The Method of Fictitious Predicates

Abstract

The exploration of the foundations of knowledge, as pursued in the scientific disciplines, has led within philosophy to a division of methods and orientations, which must be regarded as the outstanding feature of the current state in philosophic development. One direction examines the procedures by which the sciences aim to attain their findings and beyond this, what further procedures might be possible alongside those already used. Moreover, this kind of philosophy is not all concerned to reach new specific findings in those disciplines whose methods are being examined. Starting from previously obtained theses in a specific science, clarification of assumptions and steps in the cognitive procedures may of course lead to new specific items of knowledge, or it may guide research in the special sciences into new pathways; but the goal of philosophic insight consists in the laying bare of the mechanism of the methods of enquiry and of how these are anchored in elements that can count as foundation of the relevant systems of findings. This philosophic orientation is sometimes called ‘foundational research’. More generally, let us call it ‘scientific philosophy’. Not only because its object of study is scientific knowledge in general so that it undertakes to determine the aim, achievements and limits of the cognitive methods in the special sciences as well as their possible extensions, but also because of the peculiarity of the method itself here used to analyse knowledge.