They are the product of the active coping of our species with a reality irreducible to itself. Our ideas, at least our saner and more successful ones, bear always the impress both of ourselves and something beyond ourselves. I know full well that I cannot solve here and now and for all times the problem of knowledge and that it is necessary to be far more precise about these matters. My purpose here is only to urge that we exert ourselves to overcome the present deadlock and move on. The very idea of the unity of science, let us acknowledge it straight out, is grounded in the ontological assumption of the unity of the world.
Philosophers here have a role to play in arguing over the legitimacy of such an assumption.
In fact, all of us, at least those of us who pass as sane, to some extent do inevitably presuppose that reality is somehow one, for the very essence of what we call thinking is making connections, finding patterns, probing for unifying concepts. A random, disconnected, indeterminate universe could not be conceptualised. Indeed, it would not be a universe. Doing so has carried us through everything we have reason to call progress and it is reasonable for us to think that this reveals as much about the world as it does about us. My argument from here is that, if we are going to make such an assumption, it is better to do so clearly, consistently, and self-consciously than to be schizoid about it, as most philosophers these days are.