In his important work Human Understanding, Stephen Toulmin argues that the epistemological self-image of modern man inherited from the seventeenth century does not cohere with recent thinking in the sciences.¹⁵ Scientists on the growing edge of thought today simply do not make use of the presuppositions of rationalist thought, yet these presuppositions persist because no one has come forward to articulate a clear "epistemological self-portrait" of man as viewed in contemporary models of thought. Consequently, present-day lay views of man tend to make assumptions about time, substance, mind and body, causality, and so on, that have been left behind in contemporary scientific theory. Toulmin's project is to bring epistemology up to date.

This version of postmodernity is perhaps the least radical of the ten we will discuss, since Toulmin does not venture to question scientific rationality as such but rather tries to bring contemporary epistemology (especially analytic philosophy) into harmony with advanced scientific theory. (At the end of his first chapter, Toulmin pays homage to Descartes' quest for firm, verifiable knowledge, and he claims only to be trying to bring Descartes up to date—one might say to "demythologize" him.) Yet Toulmin is important to the quest for a postmodern view of man because he is able, from within contemporary philosophy of science, to demonstrate the untenability of basic axioms of modern thought rooted in Descartes.

It is important and only fair to recognize that within contemporary science itself are modes of thought totally out of harmony with our inherited spatialized, perspectival awareness.¹⁶ For example, I see Jürgen Habermas' Logik der Sozialwissenschaften and his more recent Knowledge and Human Interests (trans. 1971) as offering a valuable articulation of the ways in which the goals of scientific knowledge dictate in advance the shape of that knowledge. Habermas follows Nietzsche in seeing all knowledge as shaped by certain overriding "interests," and insists that it is the task of philosophy to explore the connection between the shape of knowledge and the goals of knowledge.¹⁷ The case against the illusions of a one-dimensional, objectivist view of knowledge (and of man) can thus arise from within scientific thinking itself.