John Deely and the Cenoscopic Presupposition of Modern Science

Presuppositions of scientific method can indeed be rationally justified – beginning with the distinction between sensation, as involving physical interaction but nothing of mental representation, on the one hand, and perception and intellection alike, on the other hand, as the levels at which concepts (mental representations, but other-representations, not self-representations) enter as interpretations of the data presented by sensation. But to appreciate this series of distinctions requires one first to recognize that, while modern science is ideoscopic (i.e., the result of knowledge that could not be acquired otherwise than by experimentation and use of instruments extending the senses), at the same time science in general has also and by priority a cenoscopic dimension. For scientific knowledge, as critically controlled objectification of experience, is possible also, and initially, precisely as based on prescissive analysis of human sensation as prior to but making possible experimental science – modern science.[1]

Source: John Deely, "Taking Faith Seriously," presentation at Center for Thomistic Studies of the University of St. Thomas, Houston, 12 October 2010; Rev. Roum. Philosophie, 55, 2, p. 391–415, Bucureşti, 2011, 404/14.

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Notes:

1. On this way of contrasting the scientific dimension of philosophy with science in the modern sense, see Benedict Ashley, The Way toward Wisdom. An interdisciplinary and intercultural introduction to metaphysics (South Bend, IN: University of Notre Dame Press), John Deely, Purely Objective Reality (Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter), and Medieval Philosophy Redefined. The Development of Cenoscopic science, AD345–1644 (Scranton, PA: University of Scranton Press)., and Ashley and Deely, How Science Enriches Theology (South Bend, IN: St Augustine’s Press).