However one might be tempted to name this process, one cannot simply by-pass it, if one is to address one of the key questions of philosophy and/or of science: what is? [what exists[, and how]? Is this one or two questions? Is any question, in any case, always more than simply one question?].
According to Ramses Fuenmayor (1991: 478), it is Reductionist Science that holds that, "the world is a collection of objects, each of which is essentially determined in-itself and externally related to each other within a world order." Such a reduction may also be encoded in 'common sense', or 'sophistry' in Heidegger's terms (Heidegger, 1978). Under such a conception, Fuenmayor continues, since a thing is determined in itself, the truth is the correct description or explanation of such determination. Reductionist Science, therefore, understands truth as adaequatio intellectus ad rem, the correspondence of intellect to thing.
This, in turn, presupposes Divine creation, as Furnmayor, following Heidegger argues. Thus, if all beings are divinely created, the possibility of the truth of human knowledge is grounded in the fact that matter (divinely created) and proposition (humanly created) measure up to the idea (divine creation re-created in the human intellect) in the same way and therefore are fitted to each other on the basis of the unity of the divine plan of creation. (Heidegger, 1978: 120)
As Heidegger explains in "On the essence of truth",
"Veritas as adaequatio rei (creandae) ad intellectum (divinum) guarantees veritas as adaequatio intellectus (humani) ad rem (creatam). Throughout, veritas essentially implies convenientia, the coming of beings themselves, as created, into agreement with the Creator, an “accord” with regard to the way they are determined in the order of creation." (Heidegger, 1978: 121)
If relatedness or being-in-relation is that which enables it to be said that entities with specific properties exist, although not in the sense of a priority or a foundation, a foundational objectivity, an arche, or a first cause, or in the sense of a transcendental subjectivity, or a static telos, a final cause retrospectively determining all that comes before, then it is understanding that relatedness, perhaps as differance or perhaps as entanglement, or possibly as contextuality as constitutive act, that becomes the task facing philosophy and science.
While it is not a primary goal here to exceed metaphysics, as this is barely a philosophical text, nevertheless it is a piece of writing. As such, still, one does not wish to be trapped in fantasy, assuming a transcendental subjectivity, that ignores its own intercorporeal intersubjectivity; yet one also wishes to admit, and to open up, the subjectivity through which artefacts and environments are misunderstood as fixed, static objects, rather than as dynamic processes of contextualisation in which one is dynamically and strategically engaged, a process that does involve risk because it does rely on intersubjective negotiation.
What we might take from Derrida, by way of an inheritance rather than a debt, as David Wood suggests, is his writing, which exceeds metaphysics,
"as and insofar as it opens up the space of alternative theoretical possibilities and as it bears witness to the scope of its own transformative possibilities." [emphasis in original] (Wood, 1988: 69)
"Philosophy on the move", Wood avers, "is the only possible transgression of metaphysics."
All of this may or may not take us very far, however, in addressing another key question of philosophy more than of science, perhaps, that of what exists for people, what matters for people, what matters to people, in answering the question of how to live, or how to live well, how to survive, or how to learn to live; to which there can be no im-mediate reply.
References
Barad, K. (2010). Quantum entanglements and hauntological relations of inheritance: dis/continuities, spacetime enfoldings, and justice-to-come. Derrida Today, 3(2), 240–268.
Brogan, W. A. (1988). The Original difference. Derrida and differance (pp. 31–39). Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.
Derrida, J. (1982). Differance. Margins of philosophy (pp. 1–27). Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Fuenmayor, R., 1991. Truth and openness: an epistemology for interpretive systemology. Systemic Practice and Action Research, 4(5), pp.473–490.
Heidegger, M. (1978). On the essence of truth. Basic writings (pp. 113–142). London, Ontario: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Wood, D. (1988). Differance and the problem of strategy. Derrida and differance. (pp. 63-70). Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.