HOW CAN WE USE THE DISTINCTION BETWEEN DISCOVERY AND JUSTIFICATION? ON THE WEAKNESSES OF THE STRONG PROGRAMME IN THE SOCIOLOGY OF SCIENCE

Abstract

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).