HEURISTIC APPRAISAL: CONTEXT OF DISCOVERY OR JUSTIFICATION?

Abstract

Many have noted the irony of the English title, The Logic of Scientific Discovery, of Karl Popper’s expanded translation of his Logik der Forschung (1934). Given Popper’s use of the distinction between context of discovery and context of justification (the DJ distinction), there is no such thing as a logic (or method or even rationality) of discovery. Yet the book is nearly 500 pages long!1 But instead of once again looking at how the DJ distinction discouraged attention to what Popper termed “the initial stage, the act of conceiving or inventing a theory” (Popper 1959, p. 31), I shall examine the privileged context of justification.