The transcendental ego is the agent of truth. It exercises this agency in many contexts: in speech, picturing, reminiscence, practical conduct, political rhetoric, clever deception, and strategic maneuvers. A special way of exercising the power to be truthful occurs in science, whether the science is empirical or theoretic, and whether it is focused on one region of being or another. In science, we wish simply to find the truth of things; the scientific enterprise is an attempt just to show the way things are, apart from how they can be used or how we might wish them to be. Success in science does not mean victory over other people or the gratification of our various desires; it means purely and simply the triumph of objectivity, the disclosure of how things are.

Philosophy is a scientific effort, but it is different from mathematics and the natural and social sciences; it is concerned not with a particular region of being, but with truthfulness as such: with the human conversation, the human attempt to disclose the way things are, and the human ability to act in accordance with the nature of things; ultimately, it is concerned with being as it manifests itself to us. In science and philosophy we seek truth for its own sake, apart from any other benefit it might bring. In both endeavors we try to reach the highest degree of exactness appropriate to the matter at hand; we are not satisfied by what is just enough to get a particular job done.