy of Science (2020) 10: 30
contrary, “[q]uantum theory itself threw these considerations before us!” (Fuchs 2017,
115). This means we need to take quantum mechanics, its features and phenomena, at
face value and by doing so we learn something new about reality that was hidden in
classical physics.
I believe that this perfectly captures Merleau-Ponty’s attitude towards quantum
mechanics. Quantum mechanics does not deliver a purely objective view on the world
as the objectivist realist would have it; instead, quantum mechanics shows us that a
purely objective view on the world is impossible. Quantum mechanics does not
represent an observer-independent reality; instead, quantum mechanics calls into ques-
tion the idea that there is a purely observer-independent reality behind the phenomena.
How quantum mechanics might support perspectivist and phenomenological ap-
proaches to science and how QBism relates to Merleau-Ponty’s ideas are the topics
of the following section.
5 QBism
In quantum mechanics we find many concepts and phenomena that seem to support
perspectivist and phenomenological approaches to science and reality, undermining our
classical world-view. Determinism is called into question, Heisenberg’s uncertainty
principle imposes certain limitations on what we can know about reality, and comple-
mentarity and entanglement are often viewed as revealing that acts of measurement
necessarily affect observed reality. Particularly in the early days of quantum mechanics,
complementarity was considered the key feature of quantum mechanics and was
interpreted in a way that seems to support a perspectivist picture. Heisenberg summa-
rized the Copenhagen understanding of complementarity as follows:
By this term ‘complementarity’ Bohr intended to characterize the fact that the
same phenomenon can sometimes be described by very different, possibly even
contradictory pictures, which are complementary in the sense that both pictures
are necessary if the ‘quantum’ character of the phenomenon shall be made
visible. (Heisenberg 1977, 6)
Wave-particle duality and Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle are often considered the
most prominent manifestations of complementarity. Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle
famously says that with respect to complementary variables such as position and
momentum the more precisely we determine the one, the less we know about the other.
As Heisenberg himself noted this implies that “[e]ven in principle we cannot know the
present in all detail” (Heisenberg 1983, 83). Concerning measurements in quantum
mechanics, Frescura and Hiley express a common attitude among physicists when they
say that the issues surrounding complementarity imply
that not all aspects of a system can be viewed simultaneously. By using one
particular piece of apparatus only certain features could be made manifest at the
expense of others, while with a different piece of apparatus another
Page 19 of 27 30European Journal for Philosophy of Science (2020) 10: 30
complementary aspect could be made manifest in such a way that the original set
became non-manifest, that is, the original attributes were no longer well defined
(Frescura & Hiley 1984).
This claim that scientific instruments can only shed light on certain limited aspects of
reality is precisely the claim we find in Giere (2006, chapter 3) as discussed in section
1. However, concerning the examples discussed by Giere, one might argue that one
could simply add all the perspectives delivered by different instruments to gain one
complete picture of reality. Complementarity in quantum mechanics, on the other hand,
seems to impose even more rigorous limitations on scientific observations, revealing a
genuinely perspectival element of science that disallows gaining one complete picture
by adding different perspectives: An increase of information with respect to one set of
properties goes hand in hand with a decrease of information with respect to another set
of properties. In this picture, quantum mechanics reveals limits to objectivity in the
sense that our knowledge of quantum systems is necessarily perspectival, we can
always only know certain aspects, never nature in its entirety.
Of course, drawing such conclusions from quantum mechanics is a minefield since
there is no consensus on its ontological as well as epistemological implications.
Interpreting quantum mechanics, offering a solution to the notorious measurement
problem, is often considered the main topic of philosophy of physics. As a conse-
quence, there exist a number of different interpretations that lead to very different
pictures of reality. This is true also for the question of which conclusions to draw from
Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle (cf. Hilgevoord & Uffink 2016).33
Many open questions in quantum mechanics concern the wave function and its
apparent collapse. Is the wave function something that really exists or is it merely a
mathematical tool, useful to make predictions? Why is it that apparently the outcomes
of measurements are always definite states? Does the wave function collapse upon
measurement? If so, how and why? This is where so-called interpretations of quantum
mechanics usually come into play. Some of them, most notably Bohmian mechanics
and the many-worlds interpretation, preserve (in some sense and with some costs) the
deterministic picture we know from classical mechanics. Proponents of these interpre-
tations typically view the wave function as physically real and believe that quantum
mechanics provides an objective picture of reality. Other interpretations, such as
Rovelli’s relational interpretation (Rovelli 1996), Dieks’ perspectivalism (Dieks
2019a, 2019b), or Healey’s pragmatist approach (Healey 2012) in one way or another
contest the idea that physics delivers a purely objective picture of the world. One
interpretation in this camp that has gained particular attention recently is QBism. I shall
focus on QBism also because the ideas and the terminology we find here are particu-
larly close to what we found in Merleau-Ponty.
