ABSTRACT
We can easily imagine a world similar to ours, containing the same intransitive objects of scientific knowledge, but without any science to produce knowledge of them. In such a world, which has occurred and may come again, reality would be unspoken for and yet things would.not cease to act and interact in all kinds of ways. In such a world the causal laws that science has now, as a matter of fact, discovered would presumably still prevail, and the kinds of things that science has identified endure. The tides would still turn and metals conduct electricity in the way that they do, without a Newton or a Drude to produce our knowledge of them. The Wiedemann-Franz law would continue to hold although there would be no-one to formulate, experimentally establish or deduce it. Two atoms of hydrogen would continue to combine with one atom of oxygen and in favourable circumstances osmosis would continue to occur. In short, the intransitive objects of knowledge are in general invariant to our knowledge of them: they are the real things and structures, mechanisms and processes, events and possibilities of the world; and for the most part they are quite independent of us. They are not unknowable, because as a matter of fact quite a bit is known about them. (Remember they were introduced as objects of scientific knowledge.) But neither are they in any way dependent upon our knowledge, let alone perception, of them. They are the intransitive, science-independent, objects of scientific discovery and investigation.
