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I seem to recall Dewey saying somewhere (in Experience and Nature, I think) something to the effect that metaphysics supplies "the ground map of criticism," which is to say, the critical reflection necessary to living better if not also to living well and to simply living. My question is whether this basic idea shouldn't be generalized to apply, mutatis mutandis, not only to metaphysics as the unique ontological science, but also to the two other kinds of science properly so-called, i.e., the special ontic, empirical sciences, human (or social) as well as natural; and the axiomatic sciences of logic and mathematics.

Common to all three kinds of science as such is that they are constituted, pretheoretically as well as theoretically, by some intellectual question rather than by any existential question; i.e., they abstract completely from any concern with meaning for us to attend entirely to structure in itself---whether —whether the structure of actuality, in the case of the special sciences; the structure of possibility, in the case of logic and mathematics; or the structure of necessity, in the case of metaphysics. But, then, each, in its way, plays the role of enabling or facilitating criticism: metaphysics, by explicating the structure of the necessary (including the strictly necessary); logic and mathematics, by identifying the structure(s) of the possible; and the empirical sciences, by disclosing the structures of the actual (including the distinctive structure disclosed by the hermeneutical sciences commonly referred to as "meaning").

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