The Logic of Scientific Inquiry PDF

The Logic of Scientific Inquiry
Author(s): Joseph Agassi

Source: Synthese, Vol. 26, No. 3/4, From Epistemology to Methodology (Apr., 1974), pp. 498-514
Published by: Springer
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JOSEPH AGASSI
THE LOGIC OF SCIENTIFIC INQUIRY
The question to which this paper is devoted is strikingly simple: Do we

learn scientific method, and if so, how? Historically, in the best classical
tradition of epistemology, the question universally recognized as central,
was, do we know a priori or a posteriori ? Now we agree that we do not
know a priori', perhaps not even a posteriori, though something a posteriori
does happen: we do learn from experience. This, however, does not settle
the issue at all. The question to which the present essay is devoted is just
the new version of the classical question, and looking at itmakes itmuch
easier to comprehend the present state of affairs in the field of the
philosophy of science. The question is, do we possess knowledge of the
logic of inquiry a priori, or do we learn it? If we posses its a priori, how
can our studies in methodology
progress, as they unquestionably do?
If we learn it, ifwe learn about learning, do we possess the ability to do so
a priori! Or can we say, perhaps, that we are methodologically ignorant?
When I say this paper is devoted to a question, I mean a question,
rather then alternative answers for it. A question well-put, they say, is
half the answer. Well, then, my target is only half the answer, and I may
a
fall far short ofthat too. It is strange fact that philosophers barely pose
problems, and seldom discuss questions, being so much in a hurry to
answer them. But we can take our time now, and center on a question,
for a change.
The question seems abstract. Let me try to concretize it a bit. It used
to be taken for granted that scientists know all about induction and use
what they know. This was criticized by Duhem who said, it is an empirical
fact that different scientists have different views about scientific method.
Duhem tried to discredit the view that scientists know all about method
ology because traditionally scientists were : the paradigm was
inductivists
Newton who preached induction and allegedly practiced it too. And
Duhem was an anti-inductivist. Einstein gave the idea which Duhem
criticized the coup de grace in a mock-inductive fashion :do not listen to
what a scientist says he does, look at what in fact he does. Now, as Newton
Synthese 26 (1974) 498-514. All Rights Reserved

Copyright ? 1974 by D. Reidel Publishing Company, Dordrecht-Holland
THE LOGIC OF SCIENTIFIC INQUIRY 499
did not practice the method he preached, what method did he practice?
Evidently, the right method. Whose theory describes the right method?
Mine, of course: if I did not think a theory was true, I would not be
advocating it. Hence, says Duhem, says Popper, say many others, Newton
preached inductivism, but - quite unknowingly - he
practiced the newest
methodology ever, my methodology.
This is a remarkable fact, well worth exploring. It came home to me
slowly, and two events
helped bringing it about. One was
during my
substituting a class in the London School of Economics when I said, as
a matter of course, that Newton was an arch-inductivist. One student,
who had listened to Popper's lectures for quite some time and was well
versed in Popper's doctrines, was quite shocked. This, considering that
for two centuries Newton was the inductivist paradigm, seemed to me
quaint enough. More recently, in the Boston area, I was invited in a series
of guest lectures to follow a lecture by the Newton expert, I. B. Cohen.
The students there were also shocked to hear that Newton was an induc
tivist. A week earlier Cohen told them what method Cohen thought
Newton had followed; and they all assumed as a matter of course that
Newton knew what he was doing; and hence, they all ascribed Cohen's
views on method to Newton. Clearly, Cohen had no time to explain in
one evening how Newton could practice the method of hypothesis while
preaching against it; he could not even mention in that one evening that
though Newton speculated systematically, he thought experimental phi
losophy had no place for speculation. For my part, I have now the whole
- but at least I have
evening to explain it, if I only knew the explanation
already mentioned the problem. And, as I say, I took a long time to airive
at it, in spite of these helpful events. Now the simple fact is clear to me:
it is almost providential that Newton should have practiced the right
method even while he preached the wrong one. Well, perhaps he did not.
The claim that he did is a very strong version of a priorism which does not
demand, as Descartes did, any degree of awareness.
The reasonthat this doubt, which I have discovered, has not been
noticed before, even by critics of Duhem and of Popper, including myself,
is quite obvious. It is not the matter of respect for Newton who somehow
must have done the right thing. Heavens knows, and Augustus DeMorgan
has graphically enough illustrated, how often Newton could do just about
the wrongest thing possible. The matter is not of history, but of the phi
500 JOSEPH AGASSI
losophy of the social sciences. The historical school in the philosophy of

the social sciences, notably Hegel and Marx, declared that all societal laws
are confined or historical domains, are bound to space-time regions. The
opposite or generalizing school of Rickert, Windelband, and Weber, has
won the upper hand : the qualifications of the specific space-time con
ditions of historical personages can be described in universal terms and so
the societal laws applicable to them may be stated as strictly universal.
Now scientific is subject to certain laws of human activity and so
research
describable in universal terms. Hence, my methodology, if true, eo ipso
applies to Newton; hence, we can test it by applying it to Newton's case.

