ABSTRACT
Politics has been called the art of the feasible, and sound political judgments depend essentially on a proper sense of the priorities. In scientific research, whether for one individual or for one discipline or for the whole of science, feasibility and priorities should also be the governing principles: only these must be construed in a broad enough sense based on the complex notion of scientific progress. Priority is supposed to contain not only the degree of importance but also the reasonable order in which different obstacles are to be over come in succession. Hence, it overlaps with feasibility as a guide for intellectual work. By definition, feasibility is the necessary condition of all intellectual work since progress is possible only by doing what is feasible, or, in other words, it is possible to do only what is possible. In practice, these guiding principles are hard to apply, as can be seen by imagining somebody who is faced with a choice of doing technical linguistics or political criticism or philosophy.
