Time is what changes and becomes multiple. Eternity remains simple. – Meister Eckhart
For some years now there has been awakening a “metaphysical urge” within scientific philosophy. Staying focused on mere epistemology will no longer do the job. The emphasis on epistemological problems is born of a legitimate and lively awareness of the need and value of critique, but it does not permit philosophy’s questions about ultimate issues and goals to achieve their intrinsic significance. This explains the sometimes hidden, sometimes manifest tendency towards metaphysics. We should interpret this trend as evidence of a deeper understanding of philosophy and its problems, and we should see in it philosophy’s will to power, although certainly not in the sense of the intellectual violence of the “worldview of the natural sciences.”
So strong and vital is the awareness of critique in modern science and philosophy that it even tries to dominate our culture with ungrounded or poorly founded claims to power—so strong that, even though it recognizes the indispensable need to lay an ultimate metaphysical foundation (Plato's ὐπόθεσις), it still devotes so much of its energy to grappling with epistemological (in the broadest sense, logical) problems. There is no question that, despite fruitful research in the theory of science in the last decades, numerous problems in this area still await resolution. The natural sciences, like the cultural sciences, have been problematized with regard to their logical structure. In fact one of the main outcomes of this research has been the sharp distinction between the two kinds of science, along with the logical grounding of their respective autonomies. Nonetheless, a multitude of specific problems must first be resolved [416] before we can undertake the comprehensive future task of a general theory of science. In what follows we shall take one of those specific problems as the focus of our investigation.
In order to keep the goal and specific character of such an investigation present to mind, we first offer some general observations about science and the theory of science.
Every science is a coherent interconnection of theoretical cognitions organized and grounded on principles. Cognitions are expressed in judgments; these judgments are true, i.e., valid. What is valid in the strict sense of the word is not the act of judgment that an individual researcher performs in acquiring knowledge. Instead, the sense of the judgment—its content—is what is valid. Each science, when we consider science in terms of the notion of its completion, is seen to be a self-subsisting matrix of valid sense. But the particular concrete sciences, as temporally conditioned cultural facts, are never complete. They are always in the process of discovering truth.