INTRODUCTION: REVISITING THE CONTEXT DISTINCTION

Abstract

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.