The Discovery of a New Quantum Theory

Abstract

The debate, some fifteen years ago, on the logic of scientific discovery, did not lead to any definitive or generally accepted solution. Yet it did sharpen some of the issues involved. Both the logical positivists and their erstwhile opponent, Karl Popper, insisted that scientific discovery was outside the scope of logic.1 N. R. Hanson’s vociferous opposition seems, in retrospect, more a rhetoric about the need for a logic of discovery than a developed logic.2 Though the process of scientific discovery, especially when rationally reconstructed, inevitably evidences some structural relation between the originating question and the eventual answer, the relation definitely does not seem to be logical in the sense of being governed by formal rules of general import.