1

The Chicken and Egg, Revisited:

On the relation of theory and experiment in rational mechanics
Charles J. Sentell
University of Cambridge
Department of History and Philosophy of Science and Medicine
7 February 2005

The depersonalizing of the things of everyday practice becomes the chief agency of their repersonalizing in new and
more fruitful modes of practice. The paradox of theory and practice is that theory is with respect to all modes of
practice the most practical of all things, and the more impartial and impersonal it is, the more truly practical it is.
- John Dewey

In his preface to The Essential Tension, Thomas Kuhn recalls his own moment of
“enlightenment.” While preparing a course on the development of seventeenth-century
rational mechanics, Kuhn began to engage Aristotelian texts in the sincere attempt to “think
like [an Aristotelian]” (Kuhn 1977:xii). If he could do this, Kuhn claimed, he would be
better able to understand and communicate to his students the exact achievements of Galileo
and other seventeenth-century natural philosophers. And on one “very warm” day in 1947,
“a new way to read a set of texts” dawned on Kuhn. He ceased to understand Aristotle’s
physics as simply wrong and began, rather, to see in it a coherent, sensible view of the world.
This revolution in Kuhn’s own thought eventually led to his conception of science as a body
of knowledge that progresses through periods of paradigmatic normalcy, which gradually
acquires internal instability, and ends with the revolutionary disestablishment of one
scientific worldview for another (Kuhn 1962).
This view of science arguably constitutes the “central metaphor” governing much of
the recent work in the history and philosophy of science (Galison 1988:204). According to
Peter Galison, Kuhn’s view of science is best understood as inverting the relationship of
theory and experiment that originated with the Vienna Circle. While the logical positivists
(e.g. Carnap, Hempel, Schlick) gave priority to observation and experiment over that of
theory, Kuhn and other “anti-positivists” (e.g. Lakatos, Hesse, Feyerabend) reverse this
hierarchy and make theory the necessary framework through which observation and
experiment must occur. These frameworks, or paradigms, are discrete systems of knowledge
that contain the very principles whose existence makes possible the experience of phenomena
as scientific. This inversion of the relationship between theory and experiment has a general
Kantian orientation, and I suggest that this is neither inconsequential nor coincidental. In fact,
it stretches back well beyond Kuhn and the anti-positivists, and is perhaps best understood as
a particular genealogy within the post-Kantian tradition.
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In this essay, I examine this position concerning the relationship of theory and
experiment in terms of its philosophical and historiographical implications. I first present
two central, rather intractable, philosophical problems that arise when theory is considered to
be the necessary precondition of scientific experience. I suggest that these problems derive
their intractability from the way they are posed, namely, as problems of interaction. The
thrust of my argument, however, turns on the relationship between these philosophical
problems and the historiographical contexts from which they originate. Thus, in the second
section of the essay I examine the work of the French neo-Kantian Gaston Bachelard and his
student Alexandre Koyré. It is with Bachelard and Koyré (rather than Kuhn) that the idea of
epistemic ruptures within the history of science finds two of its earliest articulations.
Through an analysis of their notions of radical discontinuity, I show that the distinction
between theory and experiment belies a deeper distinction between science and common
sense. These two distinctions are inextricably linked, and I argue that the historiographical
distinction between science and common sense actually gives rise to the philosophical one
between theory and experiment. I conclude by suggesting that changing the way we
understand the nature of these distinctions resolves many of their problematic characteristics.
Throughout the essay, I use the example of Galileo for both philosophical and
historiographical purposes. Philosophically, Galileo’s statement of the isochrony of the
pendulum is used to illustrate the two problems I present as central to post-Kantian accounts
of the relation between theory and experiment. Historiographically, Galileo serves as the
exemplar of the first “scientific revolution,” a revolution that saw Aristotelian common sense
physics overturned in favor of the new quantitative science.
I.
Typical of post-Kantian philosophies of science is the view that, for any given science, there
is a discrete set of constitutive, a priori principles that make possible that science’s
experiments, objects, and hypotheses. This position has been termed a “Kantianism in the
second approximation” because Kant's notion of the constitutive a priori concerns the larger
concept of experience, while this position refers to a specific sub-set of experience, namely,
that of the modern mathematical-physical sciences (Tiles 1984:17; Cf. Kant 1787). This
position, in other words, holds that the construction of experiments, along with their
concomitant measurements, standardizations and instrumentations, are dependent upon prior
theoretical commitments; theory gives meaning to scientific experience precisely because it
makes it possible (Cf. Hanson 1958; Friedman 1999).
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In this section I present two basic problems that arise when the relation of theory and
