Modern science is systematic inquiry, not systematic knowledge. It cannot be defined by its method or by its metaphysics, since these are amended as inquiry progresses. The norms of science are therefore the business of science and represent empirical discoveries. Peirce’s conception of science is nontechnical and for that reason difficult: he identified it by its ’spirit’, a restless quest for concrete discovery fruitful of further discovery. Theory, then, is no longer the end of inquiry, a resting place, but is, instead, a means to further discovery. Whereas philosophical systems were meant to be coherent and comprehensive, a theory that grounds research cannot be complete and any incoherence in it is a stimulus, not a fatal flaw. But the pursuit of concrete knowledge requires specialization and an evolving network of specialists. Peirce reversed the usual deprecation of specialization: its aim is growth of a knowledge that transcends any individual consciousness.

This chapter defends Peirce’s conception of science against a pair of current, mutually antagonistic ideas of the difference of modern science from classical and medieval philosophy. The one party celebrates the difference, the other deplores it, but they agree that modern science rejects the classical ideal of theory as knowledge good for itself. Peirce saw that difference more subtly as one in which the classical ideal of knowing is transformed rather than abandoned. This revolution in cognitive aim did not occur arbitrarily. Well-established facts about the defeat of the Aristotelian world-view are cited to support the novel thesis that it depended on an empirical yet normative discovery, that restless, unending, specialist inquiry is more satisfying intellectually than is the dialectic of systems. The history of science reviewed in this chapter provides evidence for the argument of Chapter 9, that there is normative knowledge and that it is empirical.