To be sure, I do not claim that perspectivists or phenomenologists must or should
subscribe to QBism. Nor do I argue that they are committed to any “subjective”
interpretation of quantum mechanics. However, QBism might be the interpretation that
most consistently promotes some of the ideas we find in phenomenology, which is why
33 However, it should be mentioned that even in deterministic Bohmian mechanics, “there are unavoidable
limitations to our knowledge of particles. In fact, once the wave function is prepared, there is an absolute
uncertainty regarding the positions of the particles” (Solé et al. 2016, 22).
30 Page 20 of 27 European Journal for Philosophy of Science (2020) 10: 30
it is worth considering it in more detail (cf. particularly Bitbol forthcoming and
Tremblaye forthcoming).
In QBism the agent and her experiences and expectations play a central role. The
distinctive idea of QBism is to apply a personalist Bayesian account of probability, as it
has been developed by Bruno de Finetti, to quantum probabilities. This means that
probabilities in quantum mechanics are interpreted not as objective but as subjective
probabilities. Accordingly, in QBism quantum states do not represent objective reality
but instead represent an agent’s subjective degrees of beliefs about her future experi-
ences. Consequently, the wave function is not physically real but a mathematical tool
that encodes one’s expectations about one’s future experiences. In short, QBism argues
that quantum states do “not represent an element of physical reality but an agent s
personal probability assignments, reflecting his subjective degrees of belief about the
future content of his experience” (Fuchs & Schack 2015, 1).
The first thing to note is that even opponents of any subjective interpretation of
quantum mechanics concede that such an account delivers a straightforward solution to
the notorious apparent collapse of the wave function. This is because any “approach
according to which the wave function is not something real, but represents a subjective
information, explains the collapse at quantum measurement perfectly: it is just a
process of updating the information the observer has” (Vaidman 2014, 17). To put it
differently, according to QBism “[t]he notorious ‘collapse of the wave-function’ is
nothing but the updating of an agent’s state assignment on the basis of her experience”
(Fuchs et al. 2014, 749). In this sense, QBism dissolves the measurement problem – the
problem does not even show up.34
A further advantage of QBism is that it avoids certain implausible consequences that
plague realist interpretations of the wave function. Mathematically speaking, wave functions
are vectors in a Hilbert space. This is often expressed by saying that “Wave functions live in
Hilbert space” (Griffiths 2018, 94). A Hilbert space is an abstract mathematical concept,
namely a complete vector space on which an inner product is defined. But if the wave
function is something real, does this mean that mathematical Hilbert space is physically real
too? In fact, one can find prominent voices championing Hilbert space realism (e.g. Carroll
& Singh 2019) but most consider this an implausible and unwarranted mathematization of
nature and it has been pointed out that only “[v]ery few people are willing to defend Hilbert
space realism in print” (Wallace 2013, 216).
A similar but more subtle form of mathematization takes place in configuration
space realism, i.e., the project of reifying the 3 N-dimensional configuration space, N
being the number of the particles in the universe. The main proponent of this view is
David Albert, who at one point considered our impression that we live in three-
dimensional space “somehow flatly illusory” (Albert 1996, 277). Configuration space
realism, often referred to as “wave function realism,” has been quite popular and has
sparked much controversy. However, if configuration space realism is meant to imply
that the physical space of our everyday experiences is demoted to some kind of illusion,
then this position is in danger of being empirically incoherent.35 Furthermore, one
34 Similarly, QBism dissolves another problem that has been puzzling physicists, namely non-locality (cf.
Fuchs et al. 2014; Timpson 2008).
35 This objection has been raised, e.g., by Chen (2019, 6). For how the objection of empirical incoherence
emerges from phenomenological reasoning, cf. the beginning of Sect. 2 of the present paper, particularly
footnote 11.
Page 21 of 27 30European Journal for Philosophy of Science (2020) 10: 30
might object that configuration space realism “makes the same unmotivated conceptual
move as Hilbert space realism: it reifies a mathematical space without any particular
justification” (Wallace 2013, 217).