experiment is considered from this perspective. The first problem concerns the implications
stemming from the origins of the basic laws of the exact sciences, which I term the problem
of analyticity. The second problem concerns the role of instrumentation in the course of
theory development, which I term the problem of reification.
The Problem of Analyticity
That the basic laws of mathematical science are analytic in nature is a well-known and much
discussed fact. Indeed, this problem finds its first full articulation in The Critique of Pure
Reason where Kant, after having wrestled with the implications of Newton’s Principia, takes
as his basic problem the explanation of how synthetic a priori truths are at all possible. Kant
admits that the existence of analytic empirical truths cannot be disputed, so he then sets about
to explain how they are possible. Ever since, the problem of accounting for the exact way in
which analytic propositions map onto the empirical world has been a central philosophical
issue.
The point I am raising, however, concerns the relationship between the analytic laws
of science and their formulation in and through experimental practice. I want to ask how
these formulations find their precise analytical expression, and what this analyticity implies.
As an illustration, I turn to one the most basic, yet counterintuitively complex, instruments
and examples in the history of rational mechanics: the pendulum and Galileo’s discovery of
isochrony.
In his Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, Galileo observes that the
period of the pendulum is dependent only upon the length of the cord, and that the weight of
the bob, the speed of oscillation, and the degree of displacement from the perpendicular are
all independent of the isochronous swinging of the pendulum (Galileo 1632:450). This is a
rather striking suggestion, but has direct implications for Galileo’s work on the law of fall.
His interlocutors consider examples with different bobs, one made of lead and the other cork,
and are surprised to find that no matter what the substance is comprising the bob, nor how far
it is removed from the perpendicular, each vibration takes precisely the same amount of time.
Galileo had thus marshaled his evidence, provided experimental examples, and convinced his
interlocutors of the isochrony of the pendulum. Well, not quite.
It is not until 1638, in his Discourses Concerning Two New Sciences, that Galileo is
able to give precise mathematical formulation to one of the crucial laws in route to proving
the principle of isochrony. During the “First Day” of the dialogue, Salviati (Galileo) arrives
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at a demonstration of the law of length, which states that the period of oscillation depends
upon the square root of the length of the pendulum (Galileo 1638:95). Crucial though this
step may be, it is a long way from proving isochrony. As Piero Ariotti and others have
shown, Galileo never actually succeeds in providing an adequate proof for his claim of
isochrony (Ariotti 1968:426; cf. Naylor 1989). This must first wait for Christiaan Huygens
and his work on cycloidal pendulums, and finally for its precise nomological articulation with
Newton (Ariotti 1972:373). Moreover, by the time Newton articulated this law in the
Principia, it had been fairly well concluded that true isochrony is in fact unachievable in a
standard physical pendulum; it could only be achieved in an ideal situation (Ariotti
1972:409).
How does Galileo “see” the law of isochrony? How does he provide the correct, non-
quantitative expression of a law, which lay at the center of mechanical physics, long before
he has the means to prove it experimentally or articulate it mathematically? That he is unable
to prove the principle indicates that the formulation or articulation of this basic law of
rational mechanics did not – indeed, could not – derive from experimental observation. No
matter how many times Galileo performed his various experiments involving the pendulum,
no amount of observation or experiment could lead him to the precise mathematical
formulation of the principle of isochrony. The law is analytic and precedes the empirical
confirmation of its contents.
But what, exactly, are the implications of this point? I think there are two possible
implications, which can be roughly termed “Platonic” and “Kantian,” and that it is important
to differentiate between them. On the one hand, it could imply that mathematical
formulations of physical phenomena get to the heart of the matter, so to speak, and describe
the way the world really is. This entails that the world is mathematical and the laws of
mechanics are simply the articulations of this underlying mathematical form. This is the
Platonic point. And not being able to experience the world directly as number, the difficulty
becomes understanding the specific mechanism by which the world is mathematicized. That
the world is mathematical, in other words, begs the question of how mathematical precision
is captured, even if only approximately, by sense experience. On the other hand, the problem
of analyticity could imply that, within a mathematical framework, the analytic laws are the
possibility-creating conditions that make the space within which subsequent observation and
experimentation occurs. In this way, analytic laws provide the transcendental content which
makes empirical application possible. This is the Kantian point. On this side of the
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implication, the problem of analyticity requires we understand the foundational concepts of

