Abraham Kaplan

The conduct of inquiry. Scranton, Penn.: Chandler Publishing Company, 1964

• "the various sciences, taken together are not colonies subject to the governance of logic." (p. 3)
• "The domain of truth has no fixed boundary within it"
  "Every scientific community is a society in the small." (p. 4 )
• "What I am insisting on is that the standards of scientific practice derive from science itself, even though the science of any period is intimately involved with every other human concern." (p. 6)
• We all have physiologies and histories, and some of us also think and write about these things. Similarly, scientists and philosophers use a logic ... and some of them also formulate it explicitly. I call the former the logic-in-use, and the latter the reconstructed logic. (p. 8).
  • A reconstructed logic is itself... a hypothesis... It is not a question of whether the facts can be so construed [to fit the hypothesis], but rather whether it is still worthwhile to do so, whether the reconstruction ... continues to throw light on the sound operations operations actually being used. (p10)
    A reconstructed logic is not a description but rather an idealization of scientific practice. (p.10)
  • The crucial question concerns, not the intrinsic value of the reconstructed logic taken in itself, but rather its usefulness in illuminating the logic in use (p.11)
    • the drunkard's search.
      

   

Last revision: September 21, 1999