Science, Prescience, and Pseudoscience

Abstract

We have in this book repeatedly stressed two central philosophical themes. The first of these is that philosophical, scientific, and everyday thinking must be free from immutable a priori transcendental principles. In the context of philosophy this entails — or at least is compatible with — an anthropological view of man as a part of nature and society (recall Chapter 1). We explicated this partly in terms of the denial of the Myth of the Given in Chapter 3 and in terms of the adoption of internal or “viewpoint-dependent” scientific realism in Chapter 6. Accordingly it can be claimed generally that there are no such things as the World, Truth, Value, Man, Reason, God, etc., using capital letters here to refer to an a priori privileged view concerning the named matter. But recall that the other side of the coin of the rejection of the Myth of the Given is that there can be no knowledge without prior knowledge, without presuppositions. Accordingly, also a kind of transcendental knowledge, viz, knowledge of knowledge of objects or “metaknowledge”, is needed, although not in the Kantian sense.