mathematical science as being constructed for mathematical applicability, which transforms
the question into one about how these concepts encapsulate the universe so precisely.
So whereas the Platonic point begs the question of precision in experience, the
Kantian point begs the question of “quantitative points of contact with nature” (Kuhn
1977:98). Understanding this difference captures the conceptual breadth of the problem of
analyticity.
The Problem of Reification
I mentioned earlier that Galileo’s efforts to demonstrate the isochrony of the pendulum were
bound up with his larger project on the law of fall. If all pendulums, no matter the mass of
the bob, beat at exactly the same rate, this would support the claim that all objects fall at the
same rate (taking into account air resistance, etc.) The pendulum, then, instantiates a
particular aspect of the phenomena under investigation and functions to narrow the field of
relevant experience so that the phenomena in question may be more effectively studied. The
experimental setup, in other words, brings into focus the phenomena under investigation by
eliminating irrelevant or obfuscating phenomena. This allows the pertinent phenomena to be
drawn to the forefront and examined in isolable detail. The upshot, however, is that the
material apparatus employed to demonstrate a principle or law quickly becomes entangled
with the very theoretical expression at issue. This is what I term the problem of reification
and, again, returning to Galileo’s work on the pendulum is instructive.
Earlier I said that Galileo was only ever able to provide approximate examples of the
principle of isochrony. This should not, however, detract from what Galileo did accomplish
by way of making the pendulum a demonstrative device. In order to “see” the isochrony of
the pendulum, an entire set of theoretical claims had to be articulated in support of the very
limited principle in question. For example, in Two New Sciences, Galileo is finally able to
state three of the basic principles underlying his claim of isochrony, namely, the law of
length, the law of chords, and the brachistochrone curve theorems (Galileo 1638:96, 188, 239
respectively). These theoretical claims settled central questions concerning the precise
relationship between the length of the pendulum and its period, and the shortest movement
along an arc. These were then incorporated into the tacit operations of the pendulum so that
when Galileo uses it to demonstrate isochrony, his interlocutors have already made crucial
conceptual steps toward comprehending the point of which Galileo is trying to convince
them.
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Thus, the “self-evidence” of isochrony is not evident without a prior theoretical