Let me tell you briefly how I have arrived at the discovery that something
is fishy in what I have just described as the central argument supporting
the claim that Newton (unknowingly) practiced my methodology. My
story will render my problem somewhat more concrete, I hope, and will
also provide a case study to which we can apply any part of our inquiry.
Moreover, it concerns the empirical support of a scientific hypothesis,
variably known as verification, confirmation, corroboration, agreement
or accord between fact and theory, and by other names. I am tired of
empirical support; I have argued to my own satisfaction that science is not
after empirical support; technology is, and even science can use empirical
support to other ends, such as increasing the degree of explanation of
a hypothesis; and other kinds of support may come handy in science and
more so inmetaphysics. But science is not after empirical support as such.
-
My arguments have not been attacked by anyone except Popper, Wisdom
-
has later reiterated it and even he has offered only a measly small and
poor attack, and only as a token of general esteem, not as an expression
of esteem of my views on empirical support. Since it is all I have to
sharpen my wits on, I centered on itmuch more than I otherwise would.
And I do not regret it.
Briefly, I have criticized Popper for an inconsistency. He must decide
whether science is a process of but conjecture and refutation, or also of
corroboration. This Popper has not taken up. Also, I have said, I prefer
conjecture and refutation to conjecture, corroboration and refutation.
I even do not like conjecture and refutation too much since I qualify it
so much as to make it look quite different from the way Popper has
intended it to look. But I have no time tonight for this. So, let me repeat,
however inaccurately or misleadingly, I prefer conjectures and refutations
to conjectures, corroborations, and refutations. To this Popper has

retorted by saying, if not for corroboration history might have developed
differently, since scientists were importantly encouraged by corroboration
or empirical support.
I do endorse this historical statement. I take it for granted that science
in the 17th century gained much moral support from empirical support -
whether genuine, like that for Boyle's Law, or spurious, like the empirical
support Newton's theory of gravity gained during Newton's own lifetime.
This, of course, takes us to the following question. Assume the (alleged or
true) historical fact that scientists did seek empirical support, and for
a strong reason. Does this refute my claim that science does not seek
support as such? I do not know. Let us take it slowly.
Let us suppose, for a moment, that what encouraged scientific research
was an external event so-called, an event unrelated to what is now called
the internal history of science. Suppose, say, that it arose as an act of
indignation against the humilation which Galileo suffered at the hand of
the Inquisition. I say 'suppose' for lack of information, but surely it
could have happened; we have such an instance in the case of the attack
on Darwin from religious quarters, in a period when such attacks were far
less frightening; but the 19th century is not the one in which support for
science as such was needed to keep the enterprise of science going.
Supposing, then, that the Inquisition caused a back-lash which helped
science develop. Will this be a criticism of the view that, internally, science
is conjectures and refutations? No. Why is the claim that support plays a
positive historical role in the rise of the sciences more damaging to that
view than the analogous claim about the Inquisition?
The answer is obvious :whereas the act of the Inquisition is clearly
external to the history of science, it is not at all clear whether support,
the search for it and the use of it, is equally external. How, then, do we
judge externality or internality, and how does this make the observation
that withoutempirical support science would have died a criticism of my
contention that science is not after empirical support, that support plays
no independent role in science?
In the second biennial meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association,
Imre Lakatos drew attention to the fact that, insofar as the distinction
between internal and external history of science signifies, itmust be viewed
as theory laden. The theory in question is, of course, a historiography of
502 JOSEPH AGASSI
science, and the major ingredient in any historiography of science - I

