Heidegger’s Hermeneutic Realism (1991)

Dreyfus develops his argument for a kind of “hermeneutic realism” about the entities discovered by the natural sciences. His position is “hermeneutic” in the sense that he recognizes that our access to reality is grounded in interpretive practices, and he aims to spell out what those practices take for granted. But he is a “realist” in the sense that he argues that the conditions of access to entities do not determine or constitute those entities as such. Instead, Dreyfus argues that the realist self-understanding of scientific practices is “internally coherent and compatible with the ontological implications of our everyday practices.”