Laboratory and Field Science: Ontology and Epistemology

Abstract

In the first part of the paper the author provides a brief overview of field science research, surveying different approaches and disciplinary backgrounds. The main part of the paper is devoted to a comparative analysis of field and laboratory science. This distinction is not based on the formal attribute of conducting research in the field, but on the different procedures of acquiring knowledge. Laboratory epistemology, in which experiments play a crucial role, is based on the procedures of the reduction of complex and holistic appearances. It also includes a decompositional methodology of analysis and subsequent rationally controlled synthesis, which underpins the production of modern technology. Field science, which has crystallized in various modern scientific disciplines under the significant influence of Alexander von Humboldt, is holistic, with a wide degree of variation Acknowledgement: The results of the project "Field Studies: Science beyond Laboratories and Libraries and Its Contemporary Transformations", carried out within the framework of the Basic Research Program at the National Research University Higher School of Economics (HSE University) in 2021, are presented in this work. in the ontological structure of this holism. It ranges from the traditional ‘organism' model to more fluid and dispersed ontologies in which the organism is viewed in relation to its environment. This increase in complexity also corresponds to the development of conceptual means of analysis, where classical organicism is replaced by systems theory, cybernetics, etc. Epistemologically, holism comes in the form of a hermeneutic model of cognition, in which the "whole" and the "part" have a fundamentally fluid and open character. Hermeneutic epistemology allows us to integrate the problematic of historicism into the field model of research. Field models of scientific research are united despite disciplinary differences by a number of common epistemological features derived from these fundamental features of the field epistemology. In the last part of the article, the field epistemological model is compared with a number of models of the so-called "new ontologies" (actor-network theory, assemblage theory), and the author comes to the conclusion that there are structural similarities between them. In this paper we will also look at the role of historicism in shaping the modern theory of science.