Presuppositionalist Metaphysics holds that first principles should be discovered or known prior to developing an empirical method of inquiry. This is a time-honored philosophy that is still held by apologists the world over. In staunch contrast to presuppositionalism, logical positivists and pragmatists often seek, instead, to take the functionality of the empirical method as self-evident, and then infer ontological and cognitive stability from that. This is an effort, in both cases, to dispense with metaphysics in favor of the materialistic philosophy espoused by thinkers such as A. J. Ayer, Rudolf Carnap and the early Wittgenstein. This method can be subjected to two critiques: 1) We are still engaging in presuppositionalism since we're now presupposing that science works or 2) This is c