framework to indicate what counts as evidence and what that evidence means. By attempting
to prove isochrony with experiments using the pendulum itself, Galileo employed the
instrument that embodied the theory he was trying to prove. To succeed, he had to
presuppose an entire set of theories about the pendulum, which, including the ones already
mentioned, also include a theory of mass, a theory of the fulcrum and bob, a theory of
motion, and a theory of air resistance. So before the pendulum could effectively demonstrate
isochrony, Galileo had to incorporate into the idea of the pendulum the necessary theoretical
notions that allowed it to function as needed.
In this way, instruments are just as theory-laden as observations. What is more, they
are theory-laden in precisely the same sense. Just as the argument goes for observation, so
too must the functions of instrumentation be previously defined before the product resulting
from instrumental application can be made sensible. This is the crux of the problem of
reification: if experiments, along with their instruments, measurements and matters of fact,
are reifications of theory, how is it that this apparatus is ever able to provide material that
falls outside its previously embedded theoretical framework? Put another way, if
experiments are merely the hypostatization of theories, how does that account for the ways in
which the material conditions of experimentation lead to new theoretical insights? If matters
of fact are experimentally produced, what about “anomalous” matters of fact? Or, to put it
conversely, if instruments are not the reifications of theory, how is it possible to use those
instruments at all?
So whereas the problem of analyticity concerns the conceptual means by which a law
finds its precise articulation, the problem of reification concerns the material demonstration
that necessarily accompanies the experimental proof. The crux of these problems consists of
a particular characterization of the relationship between theory and observational or
experimental practice. By claiming the theoretical frameworks are the necessary
preconditions for scientific experience, thinkers in this tradition are asking a type of “chicken
and egg” question. Which comes first, theory or experiment? By prioritizing theory over
experiment, these questions become ones of interaction or mediation; they are questions
whose main focus is accounting for how two separate realms of activity and knowledge can
feasibly interact. By isolating theory and experiment in this way, such problems become
inevitable. This view of the relation of theory and experiment, however, is actually deeply
embedded within a particular understanding of the nature of the history of science. By
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examining the historiographical roots of this view, it becomes clear that there is another key
distinction at play, namely, that of science and common sense.
II.
While both Gaston Bachelard and Alexandre Koyré follow the general “theory first”
approach to scientific understanding outlined above, my analysis will now focus upon how
they construe the nature of scientific history so as to create a space within which these
problems find philosophical traction. Through my analysis, I will emphasize how each
addresses two key themes: (1) that the nature of scientific history is essentially discontinuous,
and that (2) science is a distinct mode of knowledge, characterized by its mathematization of
natural phenomena, and its sharp separation from common sense. By focusing on these
concepts, I will to show how the theory-experiment distinction is inextricably linked to the
science-common sense distinction.
In The New Scientific Spirit, Bachelard addresses the aforementioned problems in a
way that clearly exhibits his neo-Kantian commitments. In characterizing scientific
observation, Bachelard claims it is something which always necessitates a previously given
theory. “Observation,” he claims, “is governed by a ‘code’ of precautions that must be
observed; observers are admonished to think before they look, to scrutinize carefully what
they first see, and invariably to doubt the results of the initial observation.” He goes on to
say:
Scientific observation is always polemical; it either confirms or denies a prior thesis, a
pre-existing model, an observational protocol. It shows as it demonstrates; it establishes
a hierarchy of appearances; it transcends the immediate; it reconstructs first its own
models and then reality. And once the step is taken from observation to experimentation,
the polemical character of knowledge stands out even more sharply. Now phenomena
must be selected, filtered, purified, shaped by instruments; indeed, it may well be the
instruments that produce the phenomena in the first place. And instruments are nothing
but theories materialized. The phenomena they produce bear the stamp of theory
throughout (Bachelard 1934:12-13).
This passage also contains one of Bachelard’s most original positions, namely, that the
machinery of transcendentalism is not solely conceptual, but that it is also instantiated in the
material apparatus of experimentation. In developing this view, Bachelard introduces the
notion of “phenomeno-techniques,” which describes the way scientific theories actually
produce the space of possibilities through which phenomena is seen scientifically. Theories
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themselves, in other words, generate both the material and conceptual apparatus by which a
specific phenomena or problem is understood. He says, “the dialectical relationship between
the scientific phenomenon and the scientific noumenon is not leisurely and remote but rapid
and strict; after a few revisions, scientific projects always tend toward effective realization of
the noumenon. A truly scientific phenomenology is therefore essentially a phenomeno-
technology” (Bachelard 1934:13).
The main project of The New Scientific Spirit, however, is to explore the
philosophical consequences of the then recent developments in mathematical physics.
Through his examination, Bachelard reiterates a position outlined in many of his other works
that the history of science undergoes epistemic ruptures, or radical discontinuities, with the
preceding tradition. At work within these ruptures is the establishment of new foundations
for scientific thought. Bachelard integrates the rise of non-Newtonian mathematical physics,
non-Euclidean geometries, and non-Cartesian epistemologies into a philosophy of science
that emphasizes the ongoing, dynamical, and discontinuous nature of scientific
consciousness. Not only does Bachelard provide one of the first formulations of radical
discontinuity within the history of science, he also emphasizes that the sciences are unique in
that they undergo more upheavals than other areas of intellectual activity. What preserves
rationality through discontinuous ruptures is science’s relationship to mathematics; the
history of mathematics, for Bachelard, is the exemplar case of rational development.
An important upshot of this conception of scientific tradition is the sharp distinction it
makes between science and common sense. “It is only when science begins to struggle
against its first intuitions,” Bachelard says, “that it yields theories capable of correcting
erroneous hypotheses and experiments capable of rectifying misleading observations”
(Bachelard 1934:77). When this occurs, scientific knowledge becomes discursive, reflexive
and, therefore, potentially objective (Tiles 1984:57). Bachelard’s account, then, is not simply
one of how transitions between different scientific paradigms occur, but is at bottom an
account of the birth of science itself. Once concepts break from their intuitive and
commonsensical foundations to become formalized, conceptualized, and reified through
experimentation, science, as such, is born.
As a student of Bachelard’s, it is not surprising that in 1939 Koyré brings the term
“Scientific Revolution” into common usage (Shapin 1996:2). By following Bachelard in
characterizing the history of science as discontinuous, Koyré set down a historiographical
path aimed at accounting for the advent of science in the seventeenth-century. In
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Metaphysics and Measurement, Koyré claims that it is the distinct “mathematization

