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Neo-positivism is dead. Let that imperfect designation stand for the project that dominated and defined the philosophy of science, especially in its Anglophone form, during the fifty or so years following the end of the Second World War. While its critics were many,^1 its death was slow, and some think still to find a pulse.^2 But die it did in the cul-de-sac into which it was led by its own faulty compass.

The distinction between the contexts of discovery and justification has had a turbulent career in philosophy of science. At times celebrated as the hallmark of philosophical approaches to science, at times condemned as ambiguous, distorting, and misleading, the distinction dominated philosophical debates from the early decades of the twentieth century to the 1980s. In recent years, the distinction has vanished from philosophers’ official agenda. However, even though it is rarely explicitly addressed, it still informs our conception of the content, domain, and goals of philosophy of science. The fact that new developments in philosophy of experimentation and history and sociology of science have been marginalized by traditional scholarship in philosophy indicates that the context distinction still pervades philosophical thinking about science. This volume helps clear the grounds for the productive and fruitful integration of these new developments into philosophy of science.We identify several focal points for the re-assessment of the distinction: the original contexts, especially the work of the Logical Empiricists, its alleged forerunners in the nineteenth century, and its evolution and dissemination throughout the twentieth century.

Hans Reichenbach’s distinction between a context of discovery and a context of justification continues to be relevant all the way up to the present. This can be seen clearly in the tense relationship between the history and the philosophy of science. In the current debates about the relationships between these two disciplines one encounters arguments that Reichenbach used to defend this distinction, as well as arguments brought forth by his critics.^1 Sometimes the discussions even refer directly to the influence of Reichenbach’s distinction (Giere 1999, pp. 11–18 and 217–230).

The distinction between the contexts of discovery and justification, this distinction dear to the projects of logical empiricism, was, as is well known, introduced in precisely those terms by Hans Reichenbach in his Experience and Prediction (Reichenbach 1938). Thus, while the idea behind the distinction has a long history before Reichenbach, this text from 1938 plays a salient role in how the distinction became canonical in the work of philosophers of science in the mid twentieth century. The new contextualist history of philosophy that has arisen in recent years invites us into an investigation of the nuances of philosophical distinctions and their roles in shaping the development of disciplines. Logical empiricism played a key role in the historical development of philosophy of science and this contextualist history has revealed a much richer set of projects in logical empiricism than the potted histories had allowed. Many stories have been told about the contexts of justification and discovery; few of those stories have paid more than passing attention to the larger projects in epistemology and meta-epistemology that Reichenbach was pursuing when he drew the distinction.

William Whewell’s philosophical work has often been considered as a “forerunner” to the distinction between the context of discovery and the context of justification, and sometimes Whewell is presented as an “early advocate” of that distinction (Losee 1979; Laudan 1980; Hoyningen-Huene 1987; Schaffer 1994; Yeo 1993). In contrast to other nineteenth-century “forerunners”, notably Duhem and the anti-psychologists (see Schäfer and Peckhaus, this volume), Whewell does not owe this dubious honor to the advocates of early twentieth-century Logical Empiricism. Rather, he was made a forerunner by those philosophers who have been concerned with hypothetico-deductivist approaches to science. Larry Laudan, for example, has claimed Whewell for his study of the emergence of epistemological fallibilism. According to Laudan, the link between the logic of discovery and the justification of theories was abandoned in the early nineteenth century, and it was then, that criteria for justification were found to be independent of the generation of theories. Whewell appears as one of the central figures in this development, because he held that “(1) theories can be appraised (“verified”) independently of the circumstances of their generation, and (2) such modes of appraisal, even if fallible, are more germane to the process of justification than any fallible rules of discovery would be” (Laudan 1980, p. 181).

For Pierre Duhem, it was not just a question of personal delight or ambition that in addition to his work as physicist he also engaged in extensive studies in philosophy and history of science.^1 The integration of these diverse studies was intended to yield a better understanding of science, which, in turn, should orient the research activity of the scientist toward progress more effectively^2 and provide a better method of introducing students to science.

There is a certain analogy between the discovery–justification distinction (DJ distinction) in the philosophy of science and the genesis–validity distinction in epistemology and the foundational discourse in logic.^1 The investigation of this analogy may reveal the tight relation between Hans Reichenbach’s famous distinction and earlier modes of argument in foundational debates in post- and neo-Kantian times.

Let me begin with a convention. I will refer to the distinction between the context of discovery and the context of justification as “the DJ distinction” (where I may note, for potentially misled younger readers, that this “DJ” has nothing to do with the music business). This paper is based on an older paper of mine (Hoyningen-Huene 1987). In the present paper, I will first recapitulate some of the topics of the older paper, and will contribute further considerations. Subsequently, I will discuss Thomas Kuhn’s ideas about justification in science. Thus will be clarified, in which sense precisely Kuhn opposed the DJ distinction. This is noteworthy, because in the 1960s and 1970s, many philosophers concluded from Kuhn’s opposition to the context distinction that he just did not understand what it was all about (and they inferred from this that he was just too uneducated as a philosopher to be taken seriously).

Ever since Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Kuhn 1962, 1970), many philosophers, historians, and sociologists of science have attacked the distinction between discovery and justification (the DJ distinction). It has been argued that the distinction cannot be drawn precisely; that it cannot be drawn prior to the actual analysis of scientific knowledge; that it is useless for the analysis of scientific knowledge; and that perhaps there is no such distinction at all. Other critics, instead of trying to blur or to reject the distinction, claim that we need an even more fine-grained distinction. Avariety of concepts such as generation, invention, prior assessment, evaluation, test, proof, and so on, is needed, depending on the different kinds of questions we can raise concerning scientific research and its results (e.g., Nickels 1980b, pp. 18–22; Hoyningen-Huene 1987, pp. 507–509).

Many have noted the irony of the English title, The Logic of Scientific Discovery , of Karl Popper’s expanded translation of his Logik der Forschung (1934). Given Popper’s use of the distinction between context of discovery and context of justification (the DJ distinction), there is no such thing as a logic (or method or even rationality) of discovery. Yet the book is nearly 500 pages long!^1 But instead of once again looking at how the DJ distinction discouraged attention to what Popper termed “the initial stage, the act of conceiving or inventing a theory” (Popper 1959, p. 31), I shall examine the privileged context of justification.