- is a view of scientific method.
think it is by now agreed It should there
fore not be surprising if I were to conclude that I view the historical role
of support as external, that Popper views it as internal, that we are both
consistent, but that he has no criticism of my view thus far.
There is, however, a snag here. The more I stick to my logic and insist
on a subtle distinction between internal and external history of science,
the more subtle this distinction
becomes, the more it loses its significance.
This, I think, was Kuhn's comment on Lakatos. As long as the distinction
is applied to such things as the Inquisition's humilation of Galileo on the
on the one hand and the fact that Galileo could measure time to the
precision of the order
of magnitude of one second, the distinction is
powerful. Once we cut it finer, and diminishing returns set in fast.
This fact seems to me very interesting. I have observed elsewhere that
all methodologists who are worth noticing were reformers of methodology,
yet most of them systematically refuse to say whether they legislate how
scientists should act or observe how they do. Now the testing ground
should, of course, be history: a reformer cannot, but an observer should,
apply his theory to history. It turns out that things are not so simple,
and for the following, rather obvious reason. The history of science is
largely the history of what we value in science, and so the reformer can
and indeed should rewrite history. As Borges says, every man creates his
own predecessors. Nevertheless, the reformer, in the very act of recreating
the past in a new way, may perhaps show himself as a reformer. This is
not clear-cut since theoretical insights are enriching too. In particular,
the insight into existing scientific method also helps us recreate the past.
And so we need to know the difference between the discoverer's recon
reconstruction - which leaves us exactly
struction and the legislator's
where we were before. How can the reformer apply his ideas, say, to
Newton, if Newton knew nothing about these ideas? Borges answers
this question ingeniously for the history of the arts :we select what we
value and we value events which reflect our ideas, events which were not
especially noticed beforehand but are stressed now. The same may go for
aspects of events, of course. But can we apply all this to the history of
science?
In a way this has happened already: the new or renewed ideas about
the metaphysical foundations of science made Burtt, Koyr?, and
I. B. Cohen, rewrite its history. Now, of course, what they did is to link
science very closely to some factors which are, strictly speaking, external
to it. The very externality of the metaphysical factors may, indeed, explain
a lot. When Newton, in the highly speculative scholium gen?rale of his
Principia says, I feign no hypothesis, he may be puzzling; even if he means
a Cartesian hypothesis, as Sabra argues, it is still somewhat puzzling.
But when Newton says in the highly speculative Last Query in his Opticks,
hypotheses have no place in experimental philosophy, he does not sound
so puzzling; he says, it seems, this Query is not illegitimate as long as it
does not masquarade as science proper.
Thus, the restriction on our conception of science imposes a severe
restriction on our internal historiography of science, which consequently
prevents us from recreating the past of science as freely as we recreate
the past of literature. And yet, this very restriction offers us a new way of
overcoming it - by adding as a significant component in our history of
science the external history of science, where not only politics and religion,
but even ideas which men of science held are considered strictly external,
such as scientists' religions and/or metaphysical views of the world. Now
the question is, should we consider the history of methodology internal or
external to the history of science? In a way, this is but a reformulation
of our first question :do we know methodology a priori or do we learn it?
Do we know what is science after? Do we know what we want? This,
of course, is treated in Plato's Meno. You will forgive me, I am sure, if I
repeat it in brief.
The paradox begins with these assumptions. First, whatever it is we
wish to acquire, we do not already posses it. Second, we do, however,
already possess knowledge of it. (We may defend these assumptions, but
I shall not do so here.) Now, when we substitute 'knowledge of something'
for 'whatever we wish to acquire' we get the result. 'When we wish to
acquire knowledge of something both we do not possess knowledge of it
and we do possess knowledge of it'. We can present the paradox a bit
more formally. We assume,
VWish{x,P{x,y))=>Kn(x,y). ~P(x,y).
Substituting 'Krf (for know) for P, we get,

~
hWish(x, Kn(x, y)) =3Kn(x, y). Kn(x, y).
The reason I use this clumsy notation is to show that the paradox is a
504 JOSEPH AGASSI
paradox in the original Greek sense - it is no antinomy but merely an

