Taxonomy: Reading the Biological Diversity

The article deals with problem of application of the hermeneutical approach to understanding science and technology, which often faces a number of dead ends. In order to escape from them one needs a new vision of science. This helps understands science as a product of human creativity, which is hardly the representation but rather the construction of reality. Being so, it includes interests and values, aims and means, fantasies and desires. Scientific methods impose intellectual nets over nature that ascribe meanings to it. The case study of two main trends in biological systematics shows that natural biological diversity appears as a kind of unity ordered by classifications. A taxonomy grasping the structural unity represents a kind of artificial symbolic system, system of nomenclature based on the schematism of scientific imagination. Every taxonomy presents a «fictional», non-natural, human-dimensional, artificial picture of biological reality, but it is the such pictures that makes this reality understandable. And horizons of understanding oscillate between ontological, methodological and disciplinary structures of science. The prerequisite of the hermeneutical approach to natural sciences is understanding of science as a a humanist project. And the hermeneutical approach helps in turn enrich science viewing it as a creation of man. One enters here the hermeneutical circle, which is fruitful and provocative at the same time.