Why was the Logic of Discovery Abandoned?

Abstract

It is difficult to find a problem area in the philosophy of science about which more rubbish has been talked and in which more confusion reigns than ‘the philosophy of discovery’. It is even hard to keep the characters straight. Russ Hanson, who thought the logic of discovery was a good thing, advocated the method of abduction, which was a method for the evaluation, not the discovery, of hypotheses. Hans Reichenbach, who was notorious for insisting that the ‘context of discovery’ is of no philosophical significance, was a proponent of the straight rule of induction, a technique for the discovery of natural regularities if ever there was one. Not to be slighted here is Karl Popper who wrote a book called the Logic of Scientific Discovery, which denies the existence of any referent for its title.