unintuitive result. For, the conclusion is equivalent to the assertion
h~ Wish (x, Kn (x, y))
that necessarily we can never wish to know anything. It is easy to see that
the result is hardly even counter intuitive, since the knowledge wished for
in our discussion is detailed and certain knowledge, and, no doubt, even
the detailed knowledge that Sherlock Holmes wishes to have he may
regret once he has it; when wishing for it he has at best a vague general
knowledge he thinks he wishes to fill out. Socrates shows that the result
is less counter-intuitive then it sounds when he says, even if we finally do
achieve knowledge, somehow there will be no knowledge that the knowl
edge wished for is the knowledge acquired. In other words, the root of
the paradox is not in the concept of wishing but in the - rather unusually
strict - concept of knowledge.
There is very little literature, to my knowledge, regarding the Socratic
Paradox of Learning, and it hardly ever goes beyond Plato's Meno.
There is, I have the feeling, an allusion or two to it in the writings of
Sir Francis Bacon, who offers a unique solution to it, when he took all
knowledge to be his province. For Sir Francis Bacon, any attempt to ac
quire specific piece of knowledge
any is defective, directed towards an
arbitrary goal. For Bacon, the whole enterprise of science, of learning
and of knowledge, a
is matter of all-or-nothing. He spoke of two kinds of
knowledge, of little knowledge and of all knowledge, namely all the
knowledge we can ever acquire. He declared all the criticisms of knowledge
we know to be attacks on little knowledge only. All knowledge can be
attained once the mindis utterly free and empty; the empty mind's
capacity to learn guarantees full success ; but when the mind is partially
filled, it is prejudiced. It is prejudiced because the very partiality is some
thing which is prior to its own empirical justification, and hence prejudi
cial. The very choice of a question must be arbitrary or based on a
- not on
hypothesis knowledge which is of the answer to the question.
Of course, we always lack the empirical foundation to that which we as
yet seek; hence, it is arbitrary to seek any item of knowledge in particular;
but not all knowledge.
Bacon's fundamental theory of learning took off from the mystic
tradition of his day, from the cabalist and from the alchemist, from
Natalis Conti who assimilated these traditions into a Renaissance pseudo

Greek mythology. The fundamental division of minds was into the willful
or arbitrary or ad hoc or evil on the one hand and the submissive or
-
accepting or simple or good on the other oh, sacred simplicity! Willful
minds, said Bacon, put Nature in chains. Submissive minds collect simple
facts as an act of worship of attending to the whims of Nature. She is
allowed all caprice, of course, and as a reward She will reveal her secrets
to Man; as we all know, submission is the best road to mastery.
The Baconian folkloreaccepted to an unspecifiable
has been degree,
the sifting of myth from reason in it has never been done, though ob
viously the mythical part of inductivism is less conspicious now than it
was then. This is obviously a symptom of increased confidence in science -
a fact of no mean significance for my debate with Popper. Even Bacon
himself felt that he was too much of a mythmaker. He said in his Novum
Organum that itmatters less how we start than that we
start; that when
we get going who knows what the outcome will be; he said that we may
even learn, by induction, something more about induction. This was
a passing remark, and I never made much of it because it was said in
passing, because it seemed to me to be an admission of the criticism of

induction from infinite regress, and because it occurs in an extravagant
- - which
passage extravagant even for Bacon says that even logic may be
learned by induction.
On a closer look we have here the second order of the Socratic Paradox
of Learning. Let me expand this slowly.
It is well known that some games, dances, rituals, etc., were con
sciously created and their rules were specified in writing by their origina
tors. There are others which have evolved and which have never been
recorded - say among pre-literate people, which are met for the first time
by the anthropologist, say Malinowski.
When a Malinowski goes to a new place to observe a new tribe he
operates scientifically, following strictly the rules of the book. He
observes facts, hard and fast facts, such as people playing diverse games.
But of course from the facts he derives the rules of the game :he is interested
not in the specific but in the universal, not in the dance he observes but in
the custom it exhibits or is an instance of. Moreover, he wants to achieve
a higher-level induction, of course; he wants to generalize from ethnic
generalizations to social anthropology in general, and again he does it by
506 JOSEPH AGASSI
the rules of induction, by using his ethnic generalizations in a comparative

