Reichenbach Falls—And Rises? Reconstructing the Discovery/Justification Distinction

ABSTRACT

The distinction between ‘context of discovery’ and ‘context of justification’ in philosophy of science appears simple at first but contains interesting complexities. Paul Hoyningen-Huene has catalogued some of these complexities and suggested that the core usefulness of the ‘context distinction’ is in distinguishing between descriptive and normative perspectives. Here, I expand on Hoyningen-Huene’s project by tracing the label ‘context of discovery and context of justification’ to its origin. I argue that, contrary to initial appearances, Hans Reichenbach’s initial context distinction from 1938 does not easily map onto Hoyningen-Huene’s distinction between descriptive and normative perspectives on science. However, this is not a reason to reject Hoyningen-Huene’s simplified context distinction, nor do I recommend returning to Reichenbach’s initial proposal. It is, however, further reason to believe that the context distinction does not have a single, easily understood meaning. Along the way, I revisit Reichenbach’s version of ‘rational reconstruction’ and highlight its usefulness as a tool for philosophy in general.

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to the participants of the Integrated History and Philosophy of Science conference at the University of Notre Dame in 2009, and especially to Don Howard and Flavia Padovani for their valuable feedback, not all of which I was able to address here. I also benefited from writings and lectures by Alan Richardson and Jutta Schickore at the History and Philosophy of Science conference at the University of British Columbia in 2008. My approach to this material is informed by their work. Thank you to the Columbia History of Science Group, where participants listened to very first presentation of these ideas and gave helpful feedback. I am also grateful to Arthur Fine, Andrea Woody, and Ben Almassi for their insightful comments on earlier drafts, and to anonymous reviewers of this journal for their helpful feedback.

Notes

1 While the idea has arguably been around much longer (Hoyningen-Huene 1987, 502–503), Reichenbach coined the English phrases ‘context of discovery’ and ‘context of justification’. He mentions the context distinction at least once in German in a 1935 letter to Erkenntnis entitled ‘Zur Induktions-Maschine’, where he distinguishes between Auffindungsverfahren (discovery processes) and Rechtfertigungverfahren (justification processes). However, he offers very little explanation, instead directing the reader to his forthcoming book (Reichenbach 1935). Reichenbach later mentions the distinction briefly in the first chapter of Elements of Symbolic Logic (Reichenbach 1947). Some attribute the distinction to Karl R. Popper, who first mentions something like it in Logik der Forschung (Popper [1934] 1969). Referring to Kant’s quid facti and quid juris, Popper distinguishes between Tatsachenfragen and Geltungsfragen, which he translates as ‘questions of fact’ and ‘questions of validity’ respectively for the English edition (Popper [1959] 2002). Reichenbach and Popper corresponded on these ideas at the time, so some overlap is to be expected even as their conceptions of the distinction differed.

2 This description is even more specific than Hoyningen-Huene suggests, but I think it nonetheless nicely captures the general attitude of the proposed distinction.

3 To what extent the philosophy was to inform the science, or the science was to inform the emerging philosophy, is a matter of dispute. See Friedman (1991).

4 Reichenbach’s use of ‘epistemology’ is much closer to common use of ‘philosophy’ today. See Uebel (2007), 6. Here, I use the two interchangeably.

5 Although he mentions his friend and mentor Einstein frequently, Reichenbach does not offer examples as explicit as this. I draw upon Galison (2003) for this example.

6 This section is similar to the debate between Andrew Pickering in The Mangle of Practice (Pickering 1995) and Ian Hacking in The Social Construction of What? (Hacking 1999) over decision points in scientific research.

7 It is unclear whether Reichenbach intends to say that the advisory task and critical task overlap in these situations, or that the philosopher stops engaging in the advisory task and starts to engage in the critical task instead.

8 To be clear, Reichenbach might very well embrace the lean DJ as a useful distinction. For instance, de Campos (2015) offers an intriguing argument that even Neurath would have endorsed Hoyningen-Huene’s lean DJ. But whether Reichenbach would, in theory, endorse the distinction between ‘descriptive’ and ‘normative’ perspectives is a separate issue. I argue merely that Reichenbach’s own DJ did not contain this distinction.

9 One should not overlook Popper’s influence here, which is of course also worth further study.

10 Note that for this reason ‘the way a scientist presents his theorem’ is offered as an analogy only. For more on the difference between how scientists think versus how they present their thought process in public, see Schickore (2008).

11 He continues to refer to ‘rational reconstructions’, however, in order to clarify the differences between the critical and descriptive tasks.

12 This latter text is well worth study. Here, Reichenbach defends his meta-methodology, arguing that even if scientists do not consciously use induction, any good scientist is implicitly relying on it.

13 Unfortunately, the phrase rational reconstruction refers to a product, as well as a process, just like the words ‘film production’, ‘test’ and even the adjective ‘objective’ (Fine 1998).

14 Much confusion arises out of this, since the philosopher does not have direct access to the scientist’s thought process. At best, she has an oral account or a written document produced by the scientist, describing what he takes to be his own thought process.

15 See Uebel (2007, 19–24, 54–60) for an account of those changes. See also Friedman (1991) and Richardson (1996, 2000) for challenges to traditional interpretations of Carnap.

16 I do not mean to overemphasise the temporal aspect here. Although the German certainly suggests this notion of a sequence in time, the important aspect is the separation between the actual thought processes and logical orderings of those thought process, not the idea that one happens before the other.

17 This controversial view did not go unnoticed. For objections to it, see Kuhn (1970, 256) and McMullin (1970).

18 That is, Lakatos suggests that adopting this methodology, as a way of approaching science, will allow philosophers to successfully pursue interesting questions. Another benefit of this methodology is that it explains scientific activities that otherwise do not appear rational.