ABSTRACT
An account of science can be criticized, or shown to be inadequate, in a number of ways. A transcendental refutation is obtained if it can be shown to be inconsistent with the possibility of science, or of certain generally recognized scientific activities. Clearly such a refutation itself presupposes a transcendental analysis - for one must know what the conditions of science’s possibility are that the refuted account cannot sustain. Such an analysis will in general be able to show under what conditions, if any, the refuted account obtains: that is, what the conditions of possibility of the erroneous account itself are. I shall call such a transcendental demonstration a transcendental situation: it is an argument in the philosophy of the philosophy of science, rather than the philosophy of science, and it stands to Kant’s ‘Dialectic’ rather as a transcendental analysis stands to his ‘Analytic’. Both together comprise one sense of the term ‘critique’: what I shall call a transcendental critique (though I shall occasionally also use this concept just to denote a transcendental refutation).
