The positive sciences reduce truth-enabling knowledge to the function of ordering the relationship between perception and concept, on the assumption that perception, as well as concepts (particularly if they are congruent), can be brought to unequivocal intersubjective certainty and secured against the arbitrariness of the alter ego. So it is that the vast, booming enterprise of science is increasingly content to justify its methods by their success without admitting any question of what happens in those areas of knowledge in which intersubjective certainty cannot be attained and without questioning the overall significance of setting up this kind of intersubjective certainty in place of the old and familiar evidence by which truth used to be measured.

Niklas Luhmann, Trust and Power, loc. 141