The meaning of scientific statements

How are we to grasp the meaning of scientific statements bearing explicitly upon manifestation of the world that is posited as anterior to the emergence of thought and even of life – posited, that is, as anterior to every form of human relation to the world? Or, to put it more precisely: how are we to think the meaning of a discourse which construes the relation to the world – that of thinking and/or living – as a fact inscribed in a temporality within which this relation is just one event among others, inscribed in an order of succession in which it is merely a stage, rather than an origin?

Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude (Continuum, 2008) pp. 9-10