2.30
Empiricism is a methodological and stylistic position that focuses on our senses as sources of our (accurate) ideas. Of course, we need our senses to encounter the world. What I’d like to question are the assumptions that go into an empirical observation.
When we sense something, we do so within a context, bound up with sets of practices, institutions, and so on. We never seize upon something just sitting there, unbound from our and its context; this is partly addressed by Heidegger’s description of the ready-to-hand and present-at-hand (§2.4). A scientific experiment is a particular way of observing phenomena. It often takes phenomena as isolatable, repeatable, mathematizable, physical, amenable to scientific discourse, and so on.
The best way to observe and engage with a phenomenon can be determined only by a network of concerns: our aims (explicit and implicit), our practices and institutions, our traditions and customs, our conceptual map (i.e., our concepts of what we’re observing and how the concepts fit into larger contexts, e.g., of our world), our metaphysics (§2.16), and—most importantly—what the phenomenon itself uniquely demands, to name just a few.
When I ask about wind, I’m implicitly asking about our context, about how we answer such questions. Asking about wind is a call, in part, to put ourselves in question. We put ourselves in question insofar as we ask which answers will satisfy us and why.
When we have a network of concerns in place, we anticipate how things fit. – It’s possible for things to question these assumptions.