Concerning the formal and technical apparatus of the mathematical sciences, Husserl
warned us not to be “misled into taking these formulae and their formula-meaning for the
true being of nature itself” (Husserl 1970, 44). We see that this problem also arises in
quantum mechanics via wave function realism. The most common realist interpretations of
quantum mechanics, the many-worlds interpretation, Bohmian mechanics, and GRW
theory are all in danger of leading to a mathematization of nature that is not based on
physical principles but on mathematical formalism. QBists such as Christopher Fuchs and
Blake Stacey have pointed out that in these interpretations “the strategy has been to reify or
objectify all the mathematical symbols of the theory and then explore whatever comes of the
move” (Fuchs & Stacey 2019, 136).
QBism takes a different approach. Instead of reifying mathematical constructs, the
idea is “to reduce the mathematical structure of quantum mechanics to some crisp
physical statements” (Fuchs & Stacey 2016, 285). In this respect, QBism is similar to
informational approaches to quantum mechanics that seek to reconstruct quantum
mechanics based on fundamental physical principles (cf., e.g., Bub 2004, Chiribella
et al. 2011, and Goyal 2012). A common idea is that “[i]n quantum mechanics,
maximal information is not complete and cannot be completed” (Caves et al. 2002,
3) and according to QBists this result “can be regarded as the greatest triumph of
Bayesian reasoning” (Caves et al. 2002, 3). I take it to be a virtue of QBism to resonate
well with recent developments in quantum information theory and the insistence that
information is necessarily incomplete also resonates well with perspectivism.
So far, we have seen that the key move of QBism is to interpret quantum probabilities as
personalist Bayesian probabilities and that this move allows QBism to dissolve the mea-
surement problem and to avoid implausible mathematizations of nature. But what about
more substantive claims about how reality works? Does QBism amount to some sort of
instrumentalism according to which quantum mechanics does not teach us anything about
reality? Indeed, the charge of instrumentalism is one of the most common objections to
QBism.
Importantly, proponents of QBism, particularly Christopher Fuchs, vehemently deny
such anti-realist interpretations of QBism. Instead, Fuchs argues that, according to
QBism, quantum mechanics tells us something very important about reality, namely
“that reality is more than any third-person perspective can capture” (Fuchs 2017, 113).
In this spirit, one of the objectives of QBism is to put the scientist back into science
(Mermin 2014). Fuchs chose the label “participatory realism” for QBism due to the
prominent role that the subject and her experiences play in QBism, highlighting the
interrelatedness of subject and object (Fuchs 2017).
Interpreting probabilities in quantum mechanics as subjective probabilities is only
the starting point of the QBist project. The idea is that the fact that quantum mechanics
does not deliver a purely objective picture of reality is not a shortcoming of the theory,
instead quantum mechanics tells us that reality does not allow being objectively
captured at a fundamental level.
But what exactly does it mean when Fuchs calls QBism a “participatory realism”?
How exactly are subject and object interrelated? Arguably, this concerns the most
challenging aspect of QBism and it does not seem that a comprehensive philosophical
30 Page 22 of 27 European Journal for Philosophy of Science (2020) 10: 30
foundation has been offered to address this question. However, to get a better idea of
what QBists have in mind, we turn to the concept of measurement. According to
QBism, “[a] measurement does not, as the term unfortunately suggests, reveal a pre-
existing state of affairs. It is an action on the world by an agent that results in the
creation of an outcome – a new experience for that agent” (Fuchs et al. 2014, 749). We
remember that in the context of quantum measurement Merleau-Ponty said that “[t]he
apparatus does not present the object to us” but “realizes a sampling of this phenom-
enon as well as a fixation. […] Known nature is artificial nature” (Merleau-Ponty 2003,
93). Merleau-Ponty and QBists agree that in quantum mechanics the agent is not an
innocent bystander. Instead, measurement is an active, participatory act: “Measurement
is not a passive process, but instead a fundamentally participatory one” (Fuchs &
Stacey 2019, 163).
According to this participatory realism, there is an agent (or a plurality of agents) and an
external physical system, and by acting upon the system the agent creates outcomes and
these outcomes are the subject matter of quantum mechanics (Fuchs & Stacey 2019, 180).
In this sense, “quantum mechanics itself does not deal directly with the objective world; it
deals with the experiences of that objective world that belong to whatever particular agent is
making use of quantum theory” (Fuchs et al. 2014, 750). Importantly, the agent cannot be
reduced to the physical system and the concept of agency is not derivable from quantum
mechanics (Fuchs & Stacey 2019, 180).
