SCHOLAR: Perhaps we will succeed in this sooner if we illustrate with an example the essence of selfsameness and identicalness just touched on.
SCIENTIST: For this it is best that we choose the case which occasioned our abstract discussion, namely, the relationship between the methodological question and the historiological question. [40]
SCHOLAR: Now of course to begin with we have a rough idea—though I would rather not characterize it as a clear idea—of “what is methodological” and also of “what is historiological.”
GUIDE: But perhaps these ideas will become clearer by bringing them into a relationship with the relations of selfsameness and identicalness.
SCIENTIST: A strange trick; that would be as if the concrete would become more concrete by means of the abstract.
GUIDE: Yes indeed. It would now be a matter of testing this case.
SCIENTIST: For me, though, what is more important is to find out something about the methodological in order to get to know what properly characterizes thinking in physics. After all, our entire conversation took off from there.
SCHOLAR: With the wider intention of bringing into view the essence of thinking in general.
SCIENTIST: And from this the essence of cognition, to which the intuitional element also belongs.
GUIDE: It is, however, still a long way to there.
SCHOLAR: I too have this impression.
SCIENTIST: Thus I am for going forward.
GUIDE: Of course we first have to settle our argument.
SCIENTIST: You claimed that the methodological view of physics and the historiological view are the selfsame.
GUIDE: In other words, the methodological view is a historiological view. [41]
SCIENTIST: I admit that the historiological view of physics supplements well the methodological analysis of its essential structure. But from this, it only follows that nothing historiological occurs in the methodological view.
SCHOLAR: We wanted, however, to pause in this discussion at an example.
SCIENTIST: We have one already on hand. While discussing the relationship of physics and technology it became apparent that theoretical physics, which lays the foundation for all physics, carries out a mathematical projection of nature.
GUIDE: Meanwhile, we have reflected no further on the mathematical, no more than on the experiment, which is an essential component of research in physics.