study or in comparative sociology, creating what Bacon called Tables of
Similarity and of Differences, etc., etc.
Now, of course, one of the tribes in question is the social anthropolo
gists; and Malinowski here has to use scientific method in order to
discover the customs of his own tribe, which include scientific method.
But if he is already in possession of the rules he need not study them;
whereas if he needs to study them he has no tools by which to pursue
a study - of anything; of the rules or of anything else. This is a complete
- not the infinite
impasse regress but the zero regress, the Socratic Paradox
of Learning itself.
I have the sneaking suspicion that this discovery - the discovery that
scientific method is hit by the paradox - is not original with me. It was
already Hegel who said in Kant's philosophy there is learning to swim
before plunging into water. Following up on this Lakatos says that fish
do not know hydrodynamics yet they can swim. Newton's learning, like
the fish's swimming was quite natural, then, and not the application of
known rules. This is just an appealing manner of putting an idea which is
more often put in the academic manner given it by Gilbert Ryle and
adopted by Michael Polanyi : the distinction between knowing how and
knowing that. Right or wrong, these views are solutions to the second
level paradox. Though they are all witticisms, they must count as expres
sions of their authors having noticed this second-level paradox of learning,
or, as I shall call it, the paradox of swimming.
Now, if you were to think that with these witticisms in scholarly garb
the matter is settled, then you would be making the same mistake that
Imade for quite some years. Now I know that they settle nothing. The one
person who saved me from my error was Nicolas Malebranche, the oc
casionalist. If you were the one who lifts your arm when you wish to lift
your arm, said that learned clergyman, you would know how you do it,
wouldn't you? Funny, the very expression, I know how to raise my arm,
which lends credibility to the Hegel-Ryle-Polanyi-Lakatos resolution of
the paradox of swimming, by a slight alteration turns the table :I know how
to raise my arm: and I do now raise it so; yet do I know how I raise my
arm? If I did I would be a leading physiologist.
We all reject Malebranch's occasionalism; we all do think that we do
raise our arms even though we do not know how we do so; we know that
we raise our arms, but we do not know how we do so. Ryle says we know
how, but not that; I have just reversed the order. Where is the rub?
What is the significant corollary to all that?
Living in the post Hegelian and post Darwinian era, and in the day of
artificial brains, we do not nowadays accept any static solution. We see
as common to both the inductive and the apiorist views a claim which
we vehemently reject (pace Piaget, Chomsky et al.) namely, the claim
that we are born with a logic of scientific inquiry. Inductivists and
apriorists disagree about the nature of methodology. But they agree that
it is inborn. It follows from our rejection of that claim that we cannot
discover the logic of scientific inquiry by applying it.We neither know how
to inquire, nor that inquiring is conducted this or that way. The book, the
set of rules of the game, is not imprinted on us from birth, we think, but
we can knowingly or unknowingly apply it. Therefore, we must conclude
that if we unknowingly apply it we will never notice the fact. Nor is it
written anywhere so that we can read try to learn to apply it.
it and
The book, we feel, is a mystery. We have here Kafka redivivus. Lakatos'
fish is paralyzed! For, the fish is either able to swim, or able to learn to
swim, or will never swim. Put learn for swim, and you get the fish is either
able to learn, or able to learn to learn, or forever ignorant. This, I contend
is an impasse. But I shall take it slowly to pinpoint matters.
We can say, a priori, that swimming is given for the fish a priori or
a posteriori, or not at all. Symbolically, the trichotomy may be written
thus:
VAsw(f) v Lsw(f) v ~ sw(f)
When Kant accepted Hume's refutation of empiricism as logically water

tight he employed the refutation and deduced from the above trichotomy
the dichotomy:
VAsw(f) v ~sw(f),
and then proceeded with what he called the transcendental argument,
which begins with the allegedly empirical facts
sw(f)
and concluding
.-. Asw(f)
508 JOSEPH AGASSI
which, he suggested, is equivalent to
\-sw(f).
This final step of viewing the opinion as demonstrable was

contested by
Solomon Maim?n who took Kant's apriorism as a mere hypothesis
much to Kant's annoyance. C. I. Lewis reinvented Maimon's position
and arguments.
But we must hurry along. We had the alleged trichotomy as a tautology :
hAsw (/) v Lsw (/) v ~ sw (f).

In our post-Hegelian post-Darwinian evolutionist manner we reject this
as too static. We have here some a priori knowledge improven genetically,
we say, and it enables us to learn more through experience. This is the
modern solution. It does not work. Take any given fish, and put 'Learn'
instead of 'swim' in our formula. We obtain:
bAL(f) v LL(f) v ~L(f).

