is dependent on the subjectivity of our thinking; the event in the world. The possibility of distinguishing between doxa and epistēmē vanishes.
Since the ancient Greeks, epistēmē and science have been related: “Science aims at knowledge” (LI, § 6, 17). Yet knowledge is not something self-evident. If it were, we would have neither science, nor, at the most basic level, any disputes about things in the world. As every one of us surely acknowledges, this is not the case. But how can we then distinguish between doxa and epistēmē?
Husserl explains that to know something means to give reasons; it is to validate our assertions, which will show to anyone that a certain state of affairs is, or is not. It is to furnish reasons for others to see beyond doubt why something must be so, or cannot be. It is to present a valid judgment about the given state of affairs. Yet truth is not something in the world: “We possess truth as the object of a correct judgement. But this alone is not enough, since not every correct judgement, every affirmation or rejection of a state of affairs that accords with truth, is knowledge of the being or non-being of this state of affairs.” We must be able to distinguish our judgment from “blind belief, from vague opining, however firm and decided” (LI, § 6, 17; italics in original). It is one thing to be correct about a state of affairs (doxa), and it is quite another to be able to give reasons to validate our judgment concerning this state of affairs as correct (epistēmē). Doxa becomes epistēmē—knowledge—if we give reasons for the truth of our propositions, if “we methodically validate them” (LI, § 6, 19).
However, Husserl notes that to provide validating arguments is not sufficient. In order for validating arguments to be understandable by anyone at any time and any place, they must be repeatable across time. “If they were formless and lawless, if it were not a fundamental truth that all validating arguments have certain indwelling ‘forms,’ [. . .] typical of the whole class of arguments, and that the correctness of this whole class of arguments is guaranteed just by their form [, . . .] there would be no science” (LI, § 8, 21). Science, as we know it, can exist only because it is based on formal validating arguments that present the acid test for the correctness of our judgments. Once those formal arguments are systematized, sedimented into repeatable forms, not only can we offer a justification for our claims about the world, but, in turn, those formal validating arguments will also guide our investigation of nature.
According to Husserl, “The most perfect ‘mark’ of correctness is inward evidence; it counts as an immediate intimation of truth itself” (LI, § 6, 17). The marker of truth is independent of our particular experience; it is something that is a priori and something that we can see in a single glance. Knowing something with certainty and without a doubt is analytic thinking because it is independent of experience. Yet it is “no gift of nature,” as Husserl notes; rather, it is something we can achieve only through methodological procedures (LI, § 6, 19). In other words, through methodical steps we arrive at the formal law that is given to us in certainty because “connections of validation are not governed by caprice or chance, but by reason and order, i.e., by regulative laws” (LI, § 7, 20). Take, for example, the modus Barbara. If I assert that all As are Bs, and all Bs are Cs, the conclusion must follow that all As are Cs. This judgment is valid without exception whether I, or anyone else, think it or not; whether I pronounce it or not. It is an a priori formal categorical judgment that will always be true because of its form. It is evidence that I can access immediately by inward reflection. When this type of judgment is established, it transgresses its particular instantiation and becomes valid for anyone acquainted with formal logic.
Formal judgments have no experiential content. They deal with concepts only and hence can be examined by insight alone. By contrast, natural laws are extrapolated from experience, and they always depend on some state of affairs in the world. We observe many particular instances of certain states of affairs, and, by abstracting from those particulars, we subsume them under the one, preferably simple, explanation, thereby formulating a so-called natural law. Natural laws are not apodictic. Their stipulation is only an approximation to the observed regularities of nature, and they are relative to our state of knowledge at a particular time. This does not mean they do not help us to predict, and hence master, nature, but their content cannot be established for all time.
Science does not take into account the changeability of nature. It is, first and foremost, a system of formal rules that scientists use to “decipher the book of nature,” as Galileo understood it;50 and under which fluctuations are read as departures from a fixed norm. Using these formal rules, scientists order and systematize finite individual experiences of nature into a standardized manifold that is impossible to find in the world of our living. As Alexandre Koyré notes: “The Galilean concept of motion (as well as that of space) seems to us so ‘natural’ that we even believe we have derived it from experience and observation, though, obviously, nobody has ever encountered an inertia motion for the simple reason that such a motion is utterly and absolutely impossible.”51
This is what Husserl reminds us: formal judgments are the foundation from which a scientific method proceeds to assemble, categorize, and “order” disparate empirical claims into a system that we call science. Everyone practicing science must become a master of these formal rules, which can be repeated across time and space. They express truth in itself. Truth is possible only in the formal domain, unaffected by changeable experience; whereas natural laws are hypothetical, expressed in abstract, simplified forms that contain many singular instances as their constituent parts and that explain those parts according to a type. Truth is the ideal limit, which, in the empirical domain, we can approach only asymptotically (LI, § 6, 18).
In order to communicate scientific hypotheses about nature, there must be a system of formal rules that is understandable across time and space. As Husserl puts it: “Every operative fashioning of one form out of others has its law [. . .] of reiteration,” which makes possible “the infinity of possible forms of judgments” (FTL, § 13, 52–53; italics in original). Otherwise, there would be nothing from which science could proceed and make its prognostications. To simplify somewhat, by taking as an example the simple formal judgment “S is p,” we can say that if this predicative judgment did not apply to countless empirical instantiations of predication in nature, which are changeable by definition, we could not have science. Originally, this predication was nothing but extrapolation from repeated regularities in nature. Once the repeatability of events can be expressed by the formal structure, for example, “S is p,” this formal proposition—stripped of particularities we encounter in our everyday living—will order our future experience.52
From then on, we can use the formal predicative proposition, that is, the formal type that covers any thing whatsoever in order to understand a particular “thing” in nature. In the case of the formal assertion “S is p,” we substitute any objects whatsoever for S and p, and the resulting judgment is considered valid, irrespective of our experience, because of its “indwelling” form. So, by applying this form to our experience and by substituting our empirical observations for S and p, the statement “A swan is white,” for example, becomes an empirical instantiation of this basic predicative form; because we know that this formal, or experientially empty, apophansis is a form that embraces many particular instances of objects experienced by us. This form, once established, is given to us a priori; we can access it by insight alone. It gives us the empty form of predication that applies to any object whatsoever. Once we use it to judge our experience, it holds as long as we do not encounter, for example, a black swan. Once encountered, although the form is unaffected by this discovery, its empirical correlative—the act of judgment—is changed. The basic form of a predication, S is p, does not cover this new empirical fact. One has to use a different formal judgment in order to assert, perhaps a disjunctive proposition that “S is either p or r”—“A swan is either white or black.”
In
