ABSTRACT
However, as Robert Blanché observed, the reflection is not necessarily philosophic: ‘it does not necessarily get one to abandon the scientific demands’; it allows itself, instead, ‘to be integrated into the domain of science’.4 All the same, what is important is that this integration does not result in a confusion between epistemology, science and the object of science. Epistemology must study the principles, the hypotheses and the results of the various sciences with the purpose of determining their value as a scheme of knowledge discourse.5 This means that it should in theory leave out of the account everything that science takes as its object. Thus an epistemological study of meteorology, under pain of confusing two levels of language, ought strictly to look only at the discourse (the science) and methods of meteorologists and not at the atmosphere, climates and weather (the object of the science). Epistemology, then, concerns itself with scientific discourse ‘treated as a system of signs combining between themselves according to certain rules independent of what they can evoke’.6 This separation is, however, by no means clear-cut and, as we shall see, particularly problematic when it comes to legal science.