as before, ~ to be false, we get
Assuming, L(f)
:.AL(f)vLL(f).
And so, the static view of knowledge which we now reject reappears as
a static view of learning! To call one disjunct knowing how and the other
knowing that is neither true nor intellectually satisfying, methinks. More
over, without much deep thinking we feel that perhaps
VLL{f)^L{f)
i.e. if a fish can learn to learn, then it can learn, and even perhaps that
\-L(f)^AL(f),
-
that some learning must be inborn or else no learning will ever occur
compare a human with an insect, for example, or with a computor. Now,
if we accept these two dubious claims, we get at once
:.AL(f)
The fish is born with some a priori knowledge of scientific method.
Whether this a priori knowledge is analytic can, again, be contested ? la
Maim?n and Lewis.
Can we then do methodology before finding out the inborn methodology

and the way it grows? Clearly, somehow, all this sounds most incredible.
The present essay, such as it is, concerns scientific method; that is, I am
already doing a social anthropological, an ethnographic study, of my own
tribe - the only case, perhaps, of perfect participant observation. How
am I doing it? Like Malebranch's wise guy who raises his hand, I just do it,
and I don't know how.
Commonsense has taken over, and it can do so defacto or also de jure.
Moses has said already, for the teaching which I am giving you today is
not in the sky that you should say, who should go there in order to bring
it to us, nor is it overseas that you should say who should go there to bring
it to us, for the teaching I am giving you today is in your heart, etc. I have
argued already that the strong point of inductivism is exactly this senti
ment, expressed by Bacon in different ways in his The Advancement of
Learning and in his Novum Organum : it matters less how you start and
more that you do start. Once you get going, the ball will role, one thing
will lead another, and great deeds are just beyond the horizon.
The peculiar fact about all this is that when commonsense is turned
from defacto to de jure it receives a religious fervor. Some of us are still
uneasy about the idea of the religious fervor of science ; some of us oppose
it with genuine religious fervor. The fact is, the strongly commonsense
fact which we so often refuse to observe with the religious fervor of the
dogmatist, is that science is, in fact, a religion. Further, that the religion
of science, as any religion, is not commonsense - that even the
religion of
commonsense is not common sense. Historically, the religion of common
sense was a version of positivism, of the religion of science. Philosophical
ly, de jure commonsense is a contradiction in terms; and defacto common
sense is as tautologous as humid water.
The reason is quite commonsense. Commonsense is skeptical, placid,
pliable, unauthoritative; its present position is inherently non-inherent,
de facto in principle. This makes the Socratic Paradox of Learning not
only less counter-intuitive; it makes it plain commonsense: whatever we
wish, whatever we achieve, whatever we have, our appraisal of it, is all
fluid. What we achieve, we achieve partly as a result of our wish to
achieve it, no doubt, but only partly. Which establishes the Socratic
Paradox as a fact of life.
Commonsense philosophers, whether of the Scottish school or the
510 JOSEPH AGASSI
Oxford school, tried to combat

skepticism with commonsense, since they
viewed skepticism as wierd. This was a misconstrual of skepticism and the
making a dogma out of commonsense. Now, no doubt, there is a dogmatic
aspect or part to commonsense, and there is the exaggerated or inflated
or misconstrued skepticism to go with it. Thus, sometimes, in an appeal to
commonsense, people suggest to give up a search because it has not thus
far led to a final and solid result - i.e. to a dogma. Thus, in the name of
commonsense, many so-called philosophers have suggested that we give
up scientific method as a bad job. Should we say, all scientific method is
but theory, is but a hypostatisation of a living, pulsating, commonsense?
I must say, this sounds - I am speaking empirically - most convincing,
most commonsense. When I am in amissionary mood I feel, commonsense
is changeable, sometimes for the better, and so I ought to try to improve it.
It will greatly improve if and when all proposals to give up searches
which do not lead to finality will cease sounding so appealing and com
monsense. I am not in a missionary mood tonight, but if you are interested
in my reason I can tell you, for what it is worth, why I think we would
be better off when it will not sound so plausible to dismiss attempts to
capture the spirits of commonsense because it is, no doubt, eo ipso a
hypostatization.
Let us go back to social anthropology. The social anthropologist cap
tures the commonsense of the natives. Indeed, this is the pinnacle of his
ethnological search. There is little reason to doubt that the natives'
commonsense is changeable too - itmay be less changeable internally
- for
internal reasons - than the Western commonsense, but it is therefore

all the more changeable externally - as the outcome of contact with the
West.
The standard complaint against traditional Malinowskian social anthro

