1793. Isn't there an important distinction to be made . . .

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Isn't there an important distinction to be made between being a form of critical reflection, on the one hand, and being a science (even in the broad sense of the word), on the other?

Yes, I believe there is. And I further incline to think that it is either one and the same with, or somehow very closely related to, the other distinction that I have long drawn between "lay" and "professional" with respect to the secondary activity of critical reflection and proper theory as well as the primary level of self-understanding and life-praxis. In other words, a particular science is to a particular form of critical reflection as the professional way of pursuing a particular theoretical question deliberately, methodically, and reasonedly is to the lay way of pursuing the same theoretical question also deliberately, methodically, and reasonedly.

22 January 1998

The above answer to the question won't do. There is no good reason to deny, as it by implication does, that a science, properly, can be pursued at the lay level as well a professionally.

The real key to the wanted distinction is the one suggested by my entry, Notebooks, 3 October 2002; rev. 28 November 2005. I argue there that merely being a matter of critical reflection, although a necessary condition of being a science, is not a sufficient condition, because also necessary is that the question constitutive of a science be an intellectual question about structure in itself, as distinct from an existential question about meaning for us.

17 May 2009