(geometrization) of nature” that defines the new science (Koyré 1968:20). What Galileo and
the founders of modern science had to do, according to Koyré, was “destroy one world and
replace it by another. They had to reshape the framework of our intellect itself, to restate and
to reform its concepts, to evolve a new approach to Being, a new concept of knowledge, a
new concept of science – and even to replace a pretty natural approach, that of common
sense, by another which is not natural at all” (Koyré 1968:21). For Koyré, modern science is
a unique form of knowledge that came into existence only after a decisive break with
Aristotelian common sense physics, and is defined by its mathematization of natural
phenomena.
Koyré uses a similar example to illustrate the problem of analyticity, namely,
Galileo’s work on the law of fall. This problem, Koyré claims, “implies that he [Galileo] was
obliged to drop sense-perception as the source of knowledge and to proclaim that intellectual,
and even a priori knowledge, is our sole and only means of apprehending the essence of the
Real” (Koyré 1968:38). Thus Koyré characterizes the advent of the scientific as a move from
common sense to science, from quality to quantity, from imprecision to precision. And
rather than address the question begged by the Platonic implication of the problem of
analyticity, Koyré merely notes that:
“Experiment is the methodical interrogation of nature, an interrogation which
presupposes and implies a language in which to formulate the questions, and a dictionary
which enables us to read and to interpret the answers…Yet obviously the choice of the
language, the decision to employ it, could not be determined by the experience which its
use was to make possible. It had to come from other sources” (Koyré 1968:18-19).
Here, Koyré’s commitment to the general post-Kantian position whereby theory precedes
experimentation is clear. Yet the operative distinction that makes possible understanding
theory and experiment in this way is precisely the distinction between science and common
sense.
By categorically separating science from common sense, Bachelard and Koyré create
the possibility for theory to be identified as entirely distinct from experimental praxis. The
problems of analyticity and reification, the problems whose main focus was that of
accounting for how theory and experiment interact, are pushed back to the level of the
relation between science and common sense. In characterizing the advent of modern science
as a decisive break with intuitive common sense, and claiming that science progresses
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through revolutionary transformations of theoretical understandings, these thinkers prioritize

and dichotomize theory as that which distinguishes scientific knowledge from everyday
conceptions. This historiographical description of science, in other words, leads to the
philosophical problematization of the relation between abstract theory and the material forms
through which that theory is made manifest.
Thus, both Bachelard and Koyré are philosophers of transition; they provide
narratives about how the move is made from pre- or non-scientific to the scientific. To this
extent, they are not so interested in the exact content of a particular science, but rather focus
on providing philosophical and historical accounts of the structural dynamics that create the
possibility for that science in the first place. They hold that what happened in Europe around
the seventeenth-century was a profound displacement of common sense in favor of a more
rarefied, mathematicized, theoretical system of knowledge that continues to grow today
under the aegis of science.
III.
I began by posing two problems that arise in the context of considering the relation between
theory and experiment. I claimed that these problems turned on questions of how two
distinct realms, namely that of theory and experimental practice, could interact. I then turned
to Bachelard and Koyré and showed that what underlay these original problems was a deeper
issue concerning the nature of scientific rationality, i.e. whether it was categorically distinct
from common sense. I want now to suggest that these questions too turn on issues of
transition. Bachelard and Koyré both argue that the first radical rupture in the history of
science actually created science through a conceptual divorce from intuitive common sense.
And as discontinuous revolutions continue to reshape the landscape of the sciences,
articulating new and oftentimes radically different visions of the world, the pressing question
becomes one of preserving rationality through these changes.
As “common sense” is notoriously difficult to define, I think it is helpful at this point
to distinguish between two senses of the term. Peter Dear claims that Aristotelian physics,
and its subsequent Scholastic developments, closely link natural philosophical knowledge
with everyday, commonsensical knowledge. Key to this link is the Aristotelian conception of
“natural” (rather than “violent”) movements, which are in sync with a particular object’s
essence and therefore happen “commonly” (Dear 2001:72). Natural philosophy, for
Aristotelian Scholastics, was the enterprise of exploring the causes of the phenomena of the
everyday world, and in that sense was part and parcel of common sense.
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With Galileo and the first scientific revolution, however, comes the announcement
that the premises of knowledge making and logic are simple and mathematical. In this sense,
Bachelard and Koyré are correct to claim that modern physical science constitutes an
important break with common sense. The Galilean revolution is the substitution of common
sense with a type of knowledge not derivable solely from experience; its mathematical and
geometrical languages were then alien to the commonsensical view of the world. A chasm
thus forms between experience and experiment, between generals and singulars, between
common sense and an organized, circumstantiated, special system of knowledge that one
cannot experience outside the artificial setting of the experimental framework.
In the Two New Sciences, Sagredo claims that Salviati (Galileo) gives him “frequent
occasion to admire the wealth and profusion of nature when, from such common and even
trivial phenomena, you derive facts which are not only striking and new but which are often
far removed from what we would have imagined” (Galileo 1638:95). In this passage, the
rudimentary elements of the two senses I wish to distinguish are present. In one sense,
science is a special case, as sub-set as it were, of common sense; it grows out of, and takes its
phenomena and examples from, the wider scope of commonsensical knowledge and
experience. In another sense, science represents a dramatic break from common sense,
whereby a completely new form of knowledge is erected outside of common sense
conceptions. Dear himself notes this tension: “Galileo wished to persuade his readers that the
results amounted to common experience. His problem, however, was that the particular
experience that he wished his readers to accept was not in fact one that is well known and
familiar” (Dear 2001:133). Thus, even for Galileo the line between common knowledge and
the more specialized sphere of his new science was difficult to mediate.
The distinction I wish to make here concerns the way in which we understand the
distinctions of science and common sense, on the one hand, and theory and experiment, on
the other. I am suggesting that the distinction between science and common sense is
acceptable as long as it is understood heuristically, rather than formally or ontologically. A
formal or ontological sense of the distinction entails a categorical difference in rationality; it
holds that science alone embodies rationality, and that common sense is either a-rational or
irrational or just not of the type of rationality that comprises science. The historiographical
point of distinguishing between science and common sense is useful for a number of reasons,
not the least of which is that it facilitates our talking about the strange and sometimes
counterintuitive knowledge of the sciences. But when it is taken in its stronger, more formal
 12

