of their discussion are the main principles of the empirical sciences and their philosophical justification. The major problem for the empirical sciences is (from the Philosopher’s point of view) that they utilize a method, induction, that is logically uncertain and does not permit the establishment of absolute truths, which is the specific type of truths that philosophy and other nonempirical sciences seek and claim to be able to establish.26To the Philosopher it seems as if the truths of the empirical sciences, due to the relative reach of induction, have lesser scientific value and scholarliness than the truths established in non-empirical sciences such as philosophy.This is not a new topic to philosophy, it recurs throughout the history of philosophy (see, among others Plato), and this opinion constitutes the grounds for the discussions of the relativity and impermanence of synthetic knowledge that occupied, for instance, Kant and his predecessors. Formally speaking, when synthetic knowledge is compared with the apodictic certainty and permanence of analytic knowledge, then the relativity and impermanence of synthetic knowledge becomes manifest: the validity of analytic knowledge is apodictic while the truth value of synthetic knowledge is probable.27 Despite the self-assertiveness of the Philosopher, the reader of the dialogue will probably ask:What is the issue? Is it the scientific methodology and claims of the Botanist that are at stake, and whose validity is judged? Is it not the reverse, the Philosopher’s somewhat p a r t i i 1 , c h a p t e r 2 176 26 Hägerström, “B. o. F.,” pp. 17-18. 27 Compare this view with Kant’s descriptions, in his different prefaces to the Critique of Pure Reason, of the relationship between the science of logic and the “queen of all the sciences”, metaphysics, wherein logic is described as resting upon immutable foundations, allowing it to travel that “secure” and steady, but uneventful course that has marked its progress from the days of Aristotle to the present time, while metaphysics, with its rickety foundations, has travelled an erratic and misleading journey, full of setbacks and illusory victories.The problem was that while logic, being analytical and thus lacking any empirical content, continued to establish immutable truths, the synthetic sciences, (including metaphysics which according to Kant must be synthetic since it is object-oriented) never managed to establish truths with any semblance of immutability. How could this unsatisfactory state of affairs be corrected so that the empirical sciences too can rest upon an immutable foundation, allowing them to establish truths with the same degree of certainty as logic? Inter alia Kant, Cr. P. R., pp. a vii, B vii-xi, and B xiv-xvii.
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