Why should the logic of discovery be revived? A reappraisal

Abstract

Three decades ago Laudan posed the challenge: Why should the logic of discovery be revived? This paper tries to answer this question arguing that the logic of discovery should be revived, on the one hand, because, by Gödel’s second incompleteness theorem, mathematical logic fails to be the logic of justification, and only reviving the logic of discovery logic may continue to have an important role. On the other hand, scientists use heuristic tools in their work, and it may be useful to study such tools systematically in order to improve current heuristic tools or to develop new ones. As a step towards reviving the logic of discovery, the paper follows Aristotle in asserting that logic must be a tool for the method of science, and outlines an approach to the logic of discovery based on the analytic method and on ampliative inference rules.