Comment on Popperian Methodology

In what follows, we shall make a few critical comments on Popperian methodology which has as many detractors as admirers.

Popper draws an invidious distinction between the context of discovery and the context of justification, and maintains that philosophy of science as methodology of science must confine itself to the latter, since according to him, discovery process involves a-rational factors which defy rational explanation. His rejection of the possibility of a rational account of discovery has been called into question. He seems to confine his attention to the examples like Kekule's discovery of Benzene structure wherein the central idea occurred to Kekule in a dream. But not all such cases are standard. Typical discoveries are provided by an elaborate reasoning process. Even in the case of Kekule, one must explain why only that dream was taken as providing clue to the Benzene structure. It appears more plausible to say that Kekule had undertaken enough reasoning to get the hint from that dream. That is to say, though clicks, hunches, intuition and other imponderables do play a role in the formation of hypothesis, they are preceded and succeeded by a long and guided chain of reasoning. Perhaps, the main reason for Popper's rejection of the possibility of a rational account of discovery is his identification of the possibility of a rational account of discovery with the possibility of an inductivist account of discovery. The inductivist account of discovery maintains the use of the principle of induction coupled with repeated observations leading to discovery. Later, inductivists like Mill even tried to work out thumb rules of discovery. Popper is right in showing that inductivists came nowhere near providing an account of discovery. No amount of observations can suggest us a theoretical idea. But, Popper is wrong in thinking that from this it follows that a rational account of discovery is an impossibility. Hanson, in his Patterns of Discovery , comes heavily on Popper and advances a theory concerning discovery on the basis of the work by Charles Pierce. If according to Popper, the essence of science consists in the way in which theories are tested, according to Hanson, real science is over with the conception of the hypothesis. To quote Hanson, ‘There is something wrong with the H-D account.