Ideology, Heuristics and Rationality in the Context of Discovery

Abstract

Philosophy often progresses by introducing sharp distinctions and then dismantling them. A prime example for those interested in heuristics is Reichenbach’s demarcation between the context of discovery and the context of justification. Reichenbach himself thought the distinction an important one and referred to it on many occasions¹, but he provides little detail about exactly what the distinction is or its proper function in the history and philosophy of science. Whatever Reichenbach’s own intentions may have been², historians of science, philosophers of discovery, and, more recently, cognitive scientists have vehemently objected to his claim that the context of discovery “… can be analyzed only psychologically, not logically… and cannot be portrayed by a rational procedure… (Reichenbach 1949, p. 434). And in his ground-breaking 1971 paper ‘Correspondence, Invariance, and Heuristics’, Heinz Post was actually able to articulate a variety of what he called ” ‘theoretic’ guide lines to new theories“ (1971, p. 217) and to provide a rationale for them. Even if the Entdeckungszusammenhang turned out to be a private, subjective affair, the Entwicklungszusammenhang could profitably be studied by the philosopher of science. So Reichenbach’s demarcation, if interpreted as an attempt to define a water-tight boundary between the proper domains of psychology and epistemology³, has proved to be a very leaky one indeed.