Page:Reichenbach - Experience and Prediction.djvu/18

4 MEANING these questions concern the sociological phenomenon “science,” they are of a very special type as compared with the form of questions occurring in general sociology. What makes this difference? It is usually said that this is a difference of internal and external relations between those human utterances the whole of which is called “knowledge.” Internal relations are such as belong to the content of knowledge, which must be realized if we want to understand knowledge, whereas external relations combine knowledge with utterances of another kind which do not concern the content of knowledge. Epistemology, then, is interested in internal relations only, whereas sociology, though it may partly consider internal relations, always blends them with external relations in which this science is also interested. A sociologist, for instance, might report that astronomers construct huge observatories containing telescopes in order to watch the stars, and in such a way the internal relation between telescopes and stars enters into a sociological description. The report on contemporary astronomy begun in the preceding sentence might be continued by the statement that astronomers are frequently musical men, or that they belong in general to the bourgeois class of society; if these relations do not interest epistemology, it is because they do not enter into the content of science—they are what we call external relations.

Although this distinction does not furnish a sharp line of demarcation, we may use it for a first indication of the design of our investigations. We may then say the descriptive task of epistemology concerns the internal structure of knowledge and not the external features which appear to an observer who takes no notice of its content.

We must add now a second distinction which concerns psychology. The internal structure of knowledge is the system of connections as it is followed in thinking. From