Certainly, much that philosophers speak of happens only implicitly, if at all, because few of us think philosophically in our daily life. But objectification is implicit in our mental compartmentalization and in our condescending conceptions of everything that's nonhuman.

So the tracker will conceive of the animal as a danger or as a meal ticket, not as part of "Gaia," for example, or of an undivided, living ecosystem. In other words, animism would be the opposite of objectification, but if we're out to control our environment, we use our concepts as tools or strategies to get the better of threats. We divide up the landscape in our minds to conquer it. We don't befriend the world but use trial and error, experimenting on the world to enslave its processes.

I agree that scientists typically view their work as tentative, although there's a movement in theoretical physics that's explicit about the search for a final, all-encompassing theory. In any case, my point was more about the cosmological questions, not so much about the available answers. What's the status of those questions? Are they ordinary, empirical ones? Just one more hurdle to climb? Or are they inherently paradoxical, as Kant said?