sense, the distinction obscures crucial similarities and dependences and actually creates
philosophical problems, such as those of analyticity and reification.
In a very real sense, the advent of modern physical science was the advent of a new
language, a new knowledge that profoundly reshaped our understanding of the world. But to
claim that it is categorically distinct from common sense, then or now, is to make an
ontological separation between two spheres of knowledge and thereby beg the question of
rational continuity through scientific change (and, for that matter, the rationality of non-
scientific knowledge as well). Understood heuristically, common sense becomes the
necessary precursor to any scientific knowledge whatsoever. From a logical point of view,
scientific knowledge simply could not have sprung fully formed from the head of Galileo. Its
contents had to come from other sources, namely, the world of common experience. All
revolutions are revolutions against something; they incorporate and transform the views
against which they are reacting, whether they be commonsensical or properly scientific.
Analogously, the distinction between theory and experiment must be understood as
two aspects of the same activity as well. Rather than being different species of knowledge
occurring in two distinct realms of activity, I am suggesting that scientific theory is an
irreducible mode of scientific practice. They are mutually dependent activities occurring in
the same space of possibilities. Bachelard’s concept of phenomeno-techniques comes very
close to this idea, though the exact mechanism by which theory and experiment interact is
never fully developed in his work. By now it should be clear that why such a mechanism
would need explicating in the first place is a function of the dualism Bachelard employed at
the historical level. If the histories of sciences are discontinuous, and indeed if the sciences
themselves are discontinuous with other forms of “common” knowledge, then naturally one
would need to provide a detailed account of how these diametrically opposed realms could
interact.
Thus, the sciences do not represent a new form of rationality, but a new form of
reification or objectivity; they provide a space within which problems, objects, and matters of
fact find fruitful routes of exploration and elaboration. Oftentimes this space is artificially
constructed, abstracted from the world so as to isolate and highlight a particular aspect of that
world. But this should not be taken as a radically separate form of knowing; rather it is a way
of counteracting and concretizing the move of abstraction.
Understood in this way, the distinctions between theory and practice, on the one
hand, and science and common sense, on the other, are rendered helpful rather than
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problematic. By advocating dissolution of the strict dualisms obtaining between these

concepts, I am not advocating their abolition from our vocabulary as well. I hope to have
made clear that such distinctions are potentially very useful, and that only by erecting them
into diametrically opposed distinctions do we run into the historiographical and philosophical
problems that have proven so particularly intractable to the post-Kantian tradition.
 14

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