Abstract

The aim of this paper is to propound a view that philosophical epistemology has failed to comprehend the essence of experimental natural science ever since the late seven-teenth century. The first indication of the failure is given in Edward Stillingfleet's misunderstanding of John Locke. In his Essay concerning Human Understanding, Locke tries to establish the distinction between the particular matters of fact and the universal theories of nature. Stillingfleet mistakenly counts him, however, among cartesians and regards his distinction as that of the objects in the mind and those in the external world. This misreading of Locke, which is common to later historians of philosophy, entails total misunderstanding of the essential trait of experimental science. The Lockean way of ideas is, if correctly un-derstood, a successful vindication of the experiments based on sense perception and has nothing to do with the cartesian skepticism towards the senses.