ing. Identifying any previous knowledge, ideas, or beliefs about phenomenon under investigation, allowed the examiner to be impartial. He intended by this bracketing of scientific or cultural presuppositions to reach "the things themselves". Therefore, for Husserl, logical empiricism should not be the model for all knowledge because it is ultimately self-defeating, since empirical scientific enquiry always presupposes some knowledge that is not itself empirical natural scientific knowledge. As Husserl states "if by "Positivism", we are to mean the absolute unbiased grounding of all science then it is we who are the guenuine positivists." (pg 78 )3.Husserl's aim was to find a philosophy that can serve as an absolutely certain basis for the development of all the sciences, by searching for facts which can't be doubted. Further, if we understand Phenomenology to be the study of the structures of consciousness that enable consciousness to refer to objects outside itself , we can see that a phenomenologist would consider only what was immediately presented to consciousness. In other words, this study requires reflection on the content of the mind to the exclusion of everything else. Husserl called this type of reflection the phenomenological reduction. In this reduction, there is exclusion from consideration of everything which is derived via scientific or logical inference, all beliefs about the external existence of the objects of consciousness, are bracketed, and descriptions deal exclusively with subjective phenomena. This bracketing of external sources of information was meant to allow one to investigate "the things themselves" leaving the philosopher with nothing but the experiencing itself. Furthermore, each act of bracketing was a step in the reduction and was defined as an Epoche . However, the fact that the external world is disregarded, that epoche is committed, does not deny this world; the external world maintains its existen...
