Glimpses Beyond

Abstract

We have now examined various structural aspects of scientific knowledge, the major portion of our considerations having gone to science as product (rather than as process) of inquiry. Accordingly, our attention has been principally on subsumption under hypotheses as the basic mode of logical structure, with nomic inference (explanatory as well as non-explanatory) and nomic statements (laws, theories, models, etc.) as the central topics. The subsumptive systemization of “finished” science, however, is not the only subject which concerns the methodologist. The growth of science - and this includes both the discovery and acceptance of scientific hypotheses - has also been of interest to him even as far back as antiquity, though in very recent times, the prevailing hypothetico-deductive view of science has virtually removed discovery from the curriculum of the analytical philosopher, deeming it a matter for the historian, psychologist or sociologist rather than for any analytic discipline. The questions of acceptance (confirmation) and refutation (falsification) have, meanwhile, festered under the cover of unsettled opinion. Contemporary discussion in the philosophy of science, however, offers strong indications of renewed and expanding interest in the entire subject of scientific development or ampliative science as we have also called it. Opinion on how to characterize this exciting phase of scientific inquiry is lively and unsettled. But out of the dialectical exchanges some novel trends of thought are emerging which pose a root challenge to traditional methodologies.