The Quest for Transcendence in Inquiry: Science’s Redemption of Kant’s Debt to Bacon

This chapter considers the ‘transcendental’ preconditions for judgement, which is a Kantian way of addressing the capacity of judgement to see beyond the moment of its own activity, which is necessary for judgements to be ‘justifiable’ in some wider conceptual sense. Yet, this capacity seems to be precisely denied by the ‘contextualist’ turn in the human sciences, whereby people are rendered empirical geniuses and transcendental dopes. In other words, we are depicted as incredibly aware of our immediate surroundings but ignorant of—if not oblivious to—those elsewhere in time and space. However, such methodological contextualism is not true to the experience of people, though it does have some basis in Kant’s own epistemology. The rest of the chapter deals with broadly ‘constructivist’ strategies to bootstrap one’s necessarily contextually situated judgement into a more transcendent form of inquiry. Historically, much of this task has been achieved by the establishment of institutions, not least those of the law and science. Francis Bacon is discussed in this respect, especially as a precursor to Kant, social constructivism and, indeed, my own social epistemology. The chapter ends with an extended discussion of William Whewell, whose career epitomized the issues raised here. In the mid-nineteenth century, he coined the word ‘scientist’ to name a profession requiring a distinct education and disposition to the world.