With the rise of science has come the realization that many questions cannot be settled by the methods of the exact sciences, ideological and ethical questions being the most obvious examples. And with the increase in our admiration and respect for the physicist, the cosmologist, the molecular biologist, has come a decrease in respect and trust for the political thinker, the moralist, the economist, the musician, the psychiatrist, etc.

In this situation some have gone with the cultural tide and argued that, indeed, there is no knowledge to be found outside of the exact sciences (and the social sciences to the extent that they succeed in aping the exact sciences, and only to this extent). This view may take the form of positivism or materialism, or some combination of these. Others have tried to argue that science too is ‘subjective’ and arbitrary – this is the popular reading of Kuhn's immensely successful book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, even if it is not the one Kuhn now says he intended. Others – e.g. the Marxist philosophers and the religious philosophers – adopt a sort of double-entry bookkeeping, leaving technical questions to the exact sciences and engineering and ideological or ethical questions to a different tribunal: the Party, the Utopian future, the church. But few can feel comfortable with any of these stances – with extreme scientism in either its positivist or materialist forms, with subjectivism and radical relativism, or with any of the species of double-entry bookkeeping. It is just because we feel uncomfortable that there is a real problem for us in this area.