Models and masks: empiricist conceptions of the conditions of scientific knowledge

There are four chief obstacles to graping truth, which hinder every man, however learned, and scarcely allow anyone to win a clear title to knowledge; namely, submission to faulty and unworthy authority, influence of custom, popular prejudice, and concealment of our own ignorance accompanied by the ostentatious display of our knowledge. (Rogern Bacon) Theorising means ordering, structuring; as such it is an isomorphic correlate of material practice, its ‘alter ego’ in the Janus-faced human existence. Exactly like the productive activity, theorising consists in modelling reality. Theories are models. Any segment of universe we isolate in order to formulate its regularities presents itself to us as a cybernetic black-box: a processual going concern with only two points-inputs and outputs-open ot the investigators' inspection. (Zygmunt Bauman, 1972: 303)