Deductive Heuristics

Abstract

Is there a logic of scientific discovery? An affirmative answer to this question is a thread which ran through all of Imre Lakatos’s writings. In this Lakatos swam against the tide of logical positivist and Popperian orthodoxy. According to that orthodoxy, the ‘context of discovery’ is the province of empirical psychology; it is only the ‘context of justification’ which is the province of logic. Moreover, psychological facts about the way in which a theory was discovered have no bearing upon the logical or epistemological question of whether it is a justified theory. Now Lakatos and his followers were not, of course, the first to swim against the tide of orthodoxy. But they were, I shall argue, the first to make much headway against it.