ABSTRACT
The recourse to the conditional “can be understood” suggests that the measure of success enjoyed by the effort can be gauged only by a judgment that is essentially normative and pragmatic. A beginning has been made with respect to the perennial problem of the relationship of science to political inquiry. An effort has been made to distinguish between the domains of language most critically the concern of the student. One of the principal functions of philosophy, since it made its appearance as a distinguishable human activity, is to encourage participants in the knowledge enterprise to sort out, catalogue and characterize the truth conditions governing the kinds of claims advanced by rational agents. If “metapolitics” identifies a range of concerns that is essentially analytic and critical, and all but exclusively linguistic, the immediate objection that its practitioners must parry is that its preoccupations are “trivial.”
