ABSTRACT
Transcendental realism comes as a triple synthesis to the demise of the positivist account of science hegemonic until c. 1970:
(a) The critique of the monistic theory of scientific development, initiated by Popper in the Anglo-Saxon and Bachelard in the Francophone world and carried through by Kuhn, Lakatos and Feyerabend. This provided the raw material for the development of a rational account of the logic of scientific discovery which would reconcile, in the context of ontological realism in the intransitive dimension, judgemental rationalism in the intrinsic or normative aspect of science with epistemic relativity in the extrinsic aspect of the transitive or social-epistemological dimension of science.
