Almost all philosophies of science work by attempting to ground science in some form of rationality that is external to science itself. It might be the pure reason of analytic logic, the undeniable universality of phenomenological experience, or the brute facticity of social/political empiricities. Reason is considered here a soil or fertile earth into which the methods, procedures, and techniques of science must be planted, enculturated, and made to take root if they are to remain rational. Science thus becomes demarcated from the unreason so endemic in the world today, it is thought, but fenced off from the vital native habitat from which it first sprung. The seed of science, however, will not grow in the barren soil of an external reason. Exactitude in Science takes up the intimate, botanical task of mapping science, understanding its construction and development from within the very discursive core of scientific practice itself. It is an attempt at horticultural cartography, a classification of the autochthonous humus from which a humble, human science unfolds itself in time — an efflorescence of rationality that is as internal to science as the blossoming of a flower is to the cultivation which sustains it.

“It is therefore necessary to take knowledge meticulously at the moment of its application, or at least in never losing sight of the conditions of its application.”

——Gaston Bachelard, Essai sur la connaissance approchée, Paris 1927, p. 261, trans. unknown.

To map science in this way exactly, is a science, becomes a science. I sometimes imagine that science is the art of deciphering a map which was long ago made of a world we no longer have any recognition of. Reminiscence has transformed into prescience, a concept into a precept, a map becomes the territory.

“In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire, the entirety of a Province. In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it. The following Generations, who were not so fond of the Study of Cartography as their Forebears had been, saw that that vast map was Useless, and not without some Pitilessness was it, that they delivered it up to the Inclemencies of Sun and Winters. In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are Tattered Ruins of that Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars; in all the Land there is no other Relic of the Disciplines of Geography.”

——Purportedly from Suárez Miranda, Travels of Prudent Men, Book Four, Ch. XLV, Lérida, 1658 (Jorge Louise Borges).

“What a useful thing a pocket-map is!” I remarked.

“That’s another thing we’ve learned from your Nation,” said Mein Herr, “map-making. But we’ve carried it much further than you. What do you consider the largest map to be that would be really useful?”

“About six inches to the mile.”

“Only six inches!” exclaimed Mein Herr. “We very soon got to six yards to the mile. Then we tried a hundred yards to the mile. And then came the grandest idea of all! We actually made a map of the country, on the scale of a mile to the mile!”

“Have you used it much?” I enquired.

“It has never been spread out, yet,” said Mein Herr: “the farmers objected: they said it would cover the whole country, and shut out the sunlight! So we now use the country itself, as its own map, and I assure you it does nearly as well.”

——Lewis Carroll, Sylvie and Bruno Concluded, London: 1895, Chapter XI.

We cannot today define science. We can only study the map which is made of the territory in which it is deployed. The project of traditional philosophy of science will therefore always remain incomplete, as science bursts the seams of the confinement that reason makes for it. As Nietzsche said: “it is only that which has no history, which can be defined.” That which science has then is its history. It is the history of science which means that science will always overspill the boundaries of reason. Thus we are afraid of history and “the tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the minds of the living”. As Foucault said, historical sense reintroduces into the realm of becoming everything considered immortal in man, and the history of science reintroduces the possibility of the becoming of rationality. But just because science is not eternal, just because science must have had a beginning, a birth a pudenda origo, does not mean it will only ever have one beginning — as though by beginning once science will no longer have cause for any further break with its past. Science never begins, it is always becoming again, renewing itself in a recurrent process of rectification.

“In sum, here is the axiom of epistemology posed by those who believe in the eternal continuity of science: since beginnings are slow, progress is continuous. The philosopher of science will not go further than this. They believe it is pointless to live in the time of newness, precisely the period of time when progress erupts from every part, precisely the period of time that makes the eruption of traditional epistemology necessary.”

——Gaston Bachelard, Le matérialisme rationnel, Paris 1953, p. 31, trans. unknown.