Invention and Justification Author(s): Larry Laudan Source: Philosophy of Science, Vol. 50, No. 2 (Jun., 1983), pp.

320-322 Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of the Philosophy of Science Association Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/188018 . Accessed: 24/10/2011 15:51
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DISCUSSION: INVENTION AND JUSTIFICATION* LARRY LAUDAN

Department of Philosophy Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University

In Robert McLaughlin's recent article in this journal (1982), several doctrines are attributedto me which I am reluctant to claim as my own. Because they are central to the structure of McLaughlin's essay, I think it is worth pointing out that they rest on a reading of my work which is very different from mine. In the essay for which McLaughlin takes me to task (Laudan 1980), I sought: (1) to explain why several prominent 19th-centuryphilosophers of science turned away from the logic of discovery, and (2) to draw some 'morals' from that story about the current rationale for the analysis of discovery. McLaughlin quarrels with my history no less than with my morals. I suspect that he has misunderstood both. In a nutshell, my historical claim was this: so long as epistemologists of science believed (a) that science was infallible knowledge, and (b) that the post hoc evaluation of the consequences of a theory was inconclusive with respect to the truth of that theory, then the justification of a theory would have to be found (if at all) in the circumstances of its genesis. The logic of discovery, in such a framework, would thus do double service; it would serve both heuristic and epistemic purposes. However (so I claimed), once (a) was abandoned, it then became reasonable-as it had not been before-to argue that the post hoc testing of a theory could provide its epistemic warrantand that a theory's origins could be ignored in its appraisal. The moral I drew from this admittedly over-simple historical account was that, once fallibilism was accepted, logics of post hoc theory testing "renderedredundant and gratuitous the logic of discovery so far as the epistemological issue [of well-founded knowledge claims] was concerned" (1980, p. 182). McLaughlin imagines, however, that I was making different and more ambitious claims. Where I had argued that the decline of infallibilism made it possible, even reasonable, to argue that a theory could be justified

*Received August 1982.

Philosophy of Science, 50 (1983) pp. 320-322.

? 1983 by the Philosophyof Science Association. Copyright

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independently of an analysis of its origins, he takes me to have said that "the decline of an infallibilist view of appraisal . . . require[d] the divorce of invention from appraisal" (1982, p. 203). The thrust of McLaughlin's own analysis is to the effect that fallibilism does not require the dismissal of the epistemic significance of a logic of discovery. I fully agree with him that fallibilism does not preclude the search for a logic of discovery; but that has no bearing on the account I was giving. I had argued that the emergence of fallibilism was a necessary condition for the recognition of the epistemic centrality of logics of post hoc theory testing of a consequentialist sort. McLaughlin, on the other hand, takes me to have asserted that fallibilism is a logically sufficient ground for the repudiation of the logic of discovery tout court. Nothing in McLaughlin's essay undercuts the historical thesis which I actually propounded (as opposed to the one he attributesto me). McLaughlin has, I think, just misunderstood the characterof the conceptual interconnections which I was addressing. As for his criticism of the morals I was drawing from the history, there is again a serious mis-reading taking place. I had suggested that, if we were ever to have a full-blown logic of post hoc theory evaluation (which we manifestly do not yet), then our epistemic tasks-so far as theory assessment was concerned-would be at an end. Under such ideal circumstances, a logic of discovery (even assuming one could be devised) would not be required to provide a warrant for the theoretical claims of science. As I wrote, the logic of discovery would be epistemically "gratuitous and redundant" (1980, p. 182) if we had a full-blown logic of justification. McLaughlin takes me to have said, rather, that the factors which play a role in the invention of a theory are always irrelevant to its appraisaland thus that there is no 'intersection' between the "contexts of invention and appraisal" (1982, p. 205). I suggested nothing of the sort. I was persuaded long ago by Peter Achinstein that many of the considerations relevant to the appraisal of a theory may well have been present in the mind of the theory's inventor (Achinstein 1971). Invention sometimes is a rational and rule-governed process. I can even imagine that many of the rules of a logic of discovery might be the same as those of a logic of justification. But, on pain of belaboring the obvious, it is not essential to the evaluation of any theory to know anything whatever about the reasoning processes of its inventor. Nor does the possibility of a logic of evaluationdepend upon the possibility of a logic of discovery. I squarely reject McLaughlin's insistence that ignoring "the logic of its [i.e., a theory's] invention would be to overlook an important element in the logic of its appraisal, so as to do a defective job of epistemological reconstruction" (1982, p. 205). Insofar as the factors utilized in the invention of a theory are relevant to that theory's epistemic warrant, they will show up in the logic of its appraisal. But they can earn a place there not by virtue

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of their role in its invention, but only because we have epistemically independent grounds for believing them to be relevant to appraisal.
REFERENCES Achinstein, P. (1971), Law and Explanation. New York: The Clarendon Press; Oxford University Press. Laudan, L. (1980), "Why was the Logic of Discovery Abandoned?" in Nickles, T. (ed.), Scientific Discovery, Logic, and Rationality. Dordrecht: D. Reidel, pp. 173-183. (A revised version of this essay appears in Laudan, L., Science and Hypothesis, 1981.) McLaughlin, R. (1982), "Invention and Induction: Laudan, Simon, and the Logic of Discovery", Philosophy of Science 49: 198-211.