The first thing we have to say about this expression that "epistemology is a science of science" is that it militates in the crude criterion that "science" is synonymous with "theory." It is truly paradoxical that in the academic environment there are professionals who incur such a thick, despicable vision. A type of theory so punctual and total at the same time (this, because it embodies concrete verification in correspondence with a qualified vision of the total) and so coherent in the investigative and especially in the expository, such as science, cannot be treated according to a signifier as varied and scattered as the word "theory" is. Although science, together with philosophy and the various ideological manifestations (of vulgar thought, immediacy, etc.) is part of the theory, it cannot be treated (at least from the academy, from the epistemological milieu ...) in a way that runs the risk of giving an "anything goes" connotation.

In theory we have three great means; namely, the scientific, the philosophical, and the ideological. The ideological terrain is the relief of the everyday, of the circumstantial, of what is marked by the shameless and situational action of social power. Ideology and social power are greatly associated with the convenience of the conjunctural in the hot frame of social events. It is present from the personal context corresponding to the internal fabric of language, thought and emotionality to matters such as propaganda, the culture that is breathed in the daily life of society. The field of the philosophical is the same, but sweetened well in the personal expression of those who exercise it (the philosophers), or in the corporate expression (academies, publishing houses, States ...). Philosophy is (assuming redundancy) ideologically treated as prestige, supremacy. At the end of the day, both manifestations of the theory (ideology and philosophy) embody speculation, apriorisms, biases ... Even so, it must be said that not everything philosophical and ideological carries with it falsehood, concealment, the illogical . They are a mixed, miscellaneous, contradictory, paradoxical medium. There may be truths there, although they do not register a total-concrete objectivity. (We warn that those contents that conceal reality which make life in the philosophical and ideological media, are called in the academy, in different ways ... ideology, pseudo-concrete, ideological surplus value*).

The critical reflection that the theory in general is made, we call gnoseology. Thus, gnoseology is philosophy both from the restricted and very special context of science, and from the scattered context of the ideological and the philosophical. Gnoseology is philosophy of science (and as such we call it epistemology), philosophy of ideology (and as such we call it axiology ****) and philosophy of philosophy (and as such we call it gnosology). As for the latter, it is good to say that to assume such repetition of terms, we have very especially appealed to the logical-mathematical principle that every set is a subset of itself…. We avoid at all costs using the signifier of "metatheory" for the matter. We are better off assuming that gnoseology encompasses the epistemological (critical theory of science), the axiological (critical theory of ideology), and the philosophical (critical theory of philosophy).

There can be no science of science. There may be a philosophy of science; that is to say, epistemology. Epistemology deals openly and in a plural way, both the problems related to the objectivity of science (research topics, methods, criteria of rigor, etc.) and the problems linked to the rationality of science (logic of the expository discourse of the investigative work). One caveat ... Those issues linked to the moral (ethics and aesthetics) of science do not belong to the field of epistemology, but they do belong to the field of gnoseology (that is, for that matter ... to the philosophical field of the philosophical) .

There can be a philosophy of science (above all, of the aspects linked to objectivity and rationality), that is to say epistemology, but not "science of science". It is not appropriate to speak of "science of science"; not. The concrete existence of a "science of science" would be more or less coupled with what believers see as "heaven" (that is, an eventual kingdom of God) and with what followers of the historical Marxist dream see (or they saw) as "the communist society" (that is, an eventual social environment in which the advice of each person is carried out according to their needs and capacities *****).

No tenemos reservas en admitir que el epistemólogo Mario Bunge (argentino-canadiense, 1910-2020) fue notable, productivo; muchas veces brillante, otras veces no tanto. No sabemos si la desafortunada frase que hoy cuestionamos aquí, y que aparece en la azulada tapa de uno de sus buenos libros, fue una ocurrencia suya o una travesura de los publicistas de la casa editorial que hizo la publicación... En todo caso tal desacierto es una contradicción, una paradoja...

We have no reservations in admitting that the epistemologist Mario Bunge (Argentine-Canadian, 1910-2020) was remarkable, productive; many times brilliant, other times not so much. We do not know if the unfortunate phrase that we question here today, and that appears on the bluish cover of one of his good books, was his idea or a prank by the publicists of the publishing house that made the publication ... In any case such mistake is a contradiction, a paradox ...

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