ABSTRACT
Richard Rorty has given us an eloquent critique of the epistemological problematic, from which contemporary philosophy is gradually emerging. But I want to suggest that he has provided us with only a partial critique of a problem-field, to which he remains in crucial respects captive. These passing notes are not of course innocent. They are written from a particular perspective, that of a Lockean underlabouring interest in human sciences which partly do and partly do not (yet) exist-which are in the process of struggling to come into being. Such sciences would provide that sort of consiousness of our natural and social past and present as to allow us to change both ourselves and the conditions under which we live (cf. PMN p. 359) in such a way that ‘the distinction between the reformer and the (violent) revolutionary is no longer necessary’ (CC p. 13). More specifically, I want to claim that we shall only be able ‘to see how things in the broadest possible sense of the term, hang together, in the broadest possible sense of the term’ (CP p. xiv) from this perspective if we are committed to:
(i) an ontologically oriented philosophically realist account of science, on which the world is explicitly construed, contrary to Humean ontology, as structured, differentiated and changing; and
(ii) a critical naturalist account of the human sciences, which will sustain the idea of an explanatory critique of specific structural sources of determination and their emancipatory transformation.
