Contemporary Schools of Metascience

The process of justification is a two-fold procedure. The first step involves assessing how well the goals or ideals sought are actually achieved or how likely they were to have been achieved by the strategy adopted. The second step involves assessing the goals sought. This second step is often neglected, which means that certain goals, which perhaps need to be changed, are taken as “given.” The necessity of this second step precludes the possibility of “value neutrality” in any full inquiry into the justification of any program, whether it be one for social action or a philosophical project. These two steps correspond to what is sometimes called internal and external critiques.