What Do Sensibility-Related, Understanding-Related, and Judgment-Related Operations Do in Scientific Operational Shapes—and Is Representation a Necessary Passage Point?
Abstract
This paper investigates what sensibility-related, understanding-related, and judgment-related operations do within scientific operational shapes, without presupposing these distinctions as fixed human faculties or universal conditions of scientific activity. Drawing on Kant, Hegel, Sellars, Brassier, and contemporary debates concerning rationality and machine intelligence, it examines the relations among object formation, conceptual determination, representation, inferential justification, nonconceptual causal organization, and scientific engagement with reality. The paper develops a locally typed and revisable minimal notation for scientific operational shapes, distinguishing tracked transitions, real effects, cross-configuration penetration, feedback, reorganization, function attribution, picturing, and warranted revision. It separates propositional truth, material correspondence, inferential entitlement, and effective intervention without treating them as jointly necessary conditions for the existence of scientific reality. Through a hypothetical autonomous scientific arrangement in which representing media, target individuation, and criteria of representational adequacy change, the paper examines the conditions under which transcendental distinctions become explanatorily relevant or operationally consequential. It argues that their application must not be confused with their physical realization, and that neither representation nor human conceptual mediation has been established as a universal constitutive prerequisite for every scientific operation. The resulting framework preserves the distinction between local scientific access and reality-as-a-whole while treating Xenoscience as an open research problem rather than an empirically established achievement.
Fields of Study & Subjects
Philosophy of Biology and Scientific Explanation
Philosophy and Theoretical Science
Logic and Philosophy of Science
Publication details
- Journal / source
- Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research)
- Publication date
- 6 March 2026
- Language
- EN
- Document type
- Dataset