ABSTRACT
Natural, social and human sciences each offer descriptions of their specific ontological domain with its respective objects and properties. The sciences may be regarded as a highly sophisticated activity in which people engage in empirical study of things-in-themselves. Perception is the result of sensory inputs and the cognitive processing of such inputs resulting in beliefs concerning what is observed. A competent speaker is one capable of recognizing the circumstances under which names and predicates are correctly applied to what figures in his or her perceptual field. The sciences, then, give people empirical knowledge about things-in-themselves insofar as they furnish them with good evidential criteria that figure as an analytical constituent of the name. The sciences come to an end at the point at which hypotheses are empirically or intensionally underdetermined. The world is undeniably what it is, independent of people's epistemic aims and interests.
