354 METHODOLOGY OF SCIENCE 



various fields of our knowledge out of the problems peculiar to those 

 fields. 



It is the office of scientific thought to interpret validly the objects 

 that are presented to us in outer and inner perception, and that 

 can be derived from both these sources. We accomplish this inter- 

 pretation entirely through judgments and combinations of judgments 

 of manifold sorts. The concepts, which the older logic regarded as 

 the true elementary forms of our thinking, are only certain selected 

 types of judgment, such stereotyped judgments as those which 

 make up definitions and classifications, and which appear independ- 

 ent and fundamental because their subject-matter, that is, their 

 intension or extension, is connected through the act of naming with 

 certain words. Scientific methods, then, are the ways and means 

 by which our thought can accomplish and set forth, in accordance 

 with its ideal, this universally valid interpretation. 



There belongs, accordingly, to methodology a list of problems 

 which we can divide, to be sure only in abstracto, into three separ- 

 ate groups. First, methodology has to analyze the methods which 

 have been technically developed in the different fields of knowledge 

 into the elementary forms of our thinking from which they have 

 been built up. Next to this work of analyzing, there comes a second 

 task which may be called a normative one; for it follows that we 

 must set forth and deduce systematically from their sources the 

 nature of these manifold elements, their resulting connection, and 

 their validity. To these two offices must be added a third that we 

 may call a potiori a synthetic one; for finally we must reconstruct out 

 of the elements of our thinking, as revealed by analysis, the methods 

 belonging to the different fields of knowledge and also determine 

 their different scope and validity. 



The beginning of another conception of the office of methodology 

 can be found in those thoughts which have become significant, 

 especially in Leibnitz's fragments and drafts of a calculus ratiocinator 

 or a specieuse generale. The foregoing discussion has set aside all 

 hope that these beginnings and their recent development may give, 

 of the possibility of constructing the manifold possible methods a 

 priori, that is, before or independent of experience. However, it 

 remains entirely undecided, as it should in this our preliminary 

 account of the office of general methodology, whether or not all 

 methods of our scientific thought will prove to be ultimately but 

 branches of one and the same universal method, a thought contained 

 in the undertakings just referred to. Although modern empiricism, 

 affiliated as it is with natural science, tends to answer this question 

 in the affirmative even more definitely and dogmatically than any 

 type of the older rationalism, still the question is one that can be 

 decided only in the course of methodological research. 



