6 MEANING
cate the task of epistemology in its specific difference from the task of psychology. Many false objections and misunderstandings of modern epistemology have their source in not separating these two tasks; it will, therefore, never be a permissible objection to an epistemological construction that actual thinking does not conform to it.
In spite of its being performed on a fictive construction, we must retain the notion of the descriptive task of epistemology. The construction to be given is not arbitrary; it is bound to actual thinking by the postulate of correspondence. It is even, in a certain sense, a better way of thinking than actual thinking. In being set before the rational reconstruction, we have the feeling that only now do we understand what we think; and we admit that the rational reconstruction expresses what we mean, properly speaking. It is a remarkable psychological fact that there is such an advance toward understanding one’s own thoughts, the very fact which formed the basis of the maeutic of Socrates and which has remained since that time the basis of philosophical method; its adequate scientific expression is the principle of rational reconstruction.
If a more convenient determination of this concept of rational reconstruction is wanted, we might say that it corresponds to the form in which thinking processes are communicated to other persons instead of the form in which they are subjectively performed. The way, for instance, in which a mathematician publishes a new demonstration, or a physicist his logical reasoning in the foundation of a new theory, would almost correspond to our concept of rational reconstruction; and the well-known difference between the thinker’s way of finding this theorem and his way of presenting it before a public may illustrate the difference in question. I shall introduce the terms context of
