The price of progression in science is a forgetfulness of ultimate foundations. While there are scientific revolutions which overturn and thus recognize some sort of foundation, these revolutions must be palace revolutions, that is, a reworking of principles that presuppose a broader, unquestioned, and more fundamental consensus. Relativity, for example, takes inertia for granted, and it certainly never calls into question the lingua franca of quantification, algebraic expression of laws, the search for law (as opposed to, say, nature or essence), nor does it raise the question of the general situation of the sciences in the broader framework of human learning.
Progress is a sort of motion and so presupposes a subject that does not change, which in this context means it presupposes an unquestioned given. Note that an unquestioned given is not the same thing as a self-evident fact. To question something allows for the possibility that what one questions might be self-evident, but it does not require it. When we say the particular sciences (physics, geometry, etc) have unquestioned givens we mean that they take certain things for granted that they have absolutely no ability of themselves to consider or question. The foundational principles of a science are general, and no particular science has the tools to question what is common to many. One can have a particular science (or group of sciences) of common things, but the price of such a science is the abandonment of the possibility of certain common notions that can provide an unquestioned basis for progress. A particular science/s of the common is very much anti-progressive- what the sciences take as an unquestioned given it seeks to explicate and understand with greater and greater clarity even when the contents of this unquestioned given are self-evident. Instead of taking some body of truth as unquestioned and working out the consequences collectively and progressively, a particular science/s of the common goes in exactly the opposite direction, seeking to go deeper and make more explicit what is unquestioned in the various particular sciences. One thing that makes this sort of discourse possible and necessary is that there is a difference between the self-evident and a distinct and fully developed understanding of the self-evident. Self-evidence is not an impediment to development, as though it can do nothing but ground discourses where it can itself never be discoursed on. To take the principle of contradiction as self-evident does not mean that we can do no more than recite formulations of it. There is a whole universe of ways in which it can be developed. The principle deserves an entire sub-science of its own. Contradicology… if one can stand to mix Latin and Greek roots.
The self-reflective character of metaphysics (Aristotle’s name for the science/s of common things) requires that it cannot develop by advancing in a progressive fashion, but by continually returning upon itself. This does not mean that everything is up for grabs or purely arbitrary, or that there s no solid ground to be found (though there is nothing immediately in the notion of self-reflection that rules this out) it means that those who do metaphysics see progress as being able to see the basis of things clearly and for themselves as opposed to progressively developing an unquestioned treasury of knowledge. This does not mean that a metaphysician cannot takes some texts as authoritative – we can have aids in seeing things for ourselves. But we have to choose between seeing into the foundations (which requires raising questions about them and having a method suited to treat them) and having a progressive, developed science that can be accepted by the multitude as true and settled.
Just Thomism 