ABSTRACT
As a laboratory investigator, I still held the ill-defined ambition of integrating different kinds of knowing (scientific and hermeneutical), the same goal I had pursued during college. In line with that unmet ambition, I had hoped that beyond the exercise of thinking as a scientist and discovering novel facts, the practice (the actual doing) of biomedical research would also present me with a philosophy of science, perhaps even a metaphysics underpinning scientific insight. While still lodged in laboratory research, I dipped into A. J. Ayer’s Language, Truth, and Logic which I found opaque, indeed, unintelligible. The same frustration occurred with Carl Hempel’s Aspects of Scientific Explanation and Rudolf Carnap’s An Introduction to the Philosophy of Science. I lacked the background, focus, and sustained attention required to comprehend these works. Consequently, my thwarted intent of developing a deepened understanding of the scientific enterprise left me with only the myopic gaze required to design and conduct experiments. Simply doing science absorbed me, although nagging questions occasionally surfaced to remind me of my original aspiration to engage broader intellectual questions.
