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that's because most of the conceptual problems that attend ordinary science are ontological. epistemology is concerned with the relations between categories and phenomena in the world. ontology is concerned with the arrangements of categories, their definitions and the frameworks that enable them. epistemology is like a proof---simple procedures, straightforward rules. ontology enables some access to axioms---you know, the statements that are arbitrary with respect to a proof because you can't prove an axiom from inside a proof that presupposes them.
but hey, that'd be a recursive way of thinking. which is where philo as an activity starts. philo as an academic institution tends to start from commentary on other texts. i enjoy some of it, find some of it useful even. but commentary as an exclusive m.o. is a problem. plus Scientists think they Know Shit because the world they operate with is carved up to fit the assumptions that orient experiment and have no Need for stuff like commentary on plotinus where they'd find exactly the same kind of activity, written about in the 3rd century, in language (an ontology) they wouldn't recognize. so they wouldn't bother trying to figure it out in the main. so the maybe questions about the interpretive circle wouldn't come up. but it'd be alot more interesting if it did come up.
unless science is supposed to just repeat the same procedures again and again.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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