pology, as presented, e.g. by Ernest Gellner in his classic 'Time and Theory
in Social Anthropology' in Mind 67 (1958), 182-202 (reprinted in his
Cause and Meaning in the Social Sciences, Routledge, London and Boston,
1973, pp. 88-106) is that it is static. It hypostatizes the local custom and
fixes it. Now, no doubt, there is no need to fix it forever, but I cannot see
how one can avoid hypostatizing it as long as one describes a time-slice.
The only possible way to give it some movement is to do it historically.
But when we come to pre-literate tribes the Baconian injunction against
speculation turns into the Radcliffe-Brownian injunction against con
jectural history (the term seems to be Taylor's), and this dooms the project
to failure. Well, not quite. Thor Heyerdahl, also a Baconian, says in his
Aku Aku that history can be revealed by the spade. But I shall leave the
pre-literate tribes now, and move to the most literate one of them all, the
scientists,for example the anthropologists.
Malinowski, we remember, made two hypostatizations, perhaps both
necessary. One was to fix today's custom, one was to banish history.
When we study physics, for example, we must do the one hypostatization,
- at least
we must fix today's physics long enough to give it a good look,
to teach it to our young rascals, etc. But we need not banish history.
Of course, inductivist historians of physics put the history of physics in
the margin of today's textbook of physics. This hypostatization, which
I have christened, for short, as up-to-date-science-text-book-worship, is
quite redundant. Though we hypostatize today's physics, we can acquire
a sense of change by looking at its history. We can treat theories of
scientific method likewise. But when we
treat the living actions of scien
tific inquiry we hypostatize not only today's method, which is inevitable,
but also yesterday's, which is unnecessary. Newton, we say, preached
inductivism but practiced my methodology.
In the post-Hegelian and post-Darwinian era, we have allowed knowl
edge to evolve; after Einstein we see little difficulty to admit a modification
of our knowledge here and there; this makes knowledge much less
universal than was envisaged during the Age of Reason. But at least
we want reason, when it is equated with the ability to learn or with the
- we wish reason to be universal to all man. If
logic of inquiry not, then
the categorical imperative itself will collapse, the ideological base of
western democracy will need a drastic revision!
As I have already shown, this argument is invalid. It may well be the
case that Newton's logic of inquiry and Einstein's are identical only at
birth, but that they evolved very differently. Let us assume for a brief
moment that ontogeny recapitulates philogeny, that one's own develop
ment is a capsule version of the development of the race. It follows that
sometime before Einstein sprang into full maturity he was a Newton of
sorts; that perhaps he believed in Newtonian mechanics or even in
- which was a variant of
Newtonian methodology inductivism, we re
member. We may be tempted to say, perhaps as far as opinions are
concerned, ontogeny does not recapitulate philogeny, but in the logic of
512 JOSEPH AGASSI
inquiry it does. Even a superficial knowledge of the history of Einstein's

career, however, will show the opposite to be the case, that Einstein never
was half as much an inductivist as he was, in some sense, a Newtonian.
Yet the more
important fact is that ontogeny never recapitulates philogeny,
that even Einstein's Newtonianism, such as it was, was much removed
from Newton's.
There is no reason to assume that in any sense the logic of inquiry

endorsed or employed by Newton was the same as Einstein's. Suffice it
to assume that at birth Newton's and Einstein's inborn abilities to learn
were identical. Even this assumption seems to me highly dubious. Even at
my birth I do not think I was as good as Einstein was at his. Nor do I
think this destroys the thesis of the unity of mankind.
On the contrary. I see the unity quite in the opposite place : even I can
learn, or acquire, a methodological insight from Einstein! Without going
into the venerable ancestry of this position, ancient and mediaeval, let
me say: it is this position, or this variant, for which I am most grateful to
my teacher, Sir Karl Popper.
One puzzling implication of this is really so obvious I can mention it
right away. The obvious line of thinking is as follows. If scientific method is
described truly, and ifNewton was a scientist, then the description applies
to his method. Hence, when I assert my view of scientific method, I already
assert by implication that Newton practiced my method. Denying this
obvious line of thinking seems to be putting a severe limitation on social
anthropology; yet I do deny that and I do wish to avoid putting any
limitation on social anthropology. Can I do so?
But perhaps I am moving too fast. Before asking about the peculiarity
of the theory of scientific method, let me ask, does anyone have a theory
of scientific method? Bacon and Descartes surely did. Yet we ignore
them today. Did Duhem, did Popper, offer a theory of scientific method?
Clearly, both Bacon and Descartes said, a scientist must be aware of his
method. Must. Duhem and Popper say, he need not be, and is, in fact,
seldom aware of what
he is doing. Query, according to Duhem and
Popper, is his awareness a factor significant to his research in any way
whatsoever?
Suppose we say, no. Then, first and foremost, all arguments from the
way people happen to have looked at science become strictly external.
In particular, the fact that they were encouraged by empirical support
may hinge on nothing more than their ignorance of the very method they
were following. Suppose we say yes, then even if the new view of method,
be it Duhem's or Popper's, applies in some sense to all science, quite
clearly applies one way to those ignorant of the new view and another to
those familiar with it. In this respect, even the very discoverer of a point
in methodology is eo ipso, an innovator: the very increased awareness is
beneficial.
This is generally true of all human affairs. Take Freud's discoveries
and see how their discovery makes us better off. But I must rush to my
conclusion.
There is here a very obvious lacuna in views of Duhem and Popper as