Even more importantly, this is not to be understood in a Kantian sense such that true
reality is hidden behind the phenomena. “In a QBist understanding of quantum theory, it is
not that nature is hidden from us. It is that it is not all there yet and never will be; nature is
being hammered out as we speak” (Fuchs in Schlosshauer 2011, 285). In this picture, “there
is no such thing as the universe in any completed and waiting-to-be-discovered sense”
(Fuchs in Schlosshauer 2011, 285).
Let us summarize how QBism relates to the scientific realism debate. QBism is not
realist in the sense that it reifies the mathematical symbols that occur in the formalism of
quantum mechanics. Particularly, the wave function is not interpreted as something that
exists physically. However, QBism is anti-instrumentalist since it holds that there are
very important lessons about reality we can learn from quantum mechanics. We learn
that we live in a participatory universe and “that reality is more than any third-person
perspective can capture” (Fuchs 2017, 113). QBism is not solipsist since it presupposes
the existence of an external system upon which the agent acts, but it remains unclear
how exactly to view the relationship between the agent and physical reality.
There is general consensus that QBism delivers a consistent interpretation of quantum
mechanics that avoids problems surrounding the apparent collapse of the wave function and
non-locality. However, there seems to be a lack of a clear philosophical foundation. “Now,
as a formal proposal, quantum Bayesianism is relatively clear and well developed. But it is
rather less transparent philosophically” (Timpson 2008, 580). Perspectivist and phenome-
nological approaches to science and physics might help QBism to find a suitable philo-
sophical foundation.
What should be clear from this section is that there are many systematically significant
parallels between Fuchs’ participatory realism and Merleau-Ponty’s partial realism. Both
emphasize the role of the subject (agent) and her experiences and draw attention to the
relationship between the observer and the observed (the agent and the external system).
Both insist that the physicist is not an innocent bystander, rejecting the idea that
Page 23 of 27 30European Journal for Philosophy of Science (2020) 10: 30
scientific observation provides us with an objective picture of nature. Both abstain from
mathematizing nature but declare that quantum mechanics quite straightforwardly tells us
something very important about the nature and structure of reality. The lessons they draw, of
course, are very different from what is claimed by objectivist realists.
One lesson, namely the idea that a purely objective third-person perspective on the world
is either impossible or cannot capture all of nature, is at the heart of any perspectivist
account. It plays an important role in the phenomenological tradition where we find various
degrees of perspectivism. The phenomenological tradition offers a rich experience-first
epistemology, developing concepts such as horizontal intentionality and life-world that
could prove immensely useful for advancing perspectivism. The present paper is supposed
to pave the way for further attempts to introduce a phenomenological perspectivism into the
philosophy of science.
6 Conclusion
Perspectivism is a new and promising approach to the scientific realism debate that aims at a
middle way between traditional forms of scientific realism and anti-realism. Perspectivism
rejects an objectivist picture, according to which the sciences deliver an exhaustive account
of nature that is free from all subjective factors. Instead, perspectivism views science as an
agent-based endeavor that delivers a certain perspective on nature. This is not to say that the
world does not have the features ascribed to it by science, but to deny that there is nothing to
know about the world over and above what is described by our best (possible) scientific
theories. Although perspectivism is a novel position in current debates, it does have its
forerunners. The present paper discusses to which degree perspectivist ideas can be found in
the phenomenological tradition. We have seen that Husserl’s account of horizontal inten-
tionality supplements Giere’s analysis of human observation. What is more, Husserl’s claim
that all science is epistemically grounded in the life-world and thus can never be entirely free
from subjective factors, fits well with Giere’s account of the perspectival character of
scientific theories. Then, we have seen how Merleau-Ponty radicalizes this idea by making
the further methodological claim that the sciences must incorporate the first-person per-
spective into science and the ontological claim that reality is in some sense observer-
dependent. Importantly, Merleau-Ponty contends that these are lessons that are motivated
by science itself, namely by quantum mechanics. In this respect, Merleau-Ponty’s partial
realism is in perfect agreement with Fuchs’ participatory realism. In the final section, we
indicated how quantum mechanics could support perspectivist and phenomenological
approaches and we shed light on QBism which is an interpretation of quantum mechanics
particularly close to the ideas we find in Merleau-Ponty.
Acknowledgments I would like to thank Andrea Pace Gainnotta for comments on an earlier version of this
paper. Also, many thanks to two anonymous referees for many helpful suggestions. This work was supported
by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) [P 31758].
Funding information Open access funding provided by Austrian Science Fund (FWF).
Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which
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appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and
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Scientific perspectivism in the phenomenological tradition
Abstract
Perspectivism in current debates
Horizontal intentionality
The scientific perspective
Merleau-Ponty’s partial realism
QBism
Conclusion
References