 For certain authorities, knowledge attains legitimacy when it has been invested with the power of tradition. The need to make an appeal to tradition represents one of the characteristics that grants authority to classical authors. In his quest for a scientific methodology with the objective of tackling new problems, Ortega asked whether philosophical legitimacy was attainable without appealing to traditional authority. The formal principles for discursive justification provide the procedural basis for distinguishing new science from the classical. For, he writes,