Thomas Nickles

The history of science is articulated by moments of discovery. Yet, these 'moments' are not simple or isolated events in science. Just as a scientific discovery illuminates our understanding of nature or of society, and reveals new connections among phenomena, so too does the history of scientific activity and the analysis of scientific reasoning illuminate the processes which give rise to moments of discovery and the complex network of consequences which follow upon such moments. Understanding discovery has not been, until recently, a major concern of modem philosophy of science. Whether the act of discoyery was regarded as mysterious and inexplicable, or obvious and in no need of explanation, modem philosophy of science in effect bracketed the question. It concentrated instead on the logic of scientific explanation or on the issues of validation or justification of scientific theories or laws. The recent revival of interest in the context of discovery, indeed in the acts of discovery, on the part of philosophers and historians of science, represents no one particular method'ological or philosophical orientation. It proceeds as much from an empiricist and analytical approach as from a sociological or historical one; from considerations of the logic of science as much as from the alogical or extralogical contexts of scientific tho'¢tt and practice. But, in general, this new interest focuses sharply on the actual historical and contem porary cases of scientific discovery, and on an examination of the act or moment of discovery in situ.

Pure consequentialists hold that all theoretical justification derives from testing the consequences of hypotheses, while generativists maintain that reasoning (some feature of) the hypothesis from we already know is an important form of justification. The strongest form of justification (they claim) is an idealized discovery argument. In the guise of H-D methodology, consequentialism is widely supposed to have defeated generativism during the 19th century. I argue that novel prediction fails to overcome the logical weakness of consequentialism or to render generative methodology superfluous. Specifically, Bayesian consequentialism is not an alternative to generativism but reduces to an instance of it.