compared with Bacon and Descartes. the old methodologists
Clearly
offered complete theories of method, something akin to algorisms or,
as Popper says, science sausage-making machines. One important and oft
ignored part of the algorism, incidentally, is the awareness of the scientist.
Duhem and Popper both stress that the making of science is subject to
no algorism. But they do not tell us how much of the phenomena is
explained by their theories. Their writings consist partly in the exposition
of historical counter-examples to preceding doctrines. This is almost
always fascinating stuff, but not yet explicanda. In science, counter
examples to the old theory are the explicanda of the new. Is it so in
methodology? Do Duhem and Popper explain the counter-examples?
In particular, they indicate the absence of awareness. Can this be ex
plained? Surely not fully, because of the Socratic paradox of learning.
I feel that the very idea of the growth of science - central to all method
- is here crucial. Inductivists have - -
ologists explained quite satisfactorily
the surge of science in the 17th century: at that time the true scientific
method came into awareness, etc. Duhem and Popper rightly reject this
explanation. Duhem has also rejected the claim that there ever occurred
a scientific revolution. We nowadays agree that, as a matter of fact, there
was one. Can we explain this? I think we can: the false methodology gave
rise to false hopes. True, the false methodology required empirical support.
This was whipped up. Pascal's brother-in-law's excursion to the mountain
was deemed an empirical support. Newton's crude calculation of the
perturbation of Saturn and Jupiter and his fiddling with Flamsteed's
data, were empirical support. But now we can ask: was all this really
necessary?
514 JOSEPH AGASSI
SUMMARY
Is methodological theory a priori or a posteriori knowledge? It is perhaps

a posteriori improvable, somehow. For example, Duhem discovered that
since scientists disagree on methods, they do not always know what they
are doing.
How is methodological innovationpossible? If it is inapplicable in
retrospect, then it is not universal and so seems defective; if it is, then
there is a miracle here. Even so, the new explicit awareness of rules pre
viously implicitly known is in itself beneficial. And so, improved methodol
ogy may make for improved methods. Hence, methodology is in part
descriptive, in part prescriptive. Knowing this, a methodologist might
improve his own studies. For example, Popper would then not hasten to
conclude from the fact that past scientists depended on positive evidence
that they had better do so in future as well; perhaps a lesser concern with
confirmation may increase the productivity of scientific inquiry.
Boston University and Tel-Aviv University

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The Logic of Scientific Inquiry

Author(s): Joseph Agassi

THE LOGIC OF SCIENTIFIC INQUIRY

The question to which this paper is devoted is strikingly simple: Do we

Synthese 26 (1974) 498-514. All Rights Reserved

losophy of the social sciences. The historical school in the philosophy of

applies to Newton; hence, we can test it by applying it to Newton's case.

to conjectures, corroborations, and refutations. To this Popper has

science, and the major ingredient in any historiography of science - I

Substituting 'Krf (for know) for P, we get,

paradox in the original Greek sense - it is no antinomy but merely an

h~ Wish (x, Kn (x, y))

Natalis Conti who assimilated these traditions into a Renaissance pseudo

passing, because it seemed to me to be an admission of the criticism of

the rules of induction, by using his ethnic generalizations in a comparative

When Kant accepted Hume's refutation of empiricism as logically water

which, he suggested, is equivalent to

This final step of viewing the opinion as demonstrable was

hAsw (/) v Lsw (/) v ~ sw (f).

bAL(f) v LL(f) v ~L(f).

Can we then do methodology before finding out the inborn methodology

Oxford school, tried to combat

internal reasons - than the Western commonsense, but it is therefore

The standard complaint against traditional Malinowskian social anthro

inquiry it does. Even a superficial knowledge of the history of Einstein's

There is no reason to assume that in any sense the logic of inquiry

There is here a very obvious lacuna in views of Duhem and Popper as

Is methodological theory a priori or a posteriori knowledge? It is perhaps

Boston University and Tel-Aviv University

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