sed an absolute truth. For how else could science’s claim to have set up an irrefutably true and immutable order of things be substantiated? And it was just such aspirations that allowed philosophy to consider itself licensed to trespass into the realms of empirical sciences with impunity. The special sciences and metaphysics thus shared a common goal - the establishment of absolutely certain knowledge. Philosophy could thus censure other sciences almost in the same manner as theology did during the Middle Ages.277 As will be shown later, in the following chapters, Hägerström objected to the idea that philosophy had a carte blanche to meddle in the doings of the specific object-oriented sciences, at least with regard to the material truths.According to Hägerström, philosophy only had license to censure science on formal, but never on material, grounds.278 Philosophy could thus not prescribe material, ontological, truths that the specific objectoriented sciences had as their task to uphold. The problem with a transcendent argument is that it allows deductive and inductive arguments to be indiscriminately mixed and confused with one another. For instance, the transcendent argument can be regarded as being inductive when applied to establish a set of basic undeniable truths, whereby the barrier betweena posteriori and a priori can be transcended.What causes problems is that the same argument is regarded as being deductive and used as a deductive argument when transcending the barrier from the necessary aspects of reality, the axioms, to the contingent, historical aspects of reality. Hence, the historical argument was used inductively when establishing analytic truths, and deductively when establishing synthetic truths. a ca l l f o r s c i e n t i f i c p u r i t y 125 4 . 2 . 2 . 1 The Formal Invalidity of the Transcendental Argument 277 Russell, History, pp. 466-490. 278 Hägerström,“Begreppet viljeförklaring,” p. 99;“Declaration of Intention,” p. 299. Cf. Hägerström,“B. o. F.,” p. 39.
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