[Critical social science attempts] to determine when theoretical statements grasp invariant regularities of social action as such and when they expre… - Jürgen Habermas

The usage of the words “public" and “public sphere” betrays a multiplicity of concurrent meanings. Their origins go back to various historical phases and, when applied synchronically to the conditions of a bourgeois society that is industrially advanced and constituted as a social-welfare state, they fuse into a clouded amalgam. Yet the very conditions that make the inherited language seem inappropriate appear to require these words, however confused their employment.

[According to Habermas, the genesis of the bourgeois public sphere resulted from a combination of early capitalist commercial development and the organization of territorial … Representative publicness involved a re-presenting or staging for the purposes of display and acclamation, hence] this publicness (or publicity) of representation was not constituted as a social realm, that is, as a public sphere; rather, it was something like a status attribute, if this term may be permitted.

Science can only be comprehended epistemologically, which means as one category of possible knowledge, as long as knowledge is not equated either effusively with the absolute knowledge of a great philosophy or blindly with scientistic self-understanding of the actual business of research.