.It is a near truism that science is a form of inquiry that has produced, and is likely to continue to produce, the most credible beliefs and belief systems purporting to realize certain fundamental epistemic and pragmatic aims of contemporary culture. However, with a few exceptions among the historically oriented philosophers, most epistemology of science has been concerned with the analysis of extant scientific concepts and static relations of evidence, and not with systematic procedures for the production of concepts or evidence. As is well known, the 'context of discovery' is sometimes thought to be beyond the reach of logic and epistemology. The subject of discovery is then left to historians, psychologists and social scientists. However, the epistemological problem of systematic inquiry has been of interest to a number of important philosophers in the western tradition and again is receiving the attention of philosophers of science. In the Meno, Plato, in the person of Socrates, formulates the problem as a dilemma which may be paraphrased as follows: if we possess complete and adequate knowledge, then inquiry is unnecessary, for whatever aims activities of inquiry might have have been achieved. If we are ignorant, then inquiry is impossible, for then we cannot choose how to conduct it nor can we tell when it is successful. We either possess complete and adequate knowledge or we are ignorant, therefore inquiry is either unnecessary or impossible. An immediately plausible strategy against .this dilemma is to offer a third possibility between its horns, that is, to claim the possibility of partial knowledge sufficient to specify unfulfilled epistemic goals. In this way their fulfillment, viz., scientific discoveries, can be recognized when it occurs, and inquiry may be directed by means of some foreknowledge of this fulfillment. Also both horns may be seized, for the human condition is normally not one in which total ignorance prevails. Nor can knowledge realistically be said to be complete at any stage of scientific inquiry, for the job of confirming or seeking falsification can continue indefinitely, and what would have appeared