Science has always been in conflict with narratives.
Judged by the yardstick of science, the majority of them
prove to be fables. But to the extent that science does to
restrict itself to stating useful regularities and seek the
truth, it is obliged to legitimate the rules of its own game.
It then produces a discourse of legitimation with respect
to its own status, a discourse called philosophy. I will use
the term modern to designate any science that legitimates
itself with reference to a metadiscourse of this kind
making an explicit appeal to some grand narrative, such as
the dialectics of Spirit, the hermeneutics of meaning, the
emancipation of the rational or working subject, or the
creation of wealth.