§ 1. THE THREE TASKS 7
discovery and context of justification to mark this distinction. Then we have to say that epistemology is only occupied in constructing the context of justification. But even the way of presenting scientific theories is only an approximation to what we mean by the context of justification. Even in the written form scientific expositions do not always correspond to the exigencies of logic or suppress the traces of subjective motivation from which they started. If the presentation of the theory is subjected to an exact epistemological scrutiny, the verdict becomes still more unfavorable. For scientific language, being destined like the language of daily life for practical purposes, contains so many abbreviations and silently tolerated inexactitudes that a logician will never be fully content with the form of scientific publications. Our comparison, however, may at least indicate the way in which we want to have thinking replaced by justifiable operations; and it may also show that the rational reconstruction of knowledge belongs to the descriptive task of epistemology. It is bound to factual knowledge in the same way that the exposition of a theory is bound to the actual thoughts of its author.
In addition to its descriptive task, epistemology is concerned with another purpose which may be called its critical task. The system of knowledge is criticized; it is judged in respect of its validity and its reliability. This task is already partially performed in the rational reconstruction, for the Active set of operations occurring here is chosen from the point of view of justifiability; we replace actual thinking by such operations as are justifiable, that is, as can be demonstrated as valid. But the tendency to remain in correspondence with actual thinking must be separated from the tendency to obtain valid thinking; and so we have to distinguish between the descriptive and the critical task. Both collaborate in the rational reconstruc-
