Abstract

The history of the idea that there is no logic of discovery is traced back from its occurrence as a fundamental tenet of twentieth century analytic philosophy of science to its origins in Kantian philosophy around 1800. Reichenbach, Carnap, Popper, and Hempel are taken as the principal influences on later analytic philosophers who held this view, and are shown to have each asserted it as part of the anti-psychologistic distinction between psychology and logic that was an increasingly standard assumption among German-language philosophers from 1880 to 1930. ;The anti-psychologistic distinctions of the neo-Kantians Cassirer, Windelband, Kulpe, and Lotze are shown to imply that there is no logic of discovery, unlike those of Frege and Husserl, which do not. Thus, Frege and Husserl were not significant figures in the tradition that there is no logic of discovery. Because Reichenbach, Carnap, Popper, and Hempel were trained as neo-Kantians by neo-Kantians, the tradition of neo-Kantian anti-psychologism is clearly the immediate source of their views. ;Two reasons were standardly given for holding that there is no logic of discovery: the anti-inductivist thesis that induction cannot be a logic of discovery, so that all scientific propositions must be found by the "method of hypothesis" of first imagining the proposition, hypothesizing its truth, and only then testing it with observations; and the romantic thesis that there is no method for imagining scientific propositions, because they are intuited in a logically unanalyzable way. The romantic idea occurred in mid-eighteenth century England and Germany; the anti-inductivist thesis is based on an explicitly Kantian argument. ;Kant himself never asserted that there is no logic of discovery, that induction is not a logic of discovery, or that scientific hypotheses must be discovered by unanalyzable intuitions. But these views were asserted by later Kantians, constructed from elements in Kant, and so belong to a German Kantian tradition not occurring before 1800. The romantic nature philosophers, Oersted and Ampere, also held these views; Whewell obtained his similar views from them, among others. Einstein, Buhler, Mach, and